Frame Contemporary Art Finland in collaboration with the Curatorial Program for Research (CPR) and HIAP Helsinki International Artist Programme present an event on contemporary curatorial practices with presentations by eight international contemporary art curators visiting Helsinki.
The event allows insight into the curators’ current projects from around the world, while shedding light on the wide range of curatorial approaches operating in the field of contemporary art today. The curators presenting their curatorial practice are Paulina Ascencio, Irene Campolmi, Marten Esko, Alessandro Facente, Siân McIntyre, Vanina Saracino, Lea Vene and Nina Wöhlk.
The event takes place at the Design Museum, Seminar room (Korkeavuorenkatu 23, Helsinki) on Friday 24 August from 10 am to 12 noon, and it’s moderated by Frame’s Head of Programme Jussi Koitela. The event is open for all and it’s held in English. No registration needed. Welcome!
About the The Curatorial Program for Research
The Curatorial Program for Research curators were selected to participate in the CPR research program Dimming the Northern Lights. The program focuses on how social integration stands for the act of incorporating individuals from different groups into a society as equals, while behavioral integration is when an individual stands in harmony with the environment.
The participants visit Reykjavik, Tórshavn, Tromsø, Boden, Luleå, Hyrynsalmi, and Helsinki getting to know the local scenes, artists and institutions, and carrying out on-site research. Local partners in Helsinki are HIAP – Helsinki International Artist Programme and Frame Contemporary Art Finland.
CPR offers fully-funded research programs and continuous elevating platforms and creates a socially-conscious network of emerging curators that connect with art scenes in burgeoning cities around the globe.
Participating curators
Paulina Ascencio is an independent curator and researcher based in Mexico. A philosophy and social sciences graduate, her research focuses on art and politics, developing a thesis on democratization of the aesthetic experience and horizontal curatorial models. Moreover, she is interested in ecology and environmental issues, currently researching artificial light as a phenomenon, through the relationship between writer’s block and the global energy crisis.
Irene Campolmi is a Copenhagen-based curator, currently working on exhibitions that explore notions such as ecology, ethics, postcolonialism, queerism and feminism. She is now working on upcoming institutional shows for 2019, including a solo show by Jesper Just at Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen and a solo presentation of Basim Magdy at MAAT. In 2018, She has curated two collective shows: Re-Routing Nature at SixtyEight Art Institute (Copenhagen) which looked at the notion of ecology in a world increasingly ruled by technology; and #whatif at Kunsthal Charlottenborg (Copenhagen), which reflected on radical socio-political projects of our contemporary society.
Campolmi has curated two editions of the Code Art Fair artistic program: Art Reacts (2017), which opened a discussion on how artistic and curatorial practice reacts to socio-political events proposing new ways to look at and experience the world; and Performing Identities (2018) that reflects on the body as a territory to define political identity.
Marten Esko is one of the organisers of EKKM (Contemporary Art Museum of Estonia) in Tallinn. EKKM is a self-established non-profit initiative, that situates itself somewhere between official state-run institutions and artist-run-do-it-yourself venues. It is an unconventional concept of a contemporary art museum that works towards producing, exhibiting, collecting and popularizing local and international contemporary art while altering the prevailing working methods of established art institutions. It is a tool of self-establishment for younger generation artists, curators and art students. EKKM was founded by Anders Härm, Elin Kard, Neeme Külm and Marco Laimre. Since 2016 it is run by Marten Esko and Johannes Säre who joined the team in 2011.
Alessandro Facente (Italy, b. 1982) is an art critic and independent curator based in New York. He holds an M.A. in Art History and Contemporary Art from La Sapienza University in Rome. His research focuses on the crossover and interplay of art criticism and curating by following the artist’s practice closely. He is shaping this mechanism of artist-curator dynamic through a concept that he refers to as ‘curaticism’. Different all the time in solutions and arrangement, ‘curaticism’ is a curatorial theory founded by himself in 2013 that has the goal of ‘curatorially’ identify the political and social position that the artist’s practice occupies within the current time, and to ‘critically’ investigate how the artwork’s visuality makes the piece to be politically and socially questionable. He currently serves as a Curator at Artists Alliance Inc., an artist and curator-centered non-profit organization based in the Lower East Side, New York. Facente has curated solo, group exhibitions and talks in non-profit spaces, foundations, and galleries, including NARS Foundation, Italian Institute of Culture, Residency Unlimited in New York, TranzitDisplay in Prague, HIAP in Helsinki and Ateliê397 in São Paulo. His articles, interviews, and essays have appeared in art magazines such as Artribune, DROME magazine, TemporaryArtReview, and DOMUS, as well as in exhibition catalogues for major museums including MADRE in Naples and GAMEC in Bergamo.
Vanina Saracino is an independent curator and film programmer currently based in Berlin. She is the co-founder of OLHO, an international curatorial project about contemporary art and cinema initiated in 2015 in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, also shown at the Teatrino di Palazzo Grassi (Venice, 2017). Since 2013, she has curated monthly selections of artists’ films on the experimental channel ikonoTV, being also in charge of collaborations and projects with museums and institutions worldwide. With ikonoTV, in 2015, she initiated Art Speaks Out, a yearly exhibition project on the environment and climate change, also shown at the Istanbul Modern Museum (2015) and within the UN Climate Change Conference (Marrakech, 2016).
Siân McIntyre is Sydney based curator and artist. Founding director of The Paper Mill space in 2010–2012, was board member of Runway Experimental Art Magazine from 2015–2017 and has been Director of Verge Gallery since 2014. Siân’s research, curatorial and fine art practice is rooted in formal and social archives, curating exhibitions that act as an opportunity to engage with histories and lived experience through a combination of exhibition and public programming. She specialises in creating spaces where viewers can explore and engage with ideas, experiences, and sometimes difficult or confronting subject matter in alternative ways.
Lea Vene is an art historian and cultural anthropologist. In her research in the field of visual art and anthropology, Vene constantly rethinks the role of visual media in translating elements of culture and everyday life through documentary film and photography.For example, she examines image/visual ethics, self-reflexive practices in film making, sensory ethnography, the politics of representation, the relationship between “us” and “them,” advocacy in visual research, participatory and community art practices, and the negotiation of the marginal positions in the visual research. Vene works as a curator in the gallery Miroslav Kraljević. She’s one of the organizers of ETNOFILM (Ethnographic Film Festival) and curator at ORGAN VIDA – International photography festival. She is an active member of the association grey)(area, a space for contemporary and media art. She is also a teaching assistant at Faculty of Textile Technology in Zagreb.
Nina Wöhlk is a curator, writer and researcher specialising in site-responsive and performative practices. Connecting fields of knowledge she is currently researching performative somatic practices in contemporary art and its relation to traumas of inter-generational experience. Her most recent exhibition Khфra – on arcades unfolded five contemporary artists artistic research conducted through a year of field research and included live tableaux’s, an audio guide, installations to performance and sound art.Apart from independent projects she is the curator of Læsø Kunsthals programme for 2016–2018 with exhibitions by Per Kirkeby, Jørgen Haugen Sørensen and Asger Jorn, as well as she has co- curated La Folla / The Crowd at Museo Dei Bozzetti and Sejerø Festivals art programme for 2012–2014.
Wöhlk works as art consultant on public art commissions and as editor and writer at large. She has been assistant curator at Overgaden – Institute of Contemporary Art and research assistant for the artist group Superflex. She holds a BA in Art History at Aarhus University and a MA in Modern Culture and Cultural Communication from the University of Copenhagen.