The three-year Project UOMA of the Finnish Cultural Institute in Madrid will culminate in August with a group exhibition at Galleria MABD in Oulu, featuring artists from the Oulu2026 region and the Community of Madrid.
The Finnish Cultural Institute in Madrid’s exhibition and residency project UOMA is part of the Oulu2026 European Capital of Culture programme. Over the past three years, it has brought together artists and cultural professionals from the Oulu2026 region and the Community of Madrid. The project will culminate in August 2026 with a joint exhibition at Galleria MABD, where works by all participating artists will be presented. Liina Holmes’s (Oulu) and Miguel Álvarez-Fernández’s (Madrid) audiovisual artwork is also part of OMVF’s programme.
The artists have collaborated through reciprocal residencies in each other’s home regions. In the first year, 2024, the artist pair consisted of Antti J. Leinonen and Miguel Sbastida. Leinonen is a photographer from Ii, Finland, while Sbastida is a Madrid-based artist and researcher. In the second year, 2025, the participating artists were Johanna Pöykkö and Lucía Loren. Pöykkö is from Oulu and works primarily in textile art, whereas Loren, from Madrid, focuses on environmental art. In the third year, 2026, the collaboration brought together Liina Holmes from Oulu and Miguel Álvarez-Fernández from Madrid. Holmes is a multidisciplinary artist working with video art and painting, while Álvarez-Fernández is a composer, sound artist, and researcher.
The group exhibition features artworks by each of the participating artists and explores for example themes of time, loss, distortion, injustice, climate change, ecosystems, and arctic ecologies. It draws attention to relationships and connections between species across time and place, as well as between past and present. Inspired by shared landscapes and themes, the works created by the artist pairs engage in dialogue with one another and together form a multidisciplinary and polyphonic whole that has emerged through interaction between Europe’s geographical peripheries.
The artists have participated in residencies in the Madrid region at the ISLA Project (Ideario de Sostenibilidad & Laboratorio de Arte), a residency dedicated to sustainable art in the village of Robledo de Chavela, as well as in Collado Villalba. In Finland, the residency partners have been Artbreak and KulttuuriKauppila, both located in Ii, near Oulu.
At the heart of the Project UOMA is listening to others and engaging with another culture, opening new perspectives on one’s own ways of thinking. These encounters generate inspiration, connections, new ideas, and artworks. In addition to the residency partners, UOMA’s collaborators include the cultural association Hug Culture in Madrid, and in Oulu Photo North – the Northern Photographic Centre, the Oulu Artists Association, Oulu Music Video Festival, and Galleria MABD.
Exhibition: Galleria MABD, Torikatu 4, 90100 Oulu
Opening: Tuesday 4th of August, 6–8 pm
Exhibition dates: 5–30th of August 2026
Free admission.
@proyecto.uoma Instagram
Oulu2026 | madrid.fi (the Finnish Cultural Institute in Madrid’s website)
