Nestori Syrjälä, performance
25.11.2025
Memory Wash
25.11.2025
Riiko Sakkinen
Time → Xx.Xx.2025 at Xx–Yy am/pm
Location → Osoite/paikka, Oulu
What does it mean to bring money into a public space that is based on free access?
Artist Riiko Sakkinen has hidden 1,000 euros in five-euro banknotes inside red books at
Oulu’s main library, Saari on 8th of February 2025.
Sakkinen has hidden the banknotes in freely borrowable books that are red in their covers, content, or attitude. Each banknote is stamped, numbered, and signed by the artist.
What does bringing money into a public space reveal about the ideals of the welfare state, the logic of capitalism, or the funding of culture? Does the gesture question charity, give money a new mission, or make visible something that is already present in everyday life but often goes unnoticed: the significance of money in every institution?
Image gallery
Artist:
Riiko Sakkinen
Riiko Sakkinen is an artist, a dissident and a one-man resistance army. He is the founder of Turborealism, an anti-capitalist art movement. Sakkinen has worked globally, for instance, during the Syrian Civil War in Damascus and Aleppo, in the midst of unrest in Beirut, in the time of the Mexican Drug War in Monterrey and in Kyiv while Russia bombed Ukraine.
Sakkinen was born in 1976 in Helsinki. He lives in Spain since 2003 and is headquartered in Pepino, a tiny village in the province of Toledo. He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki, graduating in 2002. Sakkinen’s art has been exhibited widely around the world including the MoMA, New York; Nationalmuseum, Stockholm; Kiasma, Helsinki; Camden Arts Centre, London; Artipelag, Sweden; Musac, León, Spain; and Serlachius, Mänttä, Finland.
