Traditional museum experiences require the viewer to survey a plethora of works in a short time period. We coast through the gallery space with fractured gazes. In Ote, only one work—Tyko Sallinen’s 1919 painting Devil’s Dance is displayed from The Saastamoinen Foundation Art Collection to invite the public to concentrate and take time with an artwork. The gesture of exhibiting a single artwork in EMMA’s Areena exhibition space challenges the traditional display conventions of a collection often exhibited as an entity.

In addition to drawing focus to the painting, the exhibition aims to confront the museum’s institutional framework, notably its nearly standardised setting for modernist painting. By drawing attention to the architectural possibilities of a museum’s ’white cube’, elements of the classical exhibition hall are erased, emphasised or re-worked through the lens of light and sound.

Ote physically locates Sallinen’s painting in the middle of the space. Off the wall, there is the potential for multiple approaches and interactions. Via the public program, audiences are invited to explore and test the many ways of being with an artwork in a museum space. Dancing and dining with the work are ways to stretch the limits of institutional space and behavior. A visit to Ote may result in a moment of sharing with strangers, friends or museum guards.