Mini Exhibition at Rådhusgalleriet during Nykarleby Pride

Time: 9.9–12.9 5-8 PM and Saturday 13.9 11 AM–3 PM.Place: Lilla Galleriet at Rådhusgalleriet, Kyrkogatan 4, Nykarleby.11.9 kl. 17–19.30, Nightcoffee och queer art: ”Meet and greet” with Sara Östman in the small meeting room at Rådhusgalleriet. Come and look at the exhibition, grab a coffee and discuss with the artist!

The mini-exhibition ”Drainage – A Mapping of Ostrobothnia as a Queer Landscape” consists of a selection of illustrations, installations, and archival art from Nykarleby-born artist Sara Östman’s ongoing project with the same title.
Through the artist’s own introspection and close reading of archival material about the region, Ostrobothnia is explored and mapped, hectare by hectare, as a queer landscape marked by a culture of silence. What is found when we look more closely at wetlands, mushroom picking, and farming from a queer perspective? What is found in the gaps where hidden love letters should have been preserved?
Questions asked during the creative process include: What does queer Ostrobothnia look like today and historically — how has it changed over time? How is our identity shaped by our context, and how do we shape our context? Who has walked these paths before me, and who drained the wetlands?

Sara Östman (she/her) is a Swedish-speaking queer artist, graphic designer, illustrator, and farmer’s daughter. She was born and raised in Forsby, Nykarleby, is a fairly recent resident of Helsinki, and a classic late bloomer, but in no hurry at all. In her first major art project, she explores questions related to time, identity, queerness, and origins. The full exhibition will be shown in Helsinki in 2026.
The theme of this exhibition builds on Sara’s earlier works on otherness (The Homecomer, a graphic novel about the conditions for creativity in a rural context, which was her graduation project from Novia in 2021) and queerness (notes on the idea of love and romantic relationships, exhibited at Malakta in Malax in October 2022). Sara works with themes that are close to her own life and that feel urgent from the perspective that they do not receive the same visibility in smaller communities and rural areas as they do in larger cities.