Gathering for Rehearsing Hospitalities Spring 2021

Online discussions are held at zoom in English and captioned in English, please register here: https://forms.gle/rvHodEN66iWXAv14A

19 April – 16 May (Thursdays only or by appointment) 

Merpersons 

Onsite installation and film screening of Merpersons (7 mins)

Museum of Impossible Forms, Helsinki (Details on visiting the venue below)

Burnout Mermaids (Iida Nissinen & Melanie Orenius), Danai Anagnostou and Marianne Savallampi.

Hosted by Museum of Impossible Forms

Merpersons is an installation that consists of video, photography and text. It focuses on documenting a group taking part in a merpersoning workshop. Merpersoning is a take on mermaiding, aimed particularly at those who cannot, or will not, fit the stereotypical notions of mermaids, be it due to oppressive body or gender norms, or to westernised understandings of mythology in relation to water. Merpersoning is refusal of cis-sexism, restrictive body norms, gendered swimming spaces, as well as heterosexist mythology and popular culture.

Merpersons installation and film is a collaborative work produced by the Museum of Impossible Forms presented at m{if} project space in Kontula, Helsinki. 

Access: Details on visiting the venue are below. The film merpersons (7 mins) is captioned. Language: English. Exhibition texts are available in Finnish and English.The film is also accessible from www.museumofimpossibleforms.com starting from 19 April. 

Visiting Museum of Impossible Forms: 

Open Thursdays from 12 noon to 5 pm or by appointment. To book send an email to: museumofimpossibleforms@gmail.com
/or fill a form at: www.museumofimpossibleforms.com

Visiting Address: Museum of Impossible Forms, Keinulaudankuja 4 E, 00940, Helsinki.

Access: Museum of Impossible Forms is located just a short distance from the Kontula metro station, on the 2nd floor of the Kontula mall.

Accessibility information: Museum of Impossible Forms is accessible by lift with thresholds up to 4cm on the way. The toilet has no thresholds but is not spacious enough to meet accessibility standards. Nearest accessible toilet is located at Kontula metro station.

Capacity: Following Covid-19 health and safety requirements for safe distancing entrance to the installation will be limited to a maximum of four visitors at a time. Please be prepared for the possibility of having to wait, if visiting without an appointment. We ask that visitors wear masks and follow hand hygiene recommendations. Toilets and other facilities will still be available. 

For more information contact: https://www.museumofimpossibleforms.org/contact

Wednesday 21 April, 4–7 pm (EEST)

Merpersons: Disability, accessibility, gender and art
Online conversation
Zoom: Register here
(additionally streamed on Frame’s Youtube channel and available to watch until end of May)
Burnout Mermaids (Iida Nissinen & Melanie Orenius), Danai Anagnostou & Marianne Savallampi, Pekka Koskinen & Reetta Mietola and Tuuli Malla & Rag Elnyg.

Hosted by Museum of Impossible Forms

Museum of Impossible Forms (m{if}) invites guests and audiences to discuss topics surrounding merpersoning, disability, accessibility, gender and art. The event features a screening of the film Merpersons exhibited in an installation at m{if}, which focuses on gender and accessibility in relation to swimming and dominant mermaid mythologies. In addition to presenting the project, invited speakers include researchers on disability, as well as artists who have been working on the topics surrounding water and mermaid mythology.

Access: Online event. Presentations are a mixture of pre-recorded live talks and include captioning. Language: English. The film Merpersons (7mins) is in English with English subtitles.

Programme Details:

4–5pm: Presenting Merpersons film (7 min) & installation
Burnout Mermaids (Iida Nissinen & Melanie Orenius), Danai Anagnostou & Marianne Savallampi

Screening and conversation of the film produced in part of the Merpersons 

installation. The Merpersons project team will be presenting the concept and thoughts behind the film. Artist duo Iida Nissinen and Melanie Orenius aka Burnout Mermaids talk about their artistic practice in relation to mermaiding, whereas director Marianne Savallampi and production assistant Danai Anagnostou share their experiences on the film production.

