Gathering for Rehearsing Hospitalities Autumn 2022

Arte Útil Archive

[Installation, 2013 – ongoing]

Designed by Kaisa Karvinen

5 – 8 October 2022
Wed–Fri 8–19,  Sat 10–16
Tori, Theatre Academy of Uniarts Helsinki

The Arte Útil Archive resulted from a year and a half of research that started in 2012 in the context of the exhibition The Museum of Arte Útil (2013–2014), presented at the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven (NL) by artist Tania Bruguera. The composition of the archive was carried on through a curatorial research-led process by Bruguera, in collaboration with the curatorial teams at the Queens Museum in New York (USA), the Van Abbemuseum (NL), Grizedale Arts in Coniston (UK), an international group of correspondents, designers and architects collective ConstructLab, an open call, and, eventually, composed by independent researchers Alessandra Saviotti and Gemma Medina Estupiñán. The archive presents a growing number of case studies from 1827 until today that imagine, create, and implement beneficial outcomes by advancing tactics that change users’ behaviour not only concerning approaching art but also in their everyday life.

The definition of Arte Útil is entangled with the conception of the criteria used to gather the case studies, and the writing process behind them was led by the research itself. 

To be included in the Arte Útil archive, a project should:

1. Propose new uses for art within society
2. Use artistic thinking to challenge the field within which it operates
3. Respond to current urgencies
4. Operate on a 1:1 scale 
5. Replace authors with initiators and spectators with users
6. Have practical, beneficial outcomes for its users
7. Pursue sustainability
8. Re-establish aesthetics as a system of transformation

In its iteration at Gathering for Rehearsing Hospitalities Autumn 2022, the archive presents projects that look into questions of redistribution and alternative forms of managing power, wealth and resources. The installation is designed by Helsinki-based architect Kaisa Karvinen.

How to attend

Arte Útil Archive installation is open to the audiences throughout the event between 5 and 8 September at the Tori space, at the Theatre Academy of Uniarts Helsinki. 

Accessibility

The building is accessible by wheelchair. Tori space along with an accessible toilet is located on the first floor of the building at street level. The language of the archive is English.

Sigrid Holmwood: Cannibal and Witch Eat the Rich

[Installation of printed textiles, 2021]

5 – 8 October 2022
Wed–Fri 10–19,  Sat 10–16
Studio 2, Theatre Academy of Uniarts Helsinki

As a part of Sigrid Holmwood’s contribution, Cannibal and Witch Eat the Rich (2021), printed textiles will be installed at Studio 1 of the Theatre Academy of Uniarts Helsinki. The textiles are made using earth and plant pigments, following the colonial histories and stories of resistance belonging to these materials.

Western colonialism and capitalism with its extractive approach to plants as ‘natural resources’ served to suppress alternative ways of relating with plant-beings both within Europe and outside Europe. As Silvia Federici has argued in her book Caliban and the Witch, the great witch hunts, in particular, were a counter-revolutionary tool that served to suppress radical movements from the peasant class, and appropriate women’s reproductive capacities by silencing their medicinal knowledge of plants. This tactic was then exported to the Americas to suppress indigenous knowledge through accusations of satanism and idolatry. The works in this exhibition use plant pigments and dyes that have particularly resonant stories, such as Mayan blue, a sacred pre-Columbian indigenous pigment made from indigo, attapulgite clay, that ceased to be made during the oppression of the colonial period and has only recently been ‘re-discovered’ – and brazilwood, a tree which produces a red dye, and which gave the country of Brazil its name.

How to attend

Installation is open to the audience throughout the event between 5 and 8 October at the Studio 1 space, at the Theatre Academy of Uniarts Helsinki. 

Accessibility

The building is accessible by wheelchair. Tori space along with an accessible toilet is located on the first floor of the building at street level

Recipes for Commoning

[Conversation Videos]

5 – 8 October 2022
Wed–Fri 10–19,  Sat 10–16
Studio 2, Theatre Academy of Uniarts Helsinki

Hosted by Farbod Fakharzadeh

Recipes For Commoning is a series of intimate and informal conversations with art professionals across different geographies who work with ideas and practices related to commoning, collectivity, funding, economical sustainability and resource sharing between various actors in art and culture. The goal is to create a possibility for dialogue in an intimate space between the participating guests/hosts in which we can reflect on these ideas.

In each session, one participant will take the role of the host and share a simple recipe of a dish that has significance for them in relation to the idea of food sharing. Sessions with

Federica Bueti and Anna Talasniemi will be conducted online, documented and presented as an installation in addition to an in-person session with K-oh-llective. 

See more in Wednesday’s programme and in Publication contributors.

How to attend

Installation is open to the audience throughout the event between 5 and 8 October at the Studio 2 space, at the Theatre Academy of Uniarts Helsinki. 

Accessibility

The building is accessible by wheelchair. The Studio 2 space along with an accessible toilet is located on the first floor of the building at street level. 

