The 2026 residencies for the Saari Residence announced

The recipients of Kone Foundation’s Saari residencies for 2026 have been announced. In total, more than 200,000 euros of funding was granted to those working in the residence next year.

The Saari Residence continues to reach an increasing number of artists from all around the world.

For 2026, Kone Foundation’s Board of Trustees granted residencies for Saari Residence to 27 individual artists and five work pairs. The residency includes a two-month work period at the Saari Residence, a monthly grant, accommodation and support for ecological travel or Global South travel for those who have applied for it.

“The Saari Residence is reaching more and more artists from all around the world. According to our survey, one of the main reasons for applying for residency is the recommendations of former residents. We are pleased that we are able to offer residency conditions that support the work of artists from different disciplines. Every artist who comes here leaves their mark and is part of our constant change. The work and thinking of the artists and researchers working in the residency provides us with knowledge that we can use to evolve our culture,” says Annika Dahlsten, Residency Director (deputy) at Saari Residence.

The award rate for residencies in 2026 was 3.5%.

Artists’ studios out of use next year due to renovation

This year, a total of 1,034 applications from 86 countries were submitted for the call for applications for the 2026 Saari Residence.

The upcoming renovation of the old stone barn at Saari Residence posed its own challenges for the residencies granted for 2026. The barn has a dance studio, visual artists’ studios and a workshop. They will all be out of use in autumn 2026, and the residents will work at desks located in their accommodation spaces.

Due to the renovation, 2026 will be the first year in the almost twenty years of activities at the Saari Residence when there will be no working groups in group residencies during the summer.

The 36 artists and work pairs who have been granted a residence form a diverse group, and next year we will be hosting both young and more experienced artists from different artistic disciplines and from around the world. Approximately half of the artists selected for the residency live in Finland, and the other half comes from outside Finland.

The typical applicant is a visual artist from a Western country

As in previous years, more than half of the applicants were visual artists. Notably, this year the second-highest number of applications came from the field of literature. In previous years, the performing arts have been the second largest discipline, but due to the temporary lack of work spaces in the autumn and the absence of summer group residencies, the number of artists working from their desks increased in this year’s application round.

The majority of the applicants were aged between 36 and 50.

Artists living in Finland were in the majority of the applicants, followed by artists from Germany. There were also many applicants from the United Kingdom, the United States, the Netherlands, Sweden and Italy.

This year, applications were received from six new countries: Azerbaijan, the Bahamas, Jordan, Panama, Qatar and Togo. Over the past seven years, we have received residency applications from a total of 125 countries.

Artists interested in more sustainable travel

Saari Residence encourages applicants to consider more sustainable modes of travel. Our support for sustainable travel has become well established, with as many as 40% of applicants from outside of Finland applying for ecological travel support. The purpose of the ecological travel grant is to motivate applicants to avoid flying, and to encourage the artists to consider more sustainable and slower travel options as part of the transition to the residence.

As part of the residency’s sustainability approach and to strengthen its social sustainability, artists arriving from the Global South can apply for support for visa and travel costs. The Global South travel grant is designed to make participation possible for residency applicants who would otherwise find it financially impossible to travel to Northern Europe from their country of residence. This year, just under 8% of all applicants applied for the support.

Social injustice, critique of the digitalisation of society and ecological themes featured in applications

The evaluators all praised the artistic quality of the applications. The applications were well executed, and their content was both socially and artistically topical.

Several artists criticised our digital society and questioned the veracity of the information it provides. Many applications also examined human history, highlighting the continuity of certain structures, such as colonial violence, surprising encounters between marginalised groups of people and the experiences of migrants. The theoretical background of the artists’ work included different forms of ecological art and new forms and theories of feminism.

One of the central themes of the artists’ designs was bodily experience and its relationship with nature, the environment, their own artistic work and identity. As in previous years, the themes of the applications also included ecology and, in particular, the use of the unique nature around Saari Manor as part of the work. Other key themes included the local environment, landscape and the artist’s relationship with the environment, the origin of food, and economic reduction (degrowth). To counterbalance the current difficult situation in the world, the applications also showed gentleness and acceptance, as well as a certain playfulness and heightened imagination. Many artists expressed a desire to jump off the bandwagon, to return to an everyday life where everything is smaller and simpler.

The research-oriented approach that has long prevailed in the visual arts has been complemented by a renewed focus on various forms of hands-on and manual practices. Many artists, especially young ones, prefer traditional physical ways of making art, such as painting, and for many visual artists, writing is as much a part of their work as visual expression.

You can read about the evaluation process in our article series, Anonymous Evaluator, where two peer reviewers who evaluated applications this year write about their work as evaluators. From a cinematic point of view, one of the evaluators considers how to find the golden highlights among the many applications. The second evaluator talks about their own assessment process and gives tips for future applicants and evaluators.

Read more about what the evaluators had to say

Residents are inspired by birdsong, musical thinking in sculpture and the world’s slowest fish

In 2026, the residents at Saari Residence include, among others, the Finnish-based Chinese multidisciplinary artist Tianjun Li (China/Finland), sculptor Hermanni Saarinen (Finland) and filmmaker, visual artist and writer Tuuli Teelahti (Finland).

