Current Focus

Frame’s public programme Rehearsing Hospitalities fosters critical discourse, pluralistic sharing and collaboration between diverse artistic practitioners in contemporary societies. 

It is a far-reaching collaborative process that nurtures the emergence of new practices and paradigms of political and cultural hospitality. It is a guiding principle for Frame to navigate contemporary challenges and to claim co-agency amid changing political, social, and cultural environments. Rehearsing Hospitalities acknowledges hospitality as an open-ended skill that needs to be constantly rehearsed. 

Rather than taking up new topics for each year and event, the programme aims to build up content by layering many points of view. These raise questions on different ways of knowing, forms of access, safety, and structural, symbolic and material re-distribution of power along with other shifts in methods and thinking required to develop more hospitable practices within the contemporary art field, and beyond.

As a departure point, the Rehearsing Hospitalities 2019 programme focused on the potential of art and cultural institutions to facilitate and mediate different ‘epistemic hospitalities’. Whilst attention to diverse ways of knowing and knowledge production remained central, the 2020 and 2021 programmes focused to expand on understandings of access, safety and security. In the 2022 edition the focus shifted to practices that deal with the redistribution of power, wealth, and resources within the art field and society at large.

Rehearsing Hospitalities 2023 revisits some of the central threads explored in the past years: ways of knowing, questions of access and security, and the hostility of hospitality. It presents practices that correspond with these matters, turning in new directions. Throughout the programme, fostering new and existing collaborations has been critical in how we explore diverse practices of hospitality with others. Building on relationships cultivated over the last four years, the final edition co-hosts a series of exhibitions, fellowships, and public programmes. The Rehearsing Hospitalities 2023 programme is curated by Yvonne Billimore and Jussi Koitela and organised in collaboration with The Showroom (London), UKS (Unge Kunstneres Samfund / Young Artists’ Society) (Oslo), Vera List Center for Art and Politics (New York), Finnish Cultural Institute in New York and Finnish Institute in the UK and Ireland.