Kukka Ranta
Kukka Ranta is an artist, photographer, journalist and activist in Freedom of Movement network and is part of the romagroup in the Social Center Satama of Helsinki — and a MA student of Fine Art in Aalto University.
She mainly writes to the prominent Finnish red/green magazine Voima (/Kraft/Fuerza). Her current project, from which she shows excerpts in this exhibition, is a photo/text work about immigrants and gypsies in Finland and elsewhere. In Helsinki "the gypsy question" has lately been a political storm: as can be expected, some see the gypsy immigrants as lazy leaches sneaking into a Nordic welfare society and causing its collapse, while others see them as an important glimpse of what's really going on in the European Union and welcome them as citizens of Europe that have the right to beg, to work to exist in Helsinki equally well as in their native, even more hostile environment.