5–6 pm: What counts as disability activism?
Pekka Koskinen & Reetta Mietola

This presentation is based on a recently started research project by the research group Performing disability activism: Acts and stories of activism and the Finnish disability movement funded by the Kone Foundation. Reetta Mietola, the project leader, is a university researcher at the University of Helsinki. Pekka Koskinen is a PhD student at the University of Helsinki.

6.15–7 pm: Water as artistic practice

Panel discussion with Marianne Savallampi, Tuuli Malla & Rag Elnyg

Curator Marianne Savallampi and artists Tuuli Malla and Rag Elnyg discuss their relationship with water as an inspiration for their work and practice. Can art be a way to bring forth compassion and awareness towards the environment? How can rethinking water mythologies be a starting point for social criticism?

Wednesday 5 May, 3–6pm (EEST)

Knowing with(in) the limits

Online conversation  

Zoom: Register here
(additionally streamed on Frame’s Youtube channel and available to watch until end of May)
Jessie Bullivant & Jemina Lindholm, Nora Heidorn and Jenni-Juulia Wallinheimo-Heimonen

Hosted by Frame Contemporary Art Finland

This online event brings together artists and curators that Frame has been in close dialogue with over the last year and whose work, in different ways, contributes to informing and widening perspectives on access. Knowing with(in) the limits considers which knowledges emerge from knowing individual and collective limits, specifically in regards to communication and entering into cultural spaces. Through the presentations and discussions the speakers share how working with situated bodily and social limits affects the art and culture being produced.

This afternoon of dialogues mixes together pre-recorded presentations, performative and installation work, and live in-conversation, with the aim to engage a range of audiences. We welcome you to follow the programme through or drop in and out. Breaks scheduled each hour.  

Access: Online event. The first two presentations are pre-recorded and include captions.The conversation is live with live captioning. Language: English.

Programme details:

3–3.15pm: Event introduction 

3.15–3.55pm: Access Riders, Jessie Bullivant and Jemina Lindholm, pre-recorded talk 

3.55–4.05pm: Break 

4.05–4.45pm: Illusion of Choice, Jenni-Juulia Wallinheimo-Heimonen pre-recorded talk 

4.45–4.55pm: Break 

4.55–5.35pm: Live conversation with Jessie Bullivant, Nora Heidorn, Jemina Lindholm, & Jenni-Juulia Wallinheimo-Heimonen 

5.35–5.55pm: open questions audience 

5.55–6.00pm: event round up and notes on upcoming programme

Artists Jessie Bullivant and Jemina Lindholm launch their Access Riders publication, the outcome of a collaborative project in which they invited contributors to the 2020-21 Rehearsing Hospitalities programme to write their own access riders. “An access rider is a document that can work as a starting point for a conversation about the accessibility of a certain situation between the inviter and invitee” state Bullivant and Lindholm, “An access rider is written by an individual, and can be shared when one is invited to take part in a project. It can include needs, wants, limits and boundaries”.

Artist Jenni-Juulia Wallinheimo-Heimonen presents Illusion of Choice, a three-part speech performance that deals with accessibility from the point of view of communication. In each act she reflects on previous works including: He could never say too much like others, an installation based on interviews and a short film about a musician living with a stutter; and Otherwise you lose street credibility, a documentary featuring an 83-year-old activist with cerebral palsy, living with a severe speech impairment. In the context of self-expression and accessibility, she brings attention to the consequences of the pandemic for disability culture in a world of pervasive inequality.

Following their presentations artists Jessie Bullivant, Jemina Lindholm and Jenni-Juulia Wallinheimo-Heimonen are joined by curator Nora Heidorn for an in-conversation. In this conversation, they will take some time to reflect on and discuss the artist’s presentations as well as opening up wider discussion around accessibility in the art world. What tools and practices (such as access riders) do we already have? How could these be better incorporated into working processes in the cultural field? This discussion will attempt to move between the micropolitics of individuals and collectives working for accessibility and the larger institutional structures that can be slow or even resistant to change.

