Anette Østerby

Anette Østerby, art historian and curator will be visiting Finland in November 2025 to conduct research on the development of artistic resilience within art organisations. The project is done in collaboration with three Nordic art organisations, including Frame Contemporary Art Finland, Bildkonst Sverige, and Foreningen af Kunsthaller i Danmark.  

Recent societal and political challenges in the Nordic Countries, like the Covid pandemic, funding cuts in culture, and political forces challenging the freedom of arts, have created a need for mapping out new organisational strategies in the Nordic visual arts organisations.

This initiative, which started over the summer of 2025, seeks to explore and present inspiring strategies of how resilience and innovation have been developed among Nordic visual arts organisations within the current landscape. The report will present a few organisations from each country, focusing on funding models, organisational structures and case to case examples. For Anette’s research in Finland she has chosen to focus her investigation on KOHTA, KUBU and IHME. 

Anette has worked as a freelance curator at Louisiana, chief curator at ARKEN, and head of Visual Arts Center in the Danish Agency for Culture and Palaces. She was responsible for the Danish Arts Foundation and the Danish Pavillon in Venice from 2004-2022 and is a board member at Kunsthal 44Møen as well as the Ferlov Mancoba Foundation. 

The research she conducts will be published as an online report in early 2026, accompanied by a podcast series with interviews of different visual art organisations. 

This new collaboration also articulates the value and need for tightening Nordic relationships in the art field, by sharing knowledge and continuing to strengthen the value of a free and democratic cultural landscape, a common aim amongst the Nordics. 

The project is supported by the Nordic Culture Fund.