Tornio-based artists Teija and Pekka Isorättyä will start the Everyone’s Birthdays event series at the Aine Art Museum in January 2026.
Tornio-based artists Teija and Pekka Isorättyä will start the Everyone’s Birthdays event series at the Aine Art Museum in January 2026. The exhibition called ”Dry January” is on display at the Rajalla På Gränsen shopping centre on the border between Finland and Sweden, and it offers an experience that can be dived into as part of the shopping centre’s offerings.
“There are robots who are drinking in a bar. And two of them are these fierce ones from Tornio, so to speak, because the roots of the art work are 90s in Tornio, during the recession, when people were kind of redundant. We have brought that Tornio era into the age of robots,” Teija and Pekka Isorättyä say and continue:
“It is also about an experience from the Covid times, when the work was created (2022). Back then, hanging out in bars and giving lip felt like a luxury that humanity no longer has the time or opportunity for. They are nostalgic things, for better or for worse.”
Life is both comic and tragic
The name of the exhibition is Dry January, because of the timing. We can gently reflect on our relationship with alcohol while looking at the robots named Veke, Tortsua and Marina in the bar. In the drunken babble a broken Mitsubishi is repaired and an epic trip to get beer is told. The Beauty, sitting alone in the corner of the bar, occasionally recites a melancholy poem. The working group for this piece includes Jaakko Niska as a coder and Samuli Pörholä and Marina de Ita as scriptwriters and voice actors.
“Charles Chaplin’s quote ” Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in long-shot” describes well the humorous melancholy of this work. This idea has often inspired us in our work,” Teija and Pekka say. The customers of the Robohemians bar are humanly deficient, unfit for purpose, far from the ideal of a perfect robot. They have a lot of what we humans do.
“Our robots are always mirroring people. In ancient tragedies, hybris was presented as man’s greatest moral mistake, that is, when man strives to be like God. We have been toying with such a biblical idea: just as God created man in his own image, man created a robot in his own image. And now we are at the point in history where humans have succeeded in creating
artificial intelligence that can get out of control at any time. Icarus flies towards the sun. On the other hand, there is also a lot of personal stuff in this job, and the idea is not to point at others and laugh, but to look at ourselves.”
At the intersection of man and machine
The Isorättyäs say that they have been thinking a lot about human history lately – where does history written by humans begin and how human-like artificial intelligence affects it.
“The history of mankind is somehow behind us. What if the history written by man began in Mesopotamia and cuneiform writing – and then ended with this year, when the machine writes and summarizing history for humans? It’s a really big change and raises the question: what is the position of humans in this time,” Pekka ponders and Teija continues:
“What are we humans good at anymore? There is a lot of premonition of some kind of feeling of being left out and useless. Artificial intelligence is eating away at jobs in Finland, and multinational technology companies are reaping the profits. In some ways, it’s really frustrating. So much so that a person can end up lounging on the bar counter day after day, like these characters in a robobar.”
Opening on Saturday 10.1.2026 at 13.00, free admission. Serving. Länsiranta 10 95400 Tornio.
[Separate box] The Everyone’s Birthdays series of events is a cultural gift for all Tornio residents and visitors to the region. During the year, the Aine Art Museum will carry out a series of events in different parts of Tornio and Haparanda, which can be a work of art, a discussion event, a workshop or a performance, made by art and culture professionals from different Nordic countries and experts in various fields. The Aine Art Museum is celebrating its 40th anniversary – and wants to give a gift every month of the year.
