‘A plant with narrative agency radically alters notions about sentience, mobility, reproduction, and representation— not the least by blurring distinctions between character and setting.’
An exhibition titled ‘The Unloved’ runs at Atletika gallery from 4 April to 17 May 2025, presenting the debut collaborative body of work by artists Felicia Honkasalo (FI) and Sam Williams (UK).
In ‘The Unloved’, the figure of the ‘weed’ is animated through a combination of film, photography, collage, text and ephemera that sits somewhere in the cracks between museum herbarium, Gothic fantasy, childhood fable and amateur theatre.
Entering the exhibition, two large silk collages intertwine ghostly narratives with botanical history. These photographic fabric prints layer pressed plant specimens from the herbarium at London’s Natural History Museum with archival photographs and documents of spectral stories tied toVictorian glasshouses. The selections are not random, they all depict plants such as the Mandrake, Mugwort, Pheasant’s Eye and Daffodil, each with a history of shifting cultural significance, once revered for their medicinal or mystical properties, only to be later dismissed as weeds. These botanical specimens merge with faded portraits and eerie traces of the past, referencing folklore, literature, and film, where the boundaries between the living and the spectral blur. We see glimpses of these plants appearing in iconic artworks, films and literature such as John Millais’s Ophelia, The Day of the Triffids and Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
In the next room, an unsettling short video introduces us to a delicate plant stalk adorned with eyes, modeled after the haunting figure of Saint Lucy from Francesco del Cossa’s 15th Century painting. In a visual style reminiscent of Czech animations for children, the eyes of Lucy (voiced by Lithuanian actress Bernadeta Lukošiūtė) narrate a brief history of the presence of so-called ‘weeds’ in human life, from the mention of ‘thorns and thistles’ in Genesis through to the Victorian obsession with plant-hunting. Their focus is on who and what determines one to be a weed, and how Empire expansion led to a Gothic fantasy of plants as exoticised and fetishised Others.
Following these draped collages into the next gallery, they now become reference to theatre curtains or backstage partitions, as we hear the voice of an actor drawing us closer. Seated in what appears to be an abandoned theatre or cinema and dressed in an extravagant plant-like costume they recount stories of their acting career across stage and screen. Their specialty is playing the weed and their desirability as an actor is based on the fickle tastes of directors and audiences. They are an Outsider, an Other, and find their home amongst the resilient peers thriving on the margins. Remaining slippery, the film slides from this monologue into a series of increasingly hallucinatory vignettes, Gothic tales of sentient plants, vengeful ghosts and a theatre set ablaze. Our actor inhabits the role of narrator, recounting these stories to an empty theatre before giving way to the ghosts of the architecture in what becomes something close to a haunting, Lynchian dream.
‘Weeds – even many intrusive aliens – give something back. They green over the dereliction we have created. They move in to replace more sensitive plants that we have endangered. Their willingness to grow in the most hostile environments – a bombed city, a crack in a wall – means that they insinuate the idea of wild nature into places otherwise quite shorn of it. They are, in this sense, paradoxical. Although they follow and are dependent on human activities, their cussedness and refusal to play by our rules makes them subversive, and the very essence of wildness.’
Living in times characterised as the end of the world, The Unloved is an exploration of identity, transformation, and the resilience of the overlooked, inviting audiences to see beauty in the tenacity of what is often dismissed or despised.
Felicia Honkasalo lives and works in Helsinki, Finland and has a Masters from the Department of Time-based Arts, University of the Arts, Helsinki, and a BA in Photography from University of the Arts, London UK. Her work has been shown in Finland and abroad in solo exhibitions, group exhibitions and at international film screenings. Her first monograph, Grey Cobalt, was published by Loose Joints in 2019 (UK). Her work explores the relationship between memory and history and the borderlines between life and death, human and animal. Through a critical and poetic approach she seeks to challenge established ways of thinking and encourage new ways of seeing the world around us. She often collaborates with other artists and scholars. Recent exhibitions include: Sinne Gallery, Helsinki, Finland (2024), Sema Nanji Museum of Contemporary Art, South-Korea (2023), Turku Art Museum, Finland (2022); Helsinki Biennial, Finland (2021), Riga International Biennial of Contemporary Art, Latvia (2020).
Sam Williams is an artist with a practice that intertwines moving-image, collage, choreography, sound and writing. His ongoing research focuses on multispecies entanglements, ecological systems, bodies-as-worlds and folk mythologies and how they propose possibilities for present and future ways of non-human-centric living. Sam is based in London where he is a resident artist at Somerset House Studios. He has presented work at institutions including Chisenhale Gallery, Arnolfini, Baltic39, Siobhan Davies Dance, Somerset House, Tate Britain, Studio Voltaire and South Kiosk (UK), She Will (Norway), Kino Arsenal, Akademie der Kunst, Tanzhalle Weisenberg and B3 Biennale (Germany). He has been artist in residence at Rupert, Lithuania (2022), PRAKSIS, Oslo (2018) and in 2021 was selected as one of ten artists forming the Wysing Arts Centre Syllabus, a peer-led alternative education program.
