Laulu Tulipunaisesta Kukasta

Rotts approaches painting obliquely – through textile, through touch, through the residue of wear. A graduate of the painting department, she replaces pigment with fabric, developing what she terms textile painting. Striped trousers – marked by use, by class, by memory – are disassembled and reconfigured into ornamental fields, where floral rhythms emerge from the logic of repetition and seam. Here, the visual language of post-Soviet street culture brushes against the decorative ethos of Art Nouveau, recalling the utopian ornament of William Morris, yet grounded in a distinctly contemporary materiality.

Her practice unfolds in dialogue with Mikhail Bakhtin and his notion of the carnivalesque. Laughter, in this framework, is neither incidental nor purely comic – it is a force of inversion. It suspends order, dissolves hierarchy, and renders the fixed unstable. The high descends; the low rises. Meaning becomes porous. What emerges is not satire, but a collective, ambivalent laughter directed at the world in its entirety.

Scale becomes a strategy of estrangement. Familiar garments are enlarged beyond human proportion, reimagined as attire for a figure that exceeds the body – a giant, or perhaps a memory of one, drawn from the illogical space of the fairy tale. This absent presence haunts the exhibition: a wearer implied but never seen, a body both imagined and invited. The suit awaits its subject.

Color operates as both structure and disruption. Unexpected chromatic encounters – acidic greens, saturated reds, improbable juxtapositions – converge with images that oscillate between the sacred and the absurd: a rocket-church, a serpent, an oversized bloom. These elements do not resolve into narrative; instead, they open a field of possibility. Rotts proposes imagination not as escape, but as a generative condition – one in which laughter becomes a threshold, and through which new forms, however unstable, might come into being.

Sasha Rotts (b. 1985) is an artist and art historian from St. Petersburg, Russia, based in Helsinki. After graduating from Stieglitz Academy (art history department), she worked at the Museum of Russian Art (department of Soviet graphic art). In 2008–2009 she studied at the Pro Arte Institute in St. Petersburg in the department of contemporary art. In 2008 Rotts took part in the first Moscow Biennale for young art Stop! Who’s Coming? In 2009 Sasha and her partner founded the artistic duo SASHAPASHA.

After moving to Finland in 2015, Rotts began her studies at Vapaa Taidekoulu (Free Art School), from which she graduated in 2020. The graduation show Etiäinen took place at Forum Box gallery in July 2020. She subsequently continued her studies at the Academy of Fine Arts, graduating from the MFA programme in the Painting department in 2024.

In March 2020 the artistic duo SASHAPASHA presented the results of their five-year project Kanava, dedicated to the history of the Soviet labour camp system GULAG, at Exhibition Laboratory in Helsinki.

In recent years Rotts has held solo exhibitions Shapes of Things to Come (together with Robin Ellis) at Huuto Gallery in Helsinki in 2024, and Please Recycle at TYPA gallery in Tartu in 2025. She has participated in group exhibitions at Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam, Paradise Works in Manchester, and the XXVII Mänttä Art Festival, as well as The Perfect Match at Gallery Apoteket in Gotland in 2024 as part of SASHAPASHA.