Hertta Kiiski: Fever Dream

NOON Projects is honored to present Fever Dream by Finnish artist Hertta Kiiski. In her second exhibition with the gallery in Los Angeles, Kiiski presents a constellation of sculptural works, photographic assemblages, and the premiere of two new films. The installation evokes a gentle collapse—quiet, recursive, and strangely tender. It unfolds as a soft hallucination, tracing the slow erosion of form, the porous boundaries between species, and the unexpected warmth found at the end of things. Fever Dream moves like a lucid dream—nonlinear, looping, and without hierarchy—where softness replaces spectacle at the edge of collapse.

At the core of the exhibition, two new video works unfold Kiiski’s ongoing inquiry into ecological poetics, and the entangled mythologies of embodiment and environment. Nox Rosae is atmospheric and sensorially charged. Structured at 17 minutes—the average duration of a REM sleep cycle—the film resists conventional narrative, offering instead a drifting, affective experience that mimics the fluidity and disorientation of dreaming. Created collaboratively by Hertta Kiiski and visual artist Janne Punkari, the work builds on their shared interest in poetic form, symbolic objects, and spatial ambiguity. At its center is a rose, one of humanity’s most universal metaphors for love and natural beauty—yet also a symbol of human control: cultivated, hybridized, and rigorously manicured. In the film, a mummified tin rose becomes an unlikely protagonist, moving through textured spaces where material and meaning blur. The sound, composed by Anniina Saksa, acts as the film’s ambient nervous system—her audio-textures framing silence as much as sound, teasing memory, and heightening sensation.

In Not not a metaphor, Kiiski doesn’t dramatize collapse but tunes into its frequencies. The film unfolds like a long exhale—soft, slow, and saturated with the minor chords of grief, wonder, absurdity, and care. Its narrator, a carrion crow—part oracle, part sidewalk prophet—riffs: “You want salvation, but also takeout. You want tenderness, but flinch at the bite. You want to save the dolphins, but you still fly. And yet. You love.”

What do we do with ourselves now that we are no longer at the center?

Filmed across zoos, aquariums, ancient ruins, and distribution centers, a monkey sits still—indifferent and alert. The artist’s daughters, long-time collaborators, appear as jesters without an audience, drifting through a glowing warehouse. Kiiski offers neither symbols nor solutions but casts out echoes suspended in a fluid, flickering ecosystem.

Surrounding the films, Kiiski’s sculptures are made from found, used, and inherited materials—ceramic dolphins, home decor, shoelaces, and wilted painted flowers—objects pre-charged with the residue of personal histories, consumer cycles, and cultural kitsch. Rather than purify or explain, Kiiski allows these materials to remain in their in-betweenness: awkward, sentimental, and animate. The works explore an aesthetic that sits at the crossroads of crumbling modern civilization and its detritus. Kiiski’s readymades become emblematic: Maslow's triangle, the mug as a vessel of comfort, the dolphin as a symbol of intelligence, play, and captivity. On the back wall are two photographic assemblages, presented in ultramarine blue frames. Created with a printed passe-partout, each contains four images arranged like holiday snapshots, hung on the wall like a family heirloom.
Fever Dream does not present any manifestos; instead, it creates a space—and a suggestion—to pay close attention to the contradictions we live inside. Kiiski presents a landscape shaped by entropy: the slow undoing of categories, systems, and species. Civilization doesn’t end with drama. It frays. It leaks. It dreams.