Jaakko Autio & Akasaka · Yö Galleria, Helsinki · 23–25 August 2024
Meeting Point was a joint exhibition by Jaakko Autio and Akasaka at Yö Galleria in Helsinki. Both artists practise meditation, and the exhibition grew from their shared exploration of contemplative art. Through ink works, live EEG performance, generative video, music and guided listening, they invited visitors into the contemplative and meditative dimensions of experiencing art.
Art as contemplative practice
For Akasaka, making her ink-dropping works was itself a meditative practice and a way of working with awareness. Her ink works and video work Living the Question brought this ongoing inquiry into the exhibition.
The relationship with the audience was central to the exhibition. The artists brought retreat practice into the gallery, creating opportunities for visitors to pause, attend to their experience and explore the works with guidance. Meeting Point made this practice something to enter and share.
Nature Within: participation made tangible
Autio developed his EEG work Nature Within to make people’s own participation in existence and in art tangible. An EEG sensor supplied brainwave data that drove a digital twin formed from a cloud of particles, changing in real time. Visitors could wear the sensor and explore connections between their attention, bodily experience and the changing image. They could sit, move or dance while others witnessed the projection.
Watching the image became part of the experience that shaped the next moment. Attention, bodily experience and visual feedback formed an ongoing loop. Autio relates this process to his meditation practice, particularly the reciprocal relationship between attending to the breath and experiencing it in anapanasati.
Time for looking and listening
Guidance in Finnish and English, heard through wireless headphones, accompanied visitors through the exhibition space and helped them enter into a contemplative encounter with the art. Looking, listening and attending to their own experience became part of the work. Supporting this encounter was an essential part of the exhibition itself.
The artists at work
This documentation video introduces the artists, their working practices and the exhibition at Yö Galleria.
Writing about the exhibition
Pia Adibe, 2024
What does the mind look like when words and images are taken away?
Adibe encountered the exhibition and also tried the EEG work herself. Her essay approaches the works through presence, impermanence and process ontology, considering how a fleeting experience can acquire a visible form.
Read Pia Adibe’s original essay (PDF, Finnish and English)
A continuing collaboration
Nature Within was developed in Outokumpu in 2024 and presented at Taidekeskus Ahjo in Joensuu before Meeting Point. It later travelled to Kehä in Oulu on 17–18 October 2025 and the One-to-One Festival in Oeiras, Portugal, on 15–16 November 2025.
Following Meeting Point, Autio and Akasaka continued their collaboration in RE-SOUND, presented as part of a group exhibition in central Turku. RE-SOUND comprised three paintings paired with individual headphone works. For two of the works, sound came first: Akasaka painted in response to Reetta Karhunen’s solo voice and to Kasper Omenasaari’s solo voice accompanied by Autio’s four-part choral work RE-DITUS.
The third work reversed this process. Akasaka created the painting first, and Autio then composed its sound. He photographed the painting and recorded his own EEG data while looking at it, using this biodata to shape the musical composition. The sound work also included narration based on a text written by Autio.
Each painting had a headphone stand in front of it. Visitors put on the headphones and pressed a button to hear the dialogue between sound and image. Within the bustle of a social exhibition setting, the headphones offered a private experience of each work.
Autio and Akasaka’s collaboration continues through their friendship and shared meditation practice, with further work together planned.
Credits and exhibition
Artists: Jaakko Autio and Akasaka
Generative video, music and performance: Jaakko Autio
Ink works: Akasaka
Video footage: Hilla Väyrynen and Jaakko Autio
Music team: Hilla Väyrynen and Reetta Karhunen (vocals), Mika Seppänen (cello), Anna Voutilainen-Veijonen (saxophone), Jaakko Autio (piano and violins)
Association coordinator: Jussi-Pekka Lehtinen, Yö Galleria
