The chicken (Gallus gallus domesticus) is the most common bird in the world, and it is estimated that there are 30 billion of them. Yet we don’t see them very often. Most chickens spend their short lives in confined, artificially lit plants; they never meet their mother hens, and they are bred to be so heavy that their bodies cannot support them. Chickens are intelligent animals that, when kept in suitable conditions, show affection, feel happy and frustrated, understand time and communicate with each other. The video work Guests of Honor (2024) shows chickens arriving at a dinner table set for them. The work attempts to show this species, usually seen as production animals, as equal to humans and questions the ways in which farm animals are treated. In a world where chickens are classified as products rather than individual animals, it may be considered radical to see them as beautiful. The video work Guests of Honor has been shown at several festivals, such as Leiden Shorts in Holland, the Minikino Film Week in Indonesia, Kassel Dokfest in Germany and in Sweden at both Uppsala Kortfilmfestival and Nordisk Panorama Market in Malmö. The installation version of the work will be shown for the first time at the Galleria Heino exhibition. - Paula Lehtonen Paula Lehtonen (b. 1983) is a media artist whose works deal with environmental issues and humans’ relationship with nature in a time that is overshadowed by an ecological disaster. For Lehtonen, art is a way to deal with the anxiety caused by the state of our planet’s nature and the unsustainability of our modern lifestyle. It is also a way to come up with new perspectives and build a reality that is more suitable for different forms of life. Guests of Honor is the second part in Lehtonen’s animal trilogy. The first part of the trilogy, Morrison & Friends (2021), which depicts communication between Morrison the alpaca and humans, was shown at Galleria Heino in autumn 2021 and was last exhibited at the Helsinki Art Museum HAM exhibition Who is an Animal? (17 May–18 August 2024). The work is part of the collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma. The third part of the trilogy, with the working title "The Pig Bliss", follows piglets and the people who care for them and is due to be completed in 2025.
The exhibition has been supported by Arts Promotion Centre Finland and the Finnish Cultural Foundation. | 
Guests of Honor, 2024