Available from Wednesday 7 April 

Access Riders

Publication 

Web PDF
Print at home PDF 

Jessie Bullivant & Jemina Lindholm

Published by Frame Contemporary Art Finland

An access rider is written by an individual, and can be shared when one is invited to take part in a project or any working relationship. It can work as a starting point for a conversation between the inviter and invitee about the accessibility of a certain situation.—Bullivant and Lindholm

Access Riders is a collaborative project by artists Jessie Bullivant and Jemina Lindholm presented as a publication. Responding to their invitation to contribute to Frame’s 2020-21 Rehearsing Hospitalities programme, Bullivant and Lindholm wanted to work with questions regarding responsibilities, resources and tools when initiating conversations about access needs. 

Working within the framework of an access rider (a document outlining personal access needs and requirements) they invited eight other contributors in Frame’s 2020-21 Rehearsing Hospitalities programme to write their own access riders. The access riders compiled in the publication vary in style, length and language, and reflect a range of needs, wants, limits and boundaries. 

The Access Riders publication is both a tool and an invitation, to institutions and individuals alike, to consider initiating safer ways to open up dialogue regarding our various needs, limits, boundaries and wishes when entering into working relationships. 

Access: Access Riders is printed as a limited edition of 100 copies and is available online in two PDF formats: one is designed for printing at home and the other for reading on a screen (including the use of screen readers). Language: English with one contribution in Finnish.

Monday 10 – Monday 24 May

Silver Epoch

Audio essay in Finnish with a plain English transcription. 

Available from 10 May on Soundcloud.

Link to transcript.

Biitsi (Heidi and Kaino Wennerstrand), with comments from Gemma Medina Estupiñán.

Hosted by Frame Contemporary Art Finland

Silver Epoch (orig. Hopeakulttuuri) is an audio essay about ageing in relation to society, gender, and class. Along with research and writings from various authors, the work stems from its authors’ experiences of trying to become functional adults.

Who can afford the silver dream of beautiful ageing when your hands are full trying to live through middle-age? Is your age, like gender, something other people project on you? How can you grow old if you’ve never had the time to be young?

Access: Online audio work and written transcript. The work, commissioned last year by National Broadcasting Company (YLE) in Finnish, is now presented in plain English, with curator Gemma Medina Estupiñán‘s additional comments and an online script including hyperlinks and visual materials from Biitsi. Language of audio: Finnish. Language of transcript: English. Audio approx. 45 min long.

Monday 24 May – Sunday 6 June

Subserotic Bulge

Video artwork. 17 min.

Available to view from 24 May – 6 June here: https://vimeo.com/554198280 

We recommend listening with headphones and the volume turned up.

Flis Holland 

Hosted by Frame Contemporary Art Finland

Subserotic Bulge by artist Flis Holland is a story told on video and presented on Vimeo. 

In 2019 an iron meteorite was filed to dust, stirred into cream, and fed to 36 people. Flis’s uterus was rife with tumours soon after. Their belly swelled as a fleshy block pushed its way out at astonishing speed. From the first poke of a finger, to WebMD, to x-rays, every diagnostic tool came up short, culminating in the catastrophic failure of a magnetic resonance imaging scan. But Flis’s telling of it is rather different to the medical notes.

Accessibility information: Artwork includes captions and audio descriptions. Language: English. 17 min. 

Thursday 27 May, 3–6 pm (EEST)

Central Park Archives: Access, commons and networks of care

Online conversation

Zoom: Register here.

Online event streamed here.

Annet Dekker, Ali Akbar Mehta, Susanna Ånäs, Iida Nissinen, Minna Tarkka and guests

Hosted by m-cult

m-cult hosts an event with artists, researchers and activists to discuss notions of access within contexts of urban spaces and online resources. How to think about care, commoning and governance in these hybrid networks of social, ecological and digital? The event includes short thematic tours of the archive’s initial collections.

