RE‑BIRTH @ MUU Helsinki Contemporary Art Centre (1–23 Nov 2025)

Artistic Concept, Sound and Direction: Jaakko Autio. Breath Choir: mariel Helovirta, Noora Kilponen, Matti Lankinen, Pasi Saarni Vorimo, Mikko Turpeinen, Hilla Väyrynen, Riikka Voutilainen. Generative Video “NIMITTA”: Jaakko Autio. Shindoku Text: Jaakko Autio, Hilla Väyrynen. Shindoku Recitation and Narration: Hilla Väyrynen. Breathwork Guidance: Jaakko Autio. Breath Choir Coordination: Riikka Voutilainen. Recording Engineer: Hilla Väyrynen. Dance and Opening Performance: Riikka Voutilainen. Movement Collaboration: Kati Korosuo and Young Dancers. Director, MUU: Timo Soppela. Gallery Coordination: MUU Helsinki Contemporary Art Centre. Lighting Designer and Exhibition Technician: Tero Kontinen. Installation Support: Eppu Pastinen.

Special thanks: Hilla Väyrynen, without whom this work would not have come to life.

Practical information.
Opening Day: Saturday 1 November 13:00–16:00. Opening performance by Riikka Voutilainen at 13:00.
Helsinki Art Walk guided tours: Sunday 9 November at 13:30 and Sunday 23 November at 13:30.
Movement and Sound with Kati Korosuo and Young Dancers: Friday 21 November at 19:00 and Saturday 22 November at 15:00.

Visitor orientation.
The room is composed like a breath. Intensity gathers toward the centre. Rest gathers toward the edges. By the entrance a large red sofa offers a distant vantage point. Experiencing the work from there is fully valid and equally rich. Next to the sofa there are headphones with an explanatory track that includes a Finnish/English translation of the Shindoku text.

The Work
RE-BIRTH began from a simple insight: beauty lives in sitting, breathing and connecting, in sensing how air nourishes us and how, through breath, we belong to the world. The installation transforms MUU Gallery into a living architecture of sound. Forty loudspeakers form a collective lung. A Breath Choir was recorded one by one so that each inhalation and exhalation finds its place in space. You can walk inside their breathing, a human constellation that expands and contracts like a living organism.

The breathing you hear was guided and recorded using rebirthing breathwork technique—a sustained, circular breathing practice that opens access to deeper embodied states. Each participant was recorded individually during extended sessions, their breath becoming both meditation and material. Over this fragile texture floats a prepared piano, not as melody but as breath-borne resonance. Viola tones and a responsive video surface listen to the room and render presence visible. You are invited to breathe and to feel the porous boundary between your body and the space around you until it dissolves.

Why Now
In the wake of pandemic isolation, escalating climate anxiety, and the erosion of collective embodied practice, our capacity for shared presence has atrophied. RE-BIRTH responds by creating infrastructure for co-regulation—not as therapeutic service but as aesthetic and political practice. Where much contemporary art speaks about care, somatic listening, and social attunement, RE-BIRTH enacts these conditions directly. It offers breath as shared commons, a concrete tool for nervous system alignment and empathic reconnection. In a cultural climate that oscillates between fragmentation and longing for belonging, the work proposes a gentle ritual pace, an invitation to practice presence together and to re-enter civic life through listening.

Method: Experience Without Notation
What distinguishes this work is its commitment to direct transmission rather than conceptual representation. RE-BIRTH does not describe empathy—it generates the conditions in which empathy arises. There is no text on the wall explaining what you should feel. Instead, decades of practice in sound, meditation, and embodied presence have been distilled into spatial architecture that speaks directly to the nervous system.

This approach emerges from sustained discipline: sound work begun at age eleven after moving from Senegal to Finland, fifteen years of theatre sound design and composition, formal training at Metropolia University of Applied Sciences (BA, Film Sound Design, 2008) and Theatre Academy Helsinki (MA, Theatre Sound Design, 2013), and over two decades as a long-term meditator since 2001, including practice in Theravada monasteries in Thailand and Soto Zen shikantaza in Finland. Each affective state, each quality of attention, has found its sonic counterpart through years of careful listening. The result is work that bypasses intellectual distance and meets the visitor where breath meets awareness—in the living present.

