Alvar Aalto’s extensive and wide-ranging oeuvrecontinues to inspire not only new generations of architects and designers but also a number of important contemporary artists. Vesa Pekka Rannikko's video installation Three Legs is the start of a new series of exhibitions at the Alvar Aalto Museum, which will present interesting contemporary art with an international flavour, based on the works of Alvar Aalto.

Vesa-Pekka Rannikko’s new video installation Three Legs will be on show in the Gallery at the Alvar Aalto Museum in October. The work centres around the museum building itself and the relationship between architecture and the human body.

By playing with scale, Three Legs examines people’s encounters with their environment as historical, pictorial and material experiences. The travelogue within the work transports the visitor from Viipuri (Vyborg) Library during the War to a photo-shoot for a science-fiction novel. Eventually, through a series of mock-up structures, the visitor ends up in the ruined hotels destroyed by the Thailand tsunami and the microcosmos of the insect world. The narrative is no longer purely linear but also on-screen, at one and the same time.

Vesa-Pekka Rannikko (born 1968) is a versatile artist who, besides video, has worked with sculpture, painting, installations and indeed performance art. In several of his works he has touched on the Alvar Aalto designed Viipuri Library and the three-legged stool designed for it, which subsequently became one of the icons of Finnish design. Rannikko’s work has been seen at many international exhibitions. This year he is representing Finland at the Venice Biennale – in the exhibition pavilion designed by Alvar Aalto in 1955.

Alvar Aalto’s extensive and wide-ranging oeuvre continues to inspire not only new generations of architects and designers but also a number of important contemporary artists. Three Legs is the start of a new series of exhibitions at the Alvar Aalto Museum, which will present interesting contemporary art with an international flavour, based on the works of Alvar Aalto.