Accessibility information: Online event. Conversation in English, recorded interviews in Finnish, captioning in English. Thursday 27 May, 3–5.30 pm (EEST)

Programme

I Introduction to Central Park Archives – moderated by Minna Tarkka and Iida Nissinen

3:00 Welcome and introduction to the project

3:10 A tour of the Central Park Archives collections

• The Stream, The Meadow, The Flying Squirrel
• Pixels in the Park
• A view on the park’s history

3:40 A Dialogue on the commons, archives and cartography, Ali Akbar Mehta and Susanna Ånäs

4:00 Short break

II Networks of Care – moderated by Annet Dekker

4:15 Networks of Care, introduction by Annet Dekker

4:35 Commentary and discussion

5:30 End

Video and audio credits:

The interviews and photography: Matti Arponen, Tony Ekman, Maunu Häyrynen, Susanna Pitkänen, Jorma Ryske, Sanni Seppo, Minna Tarkka, Vappu Turunen and Antti Viren

Interviews, video and audio editing
Kalle Kuisma, Minna Tarkka, Tuukka Haapakorpi, Iida Nissinen

Hosted by m-cult   
m-cult hosts an event with artists, researchers and activists to discuss notions of access within contexts of urban spaces and online resources. How to think about care, commoning and governance in these hybrid networks of social, ecological and digital? Framed by the Central Park Archives installation at Maunula House, the event also includes short thematic tours of the archive’s initial collections. Hosted by Minna Tarkka / m-cult, the conversations evolve in a series of live and recorded exchanges between the participants.

Silver Epoch 

As part of Gathering for Rehearsing Hospitalities Spring 2021 Frame launches a new version of artist duo Biitsi’s audio essay Silver Epoch (orig. Hopeakulttuuri) with added comments from curator translator Gemma Medina. The work is accompanied by a plain english transcript by Celia Brightwell including visual materials from Biitsi.  

Silver Epoch on Soundcloud

Plain english transcript

Silver Epoch (orig. Hopeakulttuuri) is an audio essay about ageing in relation to society, gender, and class. Along with research and writings from various authors, the work stems from its authors’ experiences of trying to become functional adults.

In the “Silver Epoch”, artist duo Biitsi think about the future of aging in capitalist societies. Who has the energy to live a “third life”, and who will even make it? What does desire in old age look like? Whose aging are we talking about?

Biitsi is an artist duo from Helsinki, consisting of Heidi and Kaino Wennerstrand. They make art to understand their own families, tastes, privileges, and the Finnish society in which they live. Heidi is a self-taught artist, while Kaino is a sound designer. Their work has been presented in Finland at ANTI Festival, Kiasma theatre, and in international shows and events such as SixtyEight Art Institute, Copenhagen and DGTL FMNSM, Berlin. 

Access: Online audio essay and written transcript. The work was first commissioned last year by National Broadcasting Company (YLE)  as a part of an audio essay series titled Säröääniä curated by Suvi Tuuli Kataja.

Language of Audio: Finnish and English.
Language of transcript: English.
Audio approx 53 min long. 

Subserotic Bulge

Subserotic Bulge by artist Flis Holland is the second online artwork launched and commissioned by Frame as part of Gathering for Rehearsing Hospitalities Spring 2021. The work takes the form of a story, told on video and presented on Vimeo. It can be accessed on Flis Holland’s Vimeo from 24 May to 6 June. We recommend listening with headphones and the volume turned up.

In 2019 an iron meteorite was filed to dust, stirred into cream, and fed to 36 people. Flis’s uterus was rife with tumours soon after. Their belly swelled as a fleshy block pushed its way out at astonishing speed. From the first poke of a finger, to WebMD, to x-rays, every diagnostic tool came up short. But Flis’s telling of it is rather different to the medical notes.