Form and Flow
Every work I create begins as a dialogue between form and flow. Form gives structure. It allows breath to take shape and to become architecture. Flow is what moves through that structure. In RE-BIRTH, form is the spatial system of forty channels and the mapped movement of sound. Flow is what happens when presence enters it, when someone steps inside and lets themselves be changed by listening. Form listens outward. Flow listens inward. Together they hold each other in balance like inhalation and exhalation. That is where empathy begins, not in explanation but in resonance.

Shindoku Recitation
RE-BIRTH weaves a ritual voice in a Shindoku recitation written collaboratively by Jaakko Autio and Hilla Väyrynen and performed by Hilla Väyrynen. In Shindoku, sacred words are spoken not for intellectual meaning but as a meditative act of resonance. The practice originates from Japanese Soto Zen tradition, where sutra recitation becomes embodied prayer—the language vibrating through breath itself, beyond translation.

The text for RE-BIRTH was created through careful dialogue between Autio’s long-term meditation practice and Väyrynen’s participation in the breath sessions. Rather than appropriating a tradition, the artists wrote from their own experience while honoring what they have learned and love within Soto Zen. The resulting poem moves between Finnish, English, and phonetic Japanese, touching something universally human through non-dual poetics:

Mu ta ri shin, ku on no koe.
I shin den shin, iki wa michibiku.
No separation in heart, the voice of emptiness.
From heart to heart, breath is the guide.

For visitors who prefer context before entering, the headphones by the entrance include an explanatory track and a Finnish translation of the Shindoku text.

Audience Reflections
“Listening close to one speaker, while hearing the backdrop of other rebirthings all around, I suddenly felt the shared suffering and beauty of being born again and again, as all of humanity. Very well done. The experience stayed with me long after I left.”
—Visitor at the opening, MUU Helsinki Contemporary Art Centre, 2025

Data and Ethics
The work does not capture personal biometric data. Ambient sound is processed in real time only to drive the visual surface and is not stored. If participatory recordings occur, for example in workshops, consent is always opt-in with clear retention periods and deletion rights.

Collaborations and Continuum
Toward the end of the exhibition, RE-BIRTH evolves through a live collaboration with Kati Korosuo and the Young Dancers, introducing improvisational movement and voice into the sonic field. This dynamic extension bridges the RE-series toward the upcoming MU MERI – Inter Species from 2026, expanding the participatory and ecological awareness first embodied in RE-BIRTH.

Programme
Opening Day, Saturday 1 November, 13:00–16:00. At 13:00 opening performance by Riikka Voutilainen. Opening remarks by Jaakko Autio and Minka Heino, Chairperson of MUU.
Helsinki Art Walk guided tours, Sunday 9 November at 13:30 and Sunday 23 November at 13:30.
Movement and Sound, Kati Korosuo and Young Dancers, Friday 21 November at 19:00 and Saturday 22 November at 15:00.

About the Artist
Jaakko Autio is a Finnish sound artist working with spatial sound, Breath Choirs, and immersive installations that invite slow, embodied listening. Born in Senegal and raised between West Africa and Finland, he began working with sound at age eleven after moving to Finland. His practice draws from both technical precision—trained at Metropolia University of Applied Sciences (BA, Film Sound Design, 2008) and Theatre Academy Helsinki (MA, Theatre Sound Design, 2013), with fifteen years of theatre sound design and composition—and contemplative depth as a long-term meditator since 2001.

Autio’s extended practice in Theravada and Zen traditions, including years of retreat practice in monasteries in Thailand (Wat Suan Mokkh, Wat Chom Thong, Dawn Kiam, Dipabhawan) and Soto Zen shikantaza in Finland since 2009, has shaped his understanding of listening as both social and spiritual act. His work merges these lineages—technical craft, embodied practice, and cross-cultural experience—into installations that transform architectural spaces into living instruments of connection. His installations have reached over 75,000 visitors internationally, and his current projects include the ongoing RE-series and the forthcoming INTER SPECIES initiative (2026-2027).