Tropical Geography & International

Jondjoli Flowers and Brutalists from Helsinki

June 13 — July 13, 2025
Triumph Gallery and Marina Gisich Gallery

The exhibition is devoted to exploring and interpreting the plastic forms of expression of the contemporary picture of the world—dynamic and ever-changing.

Triumph Gallery and Marina Gisich Gallery present the projects Tropical Geography by the art collective Jondjoli Flowers and the international group Helsinki Brutalists. Jondjoli Flowers is a local collective of artists formed in 2022 in Saint Petersburg. It operates at the intersection of utilitarian art and non-functional design.

Participating artists include Alexander Tsikarishvili, Ivan Chemakin, RTKN, Liza Tsikarishvili, Pyotr Dyakov, Grekht, Sasha Kokacheva, Yulia Mortiis, as well as other authors who may freely join the project or its individual series. By creating collaborative works, the artists experiment with various materials and manual techniques. Together, they conceptualize the handmade, the workshop-based, and the industrial within art.

Jondjoli Flowers
Tropical Geography

Triumph Gallery and Marina Gisich Gallery present the projects Tropical Geography by the art collective Jondjoli Flowers and the international group Helsinki Brutalists. Jondjoli Flowers is a local collective of artists formed in 2022 in Saint Petersburg. It operates at the intersection of utilitarian art and non-functional design.

Participating artists include Alexander Tsikarishvili, Ivan Chemakin, RTKN, Liza Tsikarishvili, Pyotr Dyakov, Grekht, Sasha Kokacheva, Yulia Mortiis, as well as other authors who may freely join the project or its individual series. By creating collaborative works, the artists experiment with various materials and manual techniques. Together, they conceptualize the handmade, the workshop-based, and the industrial within art.

The exhibition is devoted to exploring and interpreting the plastic forms of expression of the contemporary picture of the world—dynamic and ever-changing. The artists create a collage that combines images from different cultural contexts, territories, and eras, using textiles, found objects, wood, metal, photography, video, and handcraft techniques. The project is connected with the search for and "stitching together" of artifacts referencing mass media and pop culture, presenting a kind of archaeology of the present. It engages with textiles as a conceptual form of an imagined shelter in the context of a radical temporal rupture. Jondjoli Flowers work with uniforms and gear, reprocessing masculine, normative, and standardizing signs and forms. Placing them in a different context renders their associated ideological constructs less obvious.

Jondjoli Flowers
Tropical Geography

The exhibition is devoted to exploring and interpreting the plastic forms of expression of the contemporary picture of the world—dynamic and ever-changing. The artists create a collage that combines images from different cultural contexts, territories, and eras, using textiles, found objects, wood, metal, photography, video, and handcraft techniques. The project is connected with the search for and "stitching together" of artifacts referencing mass media and pop culture, presenting a kind of archaeology of the present. It engages with textiles as a conceptual form of an imagined shelter in the context of a radical temporal rupture. Jondjoli Flowers work with uniforms and gear, reprocessing masculine, normative, and standardizing signs and forms. Placing them in a different context renders their associated ideological constructs less obvious.

Helsinki Brutalists is an independent line that emerged within the Jondjoli Flowers project. It focuses on working with found objects literally extracted from the ground—contemporary archaics. Brought together through defamiliarization and the displacement of their usual functions and contexts, these objects form a new semantic field, a distinct myth of "northern" brutalism. Helsinki Brutalists exist in a state of timelessness, in an almost meditative search, assembling the incompatible and creating nearly impossible forms. The linearity of memory bends, chronology becomes confused: brutalism and Soviet industrial design turn into artifacts of deep antiquity, while the crafts of northern peoples seem to belong to the recent past.

Без названия
(High Risk)

Helsinki Brutalists is an independent line that emerged within the Jondjoli Flowers project. It focuses on working with found objects literally extracted from the ground—contemporary archaics. Brought together through defamiliarization and the displacement of their usual functions and contexts, these objects form a new semantic field, a distinct myth of "northern" brutalism. Helsinki Brutalists exist in a state of timelessness, in an almost meditative search, assembling the incompatible and creating nearly impossible forms. The linearity of memory bends, chronology becomes confused: brutalism and Soviet industrial design turn into artifacts of deep antiquity, while the crafts of northern peoples seem to belong to the recent past.

Experimenting with heavy industrial materials, the artists bring to an absolute their obsession with the memory of matter: fragments and debris in their hands form an iconography of a timeless cult of things as carriers of memory rather than function. Here, walls are not boundaries but seams. Concrete absorbs traces of epochs; metal objects, once useful, shimmer beneath layers of rust, and the traveler must navigate through lost times using maps made of chrome-plated pipes.

Curator: Alexander Tsikarishvili

Jondjoli Flowers
Tropical Geography

Experimenting with heavy industrial materials, the artists bring to an absolute their obsession with the memory of matter: fragments and debris in their hands form an iconography of a timeless cult of things as carriers of memory rather than function. Here, walls are not boundaries but seams. Concrete absorbs traces of epochs; metal objects, once useful, shimmer beneath layers of rust, and the traveler must navigate through lost times using maps made of chrome-plated pipes.

Curator: Alexander Tsikarishvili