Océane Bruel & Dylan Ray Arnold at Lämpimästi: Swallowed Rooms.

There’s a peculiar sensation that arises only in certain moments: when you enter a room that doesn’t belong to you, but feels eerily familiar. A spoon left askew, light catching on a glossy surface, the muffled pulse of a pipe behind the wall. Georges Perec wrote that to live is to move from one space to another, trying your best not to bump into the walls. Anne Carson, more oblique, speaks of something inside the body trying to get out, you feel it, she says, when you stand between two mirrors. Somewhere between these two utterances, between architecture and intimacy, Swallowed Rooms, the exhibition by Océane Bruel and dylan ray arnold at Lämpimästi, quietly unfolds.

Even the title suggests digestion rather than logic. Swallowed rooms, ingested, absorbed, metabolized, exist both within and outside of us, psychological and architectural at once. As I move through the space, I feel my gaze being slowly pulled in. There’s no clear focal point, only a constellation of small presences, like a fridge door collage of magnets, post-it notes, ticket stubs, and faded photographs. Held together not by logic, but by an emotional sense of order.

The exhibition opens in thick silence, interrupted only by materials that seem to emit invisible heat. The lighting doesn’t guide you, it hovers. There’s no prescribed route, and this lack of direction feels intentional. One is free to drift. The works don’t demand attention, they invite proximity. They are porous objects, whispering memories you didn’t know you’d stored. One shape coils into itself protectively, another appears to sweat, while a third glows with the dim hum of a bedside bulb. In this suspended atmosphere, objects don’t present as sculptures, but as presences.

Océane Bruel handles matter like someone touching something fragile: her forms are supple, often close to liquid, as if space itself had melted into emotion. Her materials suggest vulnerability, but also insistence, like habits that settle deep into muscle. dylan ray arnold builds micro-domestic landscapes that feel like aftermaths of emotional weather: wilted fabrics, exhaled structures, plastic holding the trace of a body long gone. Both artists work through accumulation and transformation—a process that’s part digestive, part archaeological. They chew up the everyday, spit it back as atmosphere.

The show, a follow-up to Water under the fridge (2024), marks the first time Bruel and arnold present their individual practices side by side in Finland. After years of working as Touristes Tristes, this shift from collaboration to coexistence introduces a productive tension. The echo of the other remains, quietly humming, never overpowering.

At the end of the visit, my eyes catch on a near-invisible detail: a small object wedged between wall and floor. It might be a piece of broken plastic, or part of a toy. Whatever it is, it’s speaking. Swallowed Rooms doesn’t shout, doesn’t explain, it lingers, like steam after a hot shower. This is a show to move through slowly, letting the walls flex and breathe around you, for once, with no fear of bumping into them.

Fw.