Rhythm Without End, 2021 Design Museum Helsinki gelatin silver prints (photograms); Aino Aalto, Bolgeblick, 1932, pressed glass, manufactured by Iittala. An Index of Infinite Rotation, 2019-20, images from Design Museum Helsinki’s image archive, alongside the artist’s photographs of material in the archive and collection. Photos: Paavo Lehtonen

Rhythm Without End draws on the collection of the Design Museum, using ideas of circulation, rhythm and repetition, to explore how objects might simultaneously inhabit our world and be a lens from which to view it. Circularity is proposed as an embedded condition of design. The circular, as formal and figurative concept, becomes evident across disciplines and encountered, in its multiplicity, within the holdings of the Museum. Spheres, cylinders, discs and rings. Objects revolving, spinning; made through rotation, formed on wheels, rolled or turned. Shapes that radiate and spiral. The installation follows this logic through a deep focus on a single design – Aino Aalto’s 1932 Bölgeblick plate. The plate’s design is influenced by concentric ripples that form on still water when disturbed. Produced in a centrifuge, its design echoes its making and the way liquid glass behaves when subjected to high-speed revolution and gravitational force. The photograms continue an engagement with circularity, translating the object into an image — its form dissolved and reconstituted as a photographic negative, an inversion of itself. Installed within a four-metre-long vitrine mirroring the dimensions of the artist’s own studio table, the surface of research enters the gallery, transforming the site of making into one where process is visible and contingent.