Maija Annikki Savolainen’s Taifun & Trinita exhibition, opening on October 24, 2026, at the Rauma Art Museum, explores women’s sailing culture
Uutinen
On Saturday, October 24, 2026, the Rauma Art Museum will open Maija Annikki Savolainen’s “Taifun & Trinita” exhibition, which explores the history, present, and future of women’s sailing culture. On opening day, the exhibition’s themes will be explored in greater depth during a panel discussion and a concert. The exhibition will be on view at the Art Museum (Kuninkaankatu 37) through April 4, 2027.
– Seafaring and sailing have traditionally been a male-dominated world, where women’s participation has received little attention and has often gone undocumented. The exhibition’s title is borrowed from two Hai-class racing boats registered in women’s names in the 1930s: Taifun, which refers to a typhoon, and Trinita, meaning the Holy Trinity. These boats and their names served as the inspiration for the exhibition, explains Maija Annikki Savolainen.
On the opening Saturday, October 24, a panel discussion on the exhibition’s themes will be held at 2:00 p.m., followed by a “seaweed concert” by the Flagellate collective at 4:00 p.m. The seaweed concert is a musical performance combining microalgae, horns made from seaweed, and traditional Finnish and Karelian horns and pipes. The panel discussion will focus on the history of women sailors and women’s agency on the margins of sailing culture. Participants in the discussion include the exhibition’s artist, Maija Annikki Savolainen; Sonja Repetti, an algae researcher at the University of Helsinki; Anna Meronen, former director of the Rauma Maritime Museum; and Anja Andersson, one of the first female Sea Scouts in Rauma.
In the exhibition, Savolainen’s works engage in a dialogue with archival photographs from the collections of the Rauma Maritime Museum and the Rauma-based Tilt Flikat girls’ Sea Scout group. The works offer insights into the relationship between women sailors and the sea and explore what the future of sailing might look like as the environment changes.
Maija Annikki Savolainen, a photographic artist and doctoral researcher born in Turku in 1980, combines in her work women’s sailing culture with concerns about the blue-green algae problem in the Baltic Sea. The book published alongside the exhibition, *Phytopia* (Khaos Publishing, 2026), brings together Savolainen’s photographs of women sailors from 2013 to 2026. In the book, the paths of the sailors and the blue-green algae intersect in a unique way.
“Algae-filled water blocks my view, so I use the soles of my feet to feel the keel or the hull. My body is part of the boat—or the boat is part of me, of us, of our bodies.” Through the boat and in harmony with it, we feel the movements of the sea, the world beneath the surface, and the wind blowing above us,” Savolainen describes the coexistence of sailors and blue-green algae in her publication.