Exhibition text – Juliet Jacques
Graphic Design – Monika Janulevičiūtė
Translation – Rosana Lukauskaitė
Technical manager – Neda Rimaitė
With thanks to Roma Auškalnytė, Rūta Radušytė, Jakub Dubaniewicz, Somerset House Studios, The Rio Cinema, TIN Café and John Hunnex at the Natural History Museum, London.
04/04 – 17/05/2025
Address: Atletika gallery, Vitebsko 21, Vilnius.
Organised by the Lithuanian Interdisciplinary Artists’ Association (LIAA). Activities of LIAA are financed by the Lithuanian Council for Culture and Vilnius City Municipality. The exhibition is supported by Nordic Culture Point and TAIKE
www.atletikaprojects.lt
Photography: Laurynas Skeisgiela
Felicia Honkasalo and Sam Williams. Exhibition The Unloved at Atletika gallery. Photographer Laurynas Skeisgiela.
Untitled, 2025. The Mandrake, 2025. Felicia Honkasalo and Sam Williams. Exhibition The Unloved at Atletika gallery. Photographer Laurynas Skeisgiela.
The Mandrake, 2025. Felicia Honkasalo and Sam Williams. Exhibition The Unloved at Atletika gallery. Photographer Laurynas Skeisgiela.
The Mandrake, 2025, detail. Felicia Honkasalo and Sam Williams. Exhibition The Unloved at Atletika gallery. Photographer Laurynas Skeisgiela.
Untitled, 2025, detail. Felicia Honkasalo and Sam Williams. Exhibition The Unloved at Atletika gallery. Photographer Laurynas Skeisgiela.
Untitled, 2025, detail. Felicia Honkasalo and Sam Williams. Exhibition The Unloved at Atletika gallery. Photographer Laurynas Skeisgiela.
Untitled, 2025. Felicia Honkasalo and Sam Williams. Exhibition The Unloved at Atletika gallery. Photographer Laurynas Skeisgiela.
Untitled, 2025. Felicia Honkasalo and Sam Williams. Exhibition The Unloved at Atletika gallery. Photographer Laurynas Skeisgiela.
Felicia Honkasalo and Sam Williams. Exhibition The Unloved at Atletika gallery. Photographer Laurynas Skeisgiela.
Untitled, 2025. Felicia Honkasalo and Sam Williams. Exhibition The Unloved at Atletika gallery. Photographer Laurynas Skeisgiela.
Untitled, 2025, detail. Felicia Honkasalo and Sam Williams. Exhibition The Unloved at Atletika gallery. Photographer Laurynas Skeisgiela.
Felicia Honkasalo and Sam Williams. Exhibition The Unloved at Atletika gallery. Photographer Laurynas Skeisgiela.
Heartsease, 2025. The Ramifications of Botanical Desire According to Lucy, 2025. Felicia Honkasalo and Sam Williams. Exhibition The Unloved at Atletika gallery. Photographer Laurynas Skeisgiela.
Heartsease, 2025, detail. Felicia Honkasalo and Sam Williams. Exhibition The Unloved at Atletika gallery. Photographer Laurynas Skeisgiela.
The Ramifications of Botanical Desire According to Lucy, 2025. Felicia Honkasalo and Sam Williams. Exhibition The Unloved at Atletika gallery. Photographer Laurynas Skeisgiela.
The Ramifications of Botanical Desire According to Lucy, 2025. Felicia Honkasalo and Sam Williams. Exhibition The Unloved at Atletika gallery. Photographer Laurynas Skeisgiela.
Ophelia’s Garland, 2025. Felicia Honkasalo and Sam Williams. Exhibition The Unloved at Atletika gallery. Photographer Laurynas Skeisgiela.
Ophelia’s Garland, 2025. Felicia Honkasalo and Sam Williams. Exhibition The Unloved at Atletika gallery. Photographer Laurynas Skeisgiela.
Ophelia’s Garland, 2025, detail. Felicia Honkasalo and Sam Williams. Exhibition The Unloved at Atletika gallery. Photographer Laurynas Skeisgiela.
The Unloved. Felicia Honkasalo and Sam Williams. Exhibition The Unloved at Atletika gallery. Photographer Laurynas Skeisgiela.
The Unloved. Felicia Honkasalo and Sam Williams. Exhibition The Unloved at Atletika gallery. Photographer Laurynas Skeisgiela.
The Unloved. Felicia Honkasalo and Sam Williams. Exhibition The Unloved at Atletika gallery. Photographer Laurynas Skeisgiela.
The Unloved. Felicia Honkasalo and Sam Williams. Exhibition The Unloved at Atletika gallery. Photographer Laurynas Skeisgiela.
