Nastja Säde Rönkkö: Survival Guide for a Post-Apocalyptic Child

At Serlachius, Nastja Säde Rönkö’s art has been shown in the Below Zero Art Award exhibition, which opened in autumn 2024. Her work salt in our blood, in our sweat, in our tears had been selected the year before as the winner of the third Below Zero Art Award in London.

However, after much consideration, we decided to acquire Survival Guide for our collection. It is without doubt the main work of Nastja Säde Rönkö’s production to date.

The acquisition was a major endeavour in terms of scale for the Serlachius contemporary art collection. We felt it was important to include this significant work in a public collection.

Pauli Sivonen, Director, Serlachius”S is for snakes and stars and spells. Serpents and skinning situations, soft soil and sex and shelter and silence. Softness of all things, or slings. S is for sleep and snow, stones, souls, seeds and storms.”

When Nastja Säde Rönkkö lists words beginning with the letter s in her video installation Survival Guide for a Post-Apocalyptic Child (2022–2024), her soft, unhurried voice creates in a strange way both a calm and tense atmosphere.

Snakes, stars, spells as well as sleep, snow, seeds or sex, softness, shelter and silence are examples of things that entwine the viewer in a slowly advancing selection of apocalypses – and a guide to surviving them.

The work does not directly tell what has happened. We are, however, clearly amidst a post-apocalyptic landscape. Although the world has irrevocably changed, individuals continue to live their lives. The narrator’s soft voice is perhaps seeking to lead us away from dystopia. It calmly presents us with the things that enable or compel life to continue.

The poems of the work are places where the global apocalyptic atmosphere is filtered into human and highly individual experiences. The narrator’s voice and the characters in the videos are living in the middle of some big and revolutionary event, but they react to it with human-sized thoughts.

From Rauma to Helsinki, Mänttä and the world

The Gösta Serlachius Fine Arts Foundation acquired Survival Guide for its collection three years after it was first displayed. The installation was originally commissioned and produced by the Lönnström Art Museum in Rauma and was soon also exhibited at HAM in Helsinki.

In summer 2025, it has toured various locations in the UK both as an installed and a screening version. The work was memorably presented at the historic Fort Burgoyne in Dover.

The work consists of 26 videos, accompanied by a soundscape and a series of sculptures. An important role is also played by a book published in conjunction with the HAM exhibition, allowing visitors to delve deeper into the poems of the work outside of the exhibition experience.

However, after much consideration, we decided to acquire Survival Guide for our collection. It is without doubt the main work of Nastja Säde Rönkö’s production to date.

The acquisition was a major endeavour in terms of scale for the Serlachius contemporary art collection. We felt it was important to include this significant work in a public collection.

Nastja Säde Rönkkö (b. 1985) often addresses in her works the relationship between people and their environment. Humanity, identities, power structures and, more broadly, social relations interest her on an individual level. The works are realised as media art, installations or performances.

Text is central to Nastja Säde Rönkö’s art. Survival Guide is a good example of this. The beauty of the work is expressed in its alphabetically progressive poetic monologues, which linger in the minds of visitors as they leave the gallery space.

Climate anxiety and apocalyptic expectations are part of our time. Nastja Säde Rönkö’s psychologically charged, ambiguous verses remind us that the future for humans and other living things is not desolate. In the work, people’s lives go on, even though the world around them is collapsing.

The Below Zero Finnish Art Award is a contemporary art prize awarded every two years. It is aimed at Finnish artists who want to advance their careers internationally. The prize is awarded by the Beaconsfield Gallery in London, the Finnish Institute in Britain and Ireland, and Serlachius.

The prize includes a six-week residency and a solo exhibition at the Beaconsfield Gallery, an exhibition at Serlachius and the opportunity for a residency period. The prize is worth more than £20,000 in total. The 2023 award was given to Nastja Säde Rönkkö, who created a video installation “salt in blood, in our sweat, in our tears” during her residency period.

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