The artist Mats Bergsmeden’s beautiful landscape pictures have a grim underside: every photograph is of a place where someone has lost their life in their struggle to get into the EU illegally.

Bergsmeden has followed the outlines of Europe, which are traced by a river running between Europe and what remains outside of it. He has photographed geographical locations in the European Union, but to illegal immigrants they look like the frontiers of a single “Fortress Europe”. In his project, begun in 2004, Bergsmeden has wanted to imitate 19th-century landscape paintings, and hence to refer the ideas of enlightenment, freedom and solidarity of that era.

This is Mats Bergsmeden’s first solo exhibition in Finland.