Flis Holland is a Finnish-British ex-engineer. They tangle depression and neurodivergence with science-fiction, to try out new ways to talk about crisis. Recent works include a solo show Gravity Doesn’t Keep You Down I Do at Kosminen in Helsinki, an exposé Hypervigilant at Finnish Cultural Institute in New York, and an IGTV tour of the exhibition Gentle Gestures curated by Camille Auer at Titanik in Turku.

Access: Artwork includes captions and audio descriptions.
Language: English. 17 min.

Along with the Gathering for Rehearsing Hospitalities public programme Frame organises networking possibilities for visiting curators to meet artists, follow the programme and introduce themselves more publicly in an afternoon chat to present their recent work. Everyone is invited to join the events in May.

Read more: Lunchtime sessions with visiting curators in May

Danai Anagnostou is a Producer for Film, Media & Live Art. She is currently the Film Curator for the Museum of Impossible Forms. In 2020, she began her Doctoral Studies at Aalto University, School of Film, Television, and Scenography where she studies hybrid models for production, curation, and education in the field of filmmaking.

Biitsi is an artist duo from Helsinki, consisting of Heidi and Kaino Wennerstrand. They make art to understand their own families, tastes, privileges, and the Finnish society in which they live. Heidi is a self-taught artist, while Kaino is a sound designer.

Jessie Bullivant (they/them) is a Helsinki-based artist, writer and cultural worker originally from (so-called) Australia. They completed an MFA at the Academy of Fine Arts (Helsinki, 2020) and are currently an artist in residence at HIAP (June 2020 – August 2021). They are interested in how various institutions are embodied. They are informed by legacies of institutional critique, reproductive labour, and queer and crip discourse.

Annet Dekker is Assistant Professor Media Studies: Archival and Information Studies at the University of Amsterdam and Visiting Professor and co-director of the Centre for the Study of the Networked Image at London South Bank University. She has previously been Researcher Digital Preservation at Tate, London and core tutor at Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam and Fellow at Het Nieuwe Instituut, Rotterdam. Next to being an independent curator, she worked as web curator for SKOR (Foundation for Art and Public Domain) and curator/head of exhibitions, education and artists in residence at the Netherlands Media Art institute.

Rag Elnyg: From a bachelor in Languages to one and a master in art in 5 countries and 2 continents, I saw things many ways. A French woman’s perspective in Mexico, A transgender man’s one back in France, a Finnish performer in Riga, a male Cheetah dancer in Tallin and Violin jammer in Leipzig among others. I feel a poet is someone who produces things. Anything. Made. To be.

Nora Heidorn is a curator, researcher and lecturer undertaking a PhD at the Royal College of Art in collaboration with Birth Rites Collection in London. She also works as an Associate Lecturer at Central Saint Martins College. Her curatorial practice is led by rigorous interdisciplinary research in the intersecting fields of gender, race, health and reproduction. Recent projects include Sick and Desiring for Bergen Assembly 2019. 

Flis Holland is a Finnish-British ex-engineer. They tangle depression and neurodivergence with science-fiction, to try out new ways to talk about crisis. Recent works include a solo show Gravity Doesn’t Keep You Down I Do at Kosminen, an exposé Hypervigilant at Finnish Cultural Institute in New York, and an IGTV tour of the exhibition Gentle Gestures curated by Camille Auer at Titanik.

Jemina Lindholm (she, her/they, them) is a contemporary artist based in Helsinki. Her/their works revolve around the themes of intimacy, sickness and health and collaborative processes often taking forms of video, photography or slightly choreographed encounters. She/they love/s working collectively as togetherness provides effectiveness, radical safety and immediate feedback. At the moment her/their main field of interest is the intersection of contemporary art, sickness and crip theory. 

Tuuli Malla is a founding member of Water Bodies collective of artists, writers, researchers and performers (est 2017, Whitstable) working towards adapting to life on an inundated planet. Tuuli’s current artistic research project Fluid Bodies deals with water, empathy and imaginary journeys across an ocean, in collaboration with Alexandra Litaker.

