Milja Viita

Serlachius Manor

13.09.2025

—03.05.2026

People on Sunday

ExhibitionMilja Viita’s new film installation examines the inevitability of the passage of time, the cyclical nature of history and the fragility of life. Does man learn anything from history, or are we doomed to make the same mistakes over and over again?

Milja Viita’s new film installation is inspired by the German classic film Menschen am Sonntag (1930), which portrayed the leisure time of young adults in Berlin between the world wars. The film is now remembered particularly as the “last summer” before the rise of Nazism and the devastation of the Second World War.

People on Sunday presents ten cinematic portraits. For her films, Viita draws on personal experiences and reflections on existence, which she combines with scientific or social observations.

The passage of time is at the heart of Viita’s work. In the film, human time and natural time are juxtaposed. Natural processes can be quite slow, and human life is a mere blink of an eye in this perspective. The scenes in the film focusing on the different stages of people’s lives remind us of this.

In the film, human time and nature time are juxtaposed.

Music plays an important role in Viita’s work. This is particularly evident in the two scenes in which we hear the Prelude in E minor (BWV 938), composed by Bach for his nine-year-old child three hundred years ago.

The curator of the exhibition is Tomi Moisio.

Milja Viita

Visual artist and filmmaker Milja Viita

Milja Viita is an award-winning and internationally renowned artist who lives and works in Porvoo. She graduated from the Department of Time and Space Arts at the Academy of Fine Arts in 2005 and currently works as a teacher at the Academy of Fine Arts of the University of the Arts Helsinki.

Viita won the Risto Jarva Prize at the Tampere Film Festival in 2019 for his film Eläinsilta U-3033 (2018). The archive-based film Skönärit, which depicts the life of old seafarers and is funded by the Lönnström Museum, premiered in live screening at the end of 2024. The film won the jury’s special mention at the DocPoint Film Festival 2025. 

Milja Viita’s works are in the collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma and the Jenny and Antti Wihuri Foundation. Viita’s work has been seen in museums, galleries, television and at several major international film festivals, such as Ann Arbor, Kurtzfilmtage Oberhausen, Hot Docs, DocPoint and the Sodankylä Film Festival. Viita’s production is distributed by Light Cone, an avant-garde film distribution centre in Paris, CFMDC in Toronto and AV-arkki in Finland.


Photo: Milja Viita, People on Sunday, 2025, still image from the film installation.