Espoo's museum of modern art has given its long-running collection display a fresh start. Alien in Me, which opened on 23 October 2026, rehangs the Saastamoinen Foundation Art Collection as a single themed presentation, and it is scheduled to run for several years, through to the start of 2030. The show forms part of EMMA's 20th anniversary programme and marks twenty years of working with the foundation, one of the museum's founding partners.

The exhibition takes estrangement as its subject. Rather than treating feeling like an outsider as a problem to be solved, the hang presents it as a way of seeing the world differently. Works explore displacement and migration, the shift from one place or culture to another, and the sense that something familiar can suddenly feel strange. Boundaries that once looked fixed, between self and other, human and machine, or one gender identity and another, are shown as fluid and connected instead.

More than 50 artists appear in the selection, mixing recent acquisitions with older collection works, some of them on public view for the first time. The roster spans Finnish and international names, including Louise Bourgeois, Cindy Sherman, Isaac Julien, Eija-Liisa Ahtila, Peter Hujar, Nnena Kalu, Jenna Sutela and Gillian Wearing. The breadth is deliberate: alienation is approached through photography, sculpture, video and installation alike, so the same question echoes across very different materials and generations.

The presentation was put together by EMMA director Krist Gruijthuijsen, with research from Shohreh Shakoory, the first EMMA-Saastamoinen curatorial fellow, who also wrote an accompanying essay. For a museum marking its twentieth year, the show doubles as a statement about what a collection is for: not a fixed record of taste, but a set of relationships that can be rearranged to ask new questions about belonging, distance and the people and places around us.