In our current exhibition ‘The Space Between’, Helsinki-based artist duo Anna Knappe & Amir Jan explore ‘Future Conditional’, a two-channel video installation piece regarding migration of an Afghan family to Finland, family time and the conditions under which a future can be imagined. The work sets parents’ future-oriented wishes alongside children’s present-tense thoughts, creating a split between adult projection and the everyday present of the child.
Filmed with Afghan families in Finland, the installation moves between winter playgrounds and domestic interiors. Parents speak in public outdoor spaces associated with children, visibly exposed to cold and snow. Children appear indoors, surrounded by the warmth, objects, and rhythms of everyday life. The contrast gives the work a physical structure: the future is spoken from a place of exposure, while the present unfolds inside domestic space.
The families’ lives are shaped by residence permits, employment contracts, family ties, and shifting migration categories. These conditions enter the work through speech, gesture, place, weather, and the pressure placed on the future. Future Conditional treats the family image as a site where care, uncertainty, expectation, and continuity are held together.
‘The Space Between’ exhibits at Centrala until Saturday 25th July, 2026.
About Anna Knappe & Amir Jan:
Anna Knappe (Finland) and Amir Jan (Afghanistan) are a Helsinki-based artist duo who have collaborated since 2010. They produce cinematic works, media installations and photographic works that combine methods from visual anthropology with poetic and speculative strategies. Their research-oriented practice is grounded in long-term collaboration with Afghan diaspora communities.
Across essay films and installations, their work returns to the word Mohajer, used by Afghans to name migrancy beyond the limits of official refugee and migrant categories. They address migrancy as an ongoing condition rather than a transitional phase, and consider how camps and border regimes shape the material and psychological terms of everyday life. They construct layered narratives where testimony, place and mediated images remain in tension, making visible what documentation cannot fully carry.
Their work has been presented in international exhibitions and screenings across Europe, Canada, Bangladesh and India.