Gemma Medina Estupiñán is an art historian, educator and writer based in Eindhoven (NL). She believes that art can be a tool for social transformation, questioning the traditional idea of art and art history. She teaches and organises exhibitions and activities that fall outside the standard artistic discourse, bringing art closer to the people and exploring other ways of being for museums and academies.

Ali Akbar Mehta is a founder member and co-Artistic Director of Museum of Impossible Forms, Helsinki, and Artistic Producer at m-cult media residency, Helsinki. He is also pursuing a Doctoral Research program at the Contemporary Art Department at Aalto University, Helsinki. Through his research-based transmedia practice, he creates immersive archives that explore collective memetic histories, narratives of memory, identity, violence, and conflict.

Reetta Mietola is a university researcher at the University of Helsinki. Pekka Koskinen is a PhD student at the University of Helsinki. They are members of the research group Performing disability activism: Acts and stories of activism and the Finnish disability movement.  

Iida Nissinen (MA) & Melanie Orenius (MA), aka Burnout Mermaids, are artists, art educators, bitches, witches, and mermaids who work with performative and participatory methods. Exhausted by the capitalist, (white) supremacist, and patriarchal idea of competitive humanity, they grow tails and shapeshift into magical, mystical, and fantasy forms. In the submerged world, they are no longer Iida and Melanie, but Wannabe Waterproof and Melancholic Meltdown. This duo is not interested in performing the heterosexist fairytale version of mermaids, but instead wants to study the complexities of their other-than-human characters. 

Jenni-Juulia Wallinheimo-Heimonen is a State Prize awarded multidisciplinary artist whose short film “Reflector of Living Will” won the Best Screenplay at Pisa Robotic Film Festival in 2018. Her work deals with disability politics, aesthetics of assistive devices and gender issues related to women with disabilities. She has facilitated social art workshops in Finland, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Estonia and China and participated in exhibitions in Finland and abroad. She is the recipient of a three year grant from Arts Promotion Center Finland for her 

project Empathy Objects 2019-2021. 

Susanna Ånäs is an artist and activist specialising in open data and cultural heritage, and exploring databases as narrative formats. She is involved in open cultural data at OpenGLAM (Open Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums), Wikimedia Finland and the international Creative Commons network.

Partner Collaborators:

The Gathering for Rehearsing Hospitalities programme is co-curated with digital culture and collaborative art agency M-cult and anti-racist and queer feminist project Museum of Impossible Forms, 

Museum of Impossible Forms (m{if}), in Kontula, Helsinki, is a culture centre founded in 2017 by a group of artists/curators/philosophers/activists/pedagogists as an antiracist and queer-feminist project. m{if} manifests itself through its multilingual libraries, an ongoing archive, and events. It is a para-museum space representing a contact zone, a space of unlearning, formulating identity constructs, norm-critical consciousness and critical thinking.

m-cult is a Helsinki-based agency which develops and promotes media art and digital culture, with a focus on cultural and social aspects of media and technology. m-cult works across the fields of media and collaborative art and open source culture; supports artists in the creation, presentation and reflection of socially engaged/ technically experimental art; brings together international networks and local communities; engages in cultural policy, documentation and archiving of media art.

Access Riders is a collaborative project by artists Jessie Bullivant and Jemina Lindholm presented as a publication. “An access rider is a document outlining personal access needs and requirements. It is written by an individual, and can be shared when one is invited to take part in a project or any working relationship. It can work as a starting point for a conversation between the inviter and invitee about the accessibility of a certain situation”, artists say.

Responding to the invitation to contribute to Frame’s Rehearsing Hospitalities programme, they invited eight other contributors to write their own access riders. The access riders compiled in the publication vary in style, length and language, and reflect a range of needs, wants, limits and boundaries.

Access Riders is printed as a limited edition of 100 copies and is available online in two PDF formats: one is designed for printing at home and the other for reading on a screen, including the use of screen readers.

Print version
Screen version