Ksenia Voy Kheninen (b. 1990) is a Helsinki-based visual artist working primarily with sculpture. Her practice blends techniques developed over years of experimentation into a tactile and poetic visual language. Her sculptures combine clay, textiles, found objects, and text, occasionally incorporating drawing.
Her perspective is shaped by her background as an Inkeri-Karelian immigrant, as well as by her neurodivergence and queerness; those experiences inform her reflection on belonging and exclusion in Finnish society. Raised in post-Soviet 1990s Russian Karelia until the age of 14, she immigrated to Helsinki with her family, where she lived and studied until 2015 before moving to the Netherlands for her education. She returned to Finland in 2020.

Kheninen was trained in textiles and design and has worked intensively with ceramics for the past five years. She has presented her work in exhibitions across Finland and in the Netherlands.

This series of sculptures is built around old black-and-white childhood photographs transformed into personal altars.

These works reflect the difficult experience of growing up in the shadow of the recently fallen Soviet Union - the 1990s, a transitional period between two totalitarian eras in Russian history.

A moment unlike any before or after: a time before modern technology, yet already nearing the fading of traditional media. Post-Soviet 1990s Russia was a brief interlude of chaotic bloom: a pop-cultural boom and a fleeting moment of freedom of speech, a few gasps of intoxicating fresh air in a long history of censorship. However, it was also a time of deep inequality as the early “wild west” of capitalism entwined with organized crime. This strange era shaped many lost people and free children, roaming unsupervised, detached from the grip of screens, slipping through the gaps of adult exhaustion and distraction.

Growing up as a noticeably neurodivergent child in these conditions gave the artist a distinct view of this reality. She witnessed an unprecedented cultural openness colliding with patriarchal, hierarchical, and totalitarian traditions of behavioral norms and education, amplified in the societal treatment of a queer and noticeably neurodiverse child.

These works carry the weight of these memories. The sculptures talk about transition, lost voices, marginalization, and both generational and individual trauma. Using a soft, feminine visual language, the artist embellishes childhood photographs through her technique of ritualistic collage—an ikebana-like approach. With that, the raw edges of complicated memories are offered tenderness and understanding that was once scarce. The results are altars to complicated love, familiar structures, and generational trauma.

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Website: https://kseniavoy.art/