Craft Punk — Juha Vehmaanperä’s first solo exhibition, at the Architecture and Design Museum, Helsinki

Juha Vehmaanperä knits. Everything else in this exhibition follows from that plain fact: an artist who works in yarn and needles, and who has spent recent years pushing the technique into places knitting is not usually asked to go — slow fashion, queer theory, and a body of knowledge that lives in the hands rather than in books.

Craft Punk is Vehmaanperä’s first large-scale solo exhibition, and it fills the gallery of the Architecture and Design Museum in Helsinki. It gathers the key works of recent years, the material experiments behind them, and something an exhibition rarely shows: the working process itself. Alongside the finished pieces are participatory works made with other people — the community-oriented method Vehmaanperä keeps returning to, in which the making is shared and the object is only part of the result.

The artist took a master’s degree in the Fashion, Clothing and Textile Design programme at Aalto University, and has taught at Aalto, Teho-Opisto and the Helsinki Adult Education Centre. In November 2025 Vehmaanperä was awarded the Taito Finlandia Prize. The work has travelled widely — the Hyères international fashion, photography and accessories festival in France, Dutch Design Week, Pitti Filati in Italy, New York Textile Month — and includes an internship in the knitwear team at Acne Studios in Stockholm.

Practical details

• When: 20 February 2026 – 6 January 2027
• Where: the Gallery, Architecture and Design Museum, Korkeavuorenkatu 23, Helsinki
• Opening hours: Tuesday 11:00–20:00, Wednesday to Sunday 11:00–18:00, closed Monday (winter season, 1 September – 31 May)
• Admission: adults €23; adults with the audio-guide combo €25; over 70s, unemployed and disability pensioners €14; young people 18–29 €6; children 2–17 €3; Museum Card free
• Getting there: tram to Johanneksenkirkko, directly in front of the main entrance; the accessible entrance is in the inner courtyard, at Ullanlinnankatu 4
• Building work: the square in front of the museum is under construction, but the Korkeavuorenkatu entrance and the courtyard entrance are both open as usual
• Organiser: the Architecture and Design Museum, Helsinki. The exhibition is realised with the Finnish Cultural Institute for the Benelux, the Finnish Heritage Agency and Novita

The building carries the visit on its own. Gustaf Nyström designed it in 1895, a red-brick pile with spires and a courtyard, standing at the edge of what Helsinki now calls its Design District; the exhibition galleries sit inside a museum whose subject is the same as its address. Readers who come to Helsinki for the design collection will find the city’s architecture in our own pages, from Alvar Aalto and Nordic functionalism outward.