Tianjun Li creates dreamlike realities and soundscapes

In 2026, the Saari Residence will host Helsinki-based multidisciplinary artist Tianjun Li, also known as Timjune, who originally comes from China. They work across photography, video, sound, voice, performance, and community-based practices. Drawing from their synesthesia and exceptional four-octave vocal range, Li creates surreal sonic-visual landscapes mixing reality and imagination. Li holds a master’s degree in Visual Cultures, Curating and Contemporary Art, with a minor in Sound in New Media, from Aalto University.

At the Saari Residence, Tianjun Li is working on a multidisciplinary performance combining experiments with singing voice with photo and video installations. The performance builds on Tianjun Li’s wider research as part of their long-term Free as Birds project. “Free as Birds reimagines birds as metaphors for freedom, fragile, imagined, and migratory, within the intertwined conditions of human displacement and ecological precarity. Developed across various island and coastal sites in Europe, the project translates folk songs into AI-generated bird’s lyrics, which are then re-performed through my voice inspired by local traditional vocalization and singing, in dialogue with local communities, forming what I call ‘bird song choirs’,” Tianjun Li describes.

The Saari Residence offers Tianjun Li the opportunity to deepen their artistic work in the peaceful and beautiful surroundings of the residence. Li is also looking forward to the social side of the residency and the dialogue with artists from different disciplines, which could lead to collaboration and new opportunities created by ‘cross-pollination’.

Hermanni Saarinen brings musical thinking into sculpting

Hermanni Saarinen is a Helsinki-based artist who works mainly with sculpture. He graduated from the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts in 2011 with a degree in sculpture, and for the past few years he has focused on works where musical thinking is part of the sculpting process.

“I apply counterpoint thinking in sculptures made up of parts. I have borrowed the term counterpoint, from music theory. It means the harmony doctrine in which the combination of counter-melodies produces a richer and more nuanced harmony than a simple canon of matching voices. In visual art and sculpture, sound and notes are replaced by form or tone,” Saarinen says.

At the Saari Residence, Saarinen sculpts his works from wood, a material close to his heart. The residency and the new milieu give time and space to be inspired and find suitable forms in many unanticipated ways.

The sculptures consist of a limited number of modules of different sizes and shapes, which he assembles into larger structures.

“The horizontal and vertical lines, the rhythm of the masses, the proportions and variations of the modules form a system in which each part contributes to the whole and its coherence. It is about the relationship between the details and the whole,” Saarinen says.

Tuuli Teelahti in the wake of an ice shark

Helsinki-based filmmaker, visual artist and writer Tuuli Teelahti will be working on her book about the Ice Shark at the Saari Residence.

Teelahti works with text, image and media art in a versatile way. She holds a master’s degree in Documentary Film from Aalto University and a master’s degree in writing from the Theatre Academy in 2025. She is a gardener by training – and has also studied shipping.

Jäähain pimeä kirja (The Dark Book of the Ice Shark) is a visual novel, which she has created using prose text, interview material, comics and photography. The impulse for the book came from the idea of what is thought to be the world’s longest-living vertebrate, the Greenland shark (“ice shark”). The shark is almost blind and lives on the North Atlantic floor. It reaches maturity at around 152 years of age and is the slowest fish in the world relative to its size. The Greenland shark spends most of its time resting. The book poses the question whether our world still has room for the miraculous, the unexplained and the unknown. Could we wonder at the world without the need to own, conquer and pick every beautiful flower that comes our way?

“During the application phase, I was attracted by the keyword ‘slow’. For several years, I have wondered about the slow ice shark and learned to slow down myself, sometimes with success. For me, a slow mindset means both being present and accepting incompleteness. Incompleteness is often seen as a problem, a weakness. But for me, it manifests as an opportunity. It is the precondition for all life and all events in the universe. Without incompleteness, nothing would exist. During the residence period, I will surrender to the slowness of the ice shark, enjoy the process and let it carry me.

I look forward to the darkness and silence of winter as much as to the warmth and encounters provided by the resident community. The residency will allow me to focus on rewriting and pruning my text, as well as going through and working on the visual elements of the book,” Teelahti says.

The Saari Residence provides opportunities for insights and encounters

Maintained by Kone Foundation, the Saari Residence in Mynämäki provides artists with a work grant and accommodation in a unique and inspiring environment of an old manor. There is a variety of representatives of different art disciplines working at the residence. The artists are encouraged to engage in communal interaction and potential collaboration. The artists are also offered opportunities to deepen their thinking relating to ecology and other sustainability matters.

Due to the renovation, the Saari Invited Artist programme in 2026 is temporarily suspended.

In a meeting held on 16 June 2025, Kone Foundation’s Board of Trustees decided on the grantees to be awarded a Saari residency in 2026.

List of the grantees awarded a residency

Additional information

Annika Dahlsten
annika.dahlsten@koneensaatio.fi
+358 40 735 6597