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  "description": "SIC Helsinki presents Matti Sumari's Worker Ant After Work. Anodized aluminum and found lampposts address precarious labor and identity. Through April 2026.",
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  "publishedAt": "2026-04-09T07:51:15.000Z",
  "site": "https://www.munchiesart.club",
  "tags": [
    "SIC",
    "Matti Sumari",
    "Instagram of Sic Helsinki",
    "Sophia Persson on Instagram",
    "Matti Sumari on Instagram",
    "catapult.art",
    "Submit your work →"
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  "textContent": "**Worker Ant After Work — SIC**\n\n**Artist:**\nMatti Sumari\n\n**Exhibition:**\nWorker Ant After Work\n\n**Venue:**\nSIC\n\n**City:**\nHelsinki, Finland\n\n**Dates:**\n14 March 2026 — 26 April 2026\n\n**Text:**\nSophia Persson\n\n**Photography:**\nSIC\n\n**Image Courtesy:**\nCourtesy SIC\n\n##\n\n## **SIC Presents Matti Sumari: Worker Ant After Work in Helsinki - Text by Sophia Person**\n\nWhat a mess! The ears have crawled out of the gallery. Perhaps they could not bear to listen to the ever-echoing jargon of freelancers, artists, curators, and gallery visitors for one minute more. Inside the gallery, lighting oscillates like days between work and rest.\n\nTwo lampposts are carrying their straw – fluorescent tubes coated with meagre provisions. Outside, the ears have taken on a new function. They are listening for the outcome of a social experiment; will they be allowed to remain hanging out for a month at the station in the suburb?\n\nWorker Ant After Work, Matti Sumari, Whose head has the noseyest ears? (2026), anodized aluminium, Photo: SICWorker Ant After Work, Matti Sumari, Worker ant after work (2026), 1990s Malmö street lights, anodized aluminium, Photo: SIC Worker Ant After Work, ****Matti Sumari**** , installation view, ****SIC, Helsinki, 2026****. Photo: SIC\n\nIt is often argued that hunter-gatherer societies enjoyed more leisure than agrarian and later capitalist societies, working no more than two or three days per week. In Swedish folklore, it was important to _h å l l a k vä l l —to “keep the evening”_ —to cease work before nightfall.\n\nThe day belonged to humans; the night to the supernatural. To overstep this boundary was to disturb a cosmological order in which labor itself had limits. With the introduction of artificial lighting during the Industrial Revolution, work was severed from daylight. As agricultural workers became industrial laborers, the working day stretched to twelve or sixteen hours. Through workers struggles, hours were gradually reduced to the forty-hour week.\n\nAt some point, some of the agricultural workers who turned into industrial laborers started working independently. Outside permanent employment structures, freelancers have been selling their labor as independent workers for centuries. However, freelancing accelerated in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries due to new, flexible labor markets and gig economies.\n\nWorker Ant After Work (left), Matti Sumari, detail of  __Whose head has the noseyest ears?__ (2026), anodized aluminium, SIC, Helsinki.\n\nWorker Ant After Work, Matti Sumari,  __Posh neighbour__ (2026), anodized aluminium, SIC, Helsinki. Photo: SIC ****SIC, Helsinki**** : __Worker Ant After Work__ , ****Matti Sumari**** , Unemployed cabbage head (2026) 1990’s street lights from Photo: SIC\n\nIdentity has long been bound to occupation; we are defined by what we do. Today, perhaps especially within the contemporary arts field, freelancing might as well be synonymous to being permanently unemployed. We move from workplace to workplace and spend our leisure chasing billable hours.\n\nOur identities might as well lay in a fiction of work and the worker; Frankenstein’s monster-like PDF-parchment(d oom-)scrolls of CVs, portfolios,personal letters, application letters, short contracts, project descriptions, declarations ofintent...\n\nIn the exhibition _Worker Ant After Work_ , we encounter depressed, freelancing and unemployed lampposts, standing with their posture broken, hunchbacked through day and night. A cocktail table resembles solar panels made of cabbage. When sliced open, the cabbage evokes x-ray images of brains.\n\nWorker Ant After Work, Matti Sumari, installation view, SIC, Helsinki, 2026. Photo: SIC Worker Ant After Work, Matti Sumari, installation view, SIC, Helsinki, 2026. Photo: SICWorker Ant After Work, Matti Sumari,  __Unemployed cabbage head__ (2026), 1990’s street lights from a Malmö suburb, anodized aluminium, SIC, Helsinki. Photo: SIC\n\nScattered throughout the exhibition space lie apple cores and hollowed cabbage heads, as if nonchalantly tossed over the shoulder, an everyday provocation. The bite marks on an apple are brutal and visceral, pulling the most classical and pure symbol into mundane reality.\n\nArtist Matti Sumari works in a defunct ketchup factory on the outskirts of Malmö, apost-industrial landscape where materials are sourced from a landfill just below the studio.\n\nThe materials gathered are most often, in their prior functions, already involuntary social sculptures. Sumari gathers, alters and reinforces their purpose through homemade versions of industrial processes.\n\nWorker Ant After Work, Matti Sumari, installation view, SIC, Helsinki, 2026. Helsinki Photo + Credits by SIC\n\nWorker Ant After Work, Matti Sumari, installation view, SIC, Helsinki, 2026. Photo: SIC\n\nWorker Ant After Work, Matti Sumari, detail, SIC, Helsinki, 2026. Photo: SIC\n\nFound aluminium is cast into sculptures of everyday supplies, placed in an electrified acid bath and boiled in a vat, which have dyed them red and green. Thisresource-conscious refinement process recurs in multiple forms associated with Sumari’spractice: the fermented cucumber, the cabbage shredded into sauerkraut, the pretzel boiled in lye––somewhat dull, everyday symbols that reach beyond the present.\n\nAs for the ears… they have started moonlighting as freelance lampposts, clocking billable hours while debating the ethics of industrial anodizing with the apple cores.\n\n_Sophia Persson_\n\n* * *\n\nInstagram of Sic Helsinki\nSophia Persson on Instagram \nMatti Sumari on Instagram\n\n**About Catapult**\n\nThis is an artist interview published by Catapult — an independent editorial platform for contemporary art, based in Vienna. We publish exhibition reviews, artist features, interviews, and critical context, with a focus on emerging and mid-career practices from Europe and beyond.\ncatapult.art\n\nWant to be featured? Submit your work →\n\n* * *\n\n## Related Readings",
  "title": "Matti Sumari at SIC Helsinki with Worker Ant After Work. Text by Sophia Person",
  "updatedAt": "2026-04-09T07:51:16.147Z"
}