Language: English

Rehearsing Hospitalities Companion 4

[Publication] 

Rehearsing Hospitalities Companion 4, published in October 2021, is the fourth in a series of readers published by Frame Contemporary Art Finland and Archive Books, which accompany Rehearsing Hospitalities.

The publication will be released on Wednesday 5 October and a limited number of copies will be gifted to members of the audience during the launch event at the Theatre Academy of Uniarts Helsinki. Hard copies are distributed by Archive Books. Digital versions are available in an open-access format on Archive Books’ and Frame’s websites. Rehearsing Hospitalities Companion 4 is published in English, and the digital version is suitable for screen readers.

See more in Wednesday’s programme and in Publication contributors.

Accessibility

Rehearsing Hospitalities Companion 4 is published in English, and the digital version is suitable for screen readers.

Language: English

LAPSODY: The Urban Pigeon Project

[Public initiative, Installation]

5 – 8 October 2022
Wed–Fri 10–19,  Sat 10–16
Majakka, Academy of Fine Arts of Uniarts Helsinki

The Urban Pigeon Project is an initiative for the city to build dovecotes on rooftops​. Urban pigeons are descendants of domesticated pigeons, so they almost solely live in human-shaped environments. Their population in Helsinki is decreasing because of our more hygienic lifestyle, changed architecture and intentional pest control. The Urban Pigeon Project promotes awareness of spaces, cities and histories that we share with the pigeons.

As part of The Urban Pigeon Project at Majakka in Academy of Fine Arts, there is an installation that presents the proposal, technical drawings and the scale model for the dovecote, and some additional visual/written material. 

See more in Thursday’s programme.

How to attend

Installation is open to the audience throughout the event between 5 and 8 October at Majakka in Academy of Fine Arts.

Guided tours to see the installation are organised by LAPS – Live Art and Performance Studies Master’s Programme students in the following time slots. The tours start from Tori.

Accessibility

The Majakka space at the Academy of Fine Arts is accessible by wheelchair. 

Language: English

Book launch: Rehearsing Hospitalities Companion 4 and Presentation of the Arte Útil Archive

[Presentations, 90 min]

5 October
14.30 – 16
Tori, Theatre Academy of Uniarts Helsinki

Introductions by Jussi Koitela and Yvonne Billimore and online presentations by Alessandra Saviotti and Gemma Medina Estupiñan

Hosted by Frame Contemporary Art Finland

Gathering for Rehearsing Hospitalities Autumn 2022 opens with the launch of Frame’s newly published companion Rehearsing Hospitalities Companion 4. The reader is the fourth in a series published by Frame Contemporary Art Finland and Archive Books in the context of Rehearsing Hospitalities, Frame’s public programme from 2019 to 2023.

In Rehearsing Hospitalities Companion 4 we ask–What are the possibilities and limitations of hospitality? How escapable are the imbalances of power instilled in hospitality? Should we instead be “rehearsing” redistribution? With a focus on doing things differently, the publication holds thoughts, insights, tools, provocations, and responses on forms and futures of redistribution.  

With a focus on practising, and practices of redistribution and decentralised organising, the event invites audiences to join in an unrehearsed collaborative reading: giving voice to some of the words, anecdotes, terms, quotes, footnotes and titles from the book. 

Book Contributors include Florian Carl, Johanna Hedva, Isa Hukka, K-oh-llective (Nada Elkalaawy, Engy Mohsen, Mohamed Al Bakeri, Soukaina Joual, Rania Atef), Jenni Laiti, Jemina Lindholm, Meenakshi Thirukode, Sandra Ruiz, Ailie Rutherford, Hypatia Vourloumis, Mike Watson and the series editors Yvonne Billimore and Jussi Koitela. 

During the event, audiences can receive a complimentary copy of the publication. 

——

After the book launch, researchers and coordinators Alessandra Saviotti and Gemma Medina Estupiñan will introduce the evolution of the Asociación de Arte Útil, its archive, and the selection of case studies on display. They will present examples focused on the redistribution of power, resources, and knowledge within and outside the artistic institutional sphere. 

The Arte Útil archive and the Asociación have challenged artistic and institutional paradigms and their contradictions. Starting from collective effort as an imperative to expand the discussion and research around the possibilities of art as a tool to affect change in daily life, the archive–this selection of projects in particular–questions the conventional models (structural and organisational) that regulate our existence. They activate and foster other forms of survival, communal ways of organisation, and collaboration between artists and other professionals. In this way, such projects allow for decentralisation of economy and knowledge.

During the presentation, Medina and Saviotti will focus on the notion of interdependence and the porosity of Arte Útil’s case studies, highlighting other ways of approaching the practice of art, both inside and outside the art world.

Event Schedule

14.30 Introduction to the book by Yvonne Billimore and Jussi Koitela 

14.40 Readings from the book

15.15 Presentation by Alessandra Saviotti and Gemma Medina Estupiñan

How to attend

This event requires registration using this form. The event takes place at the Theatre Academy of Uniarts Helsinki.

Accessibility 

The building is accessible by wheelchair. Tori space along with an accessible toilet is located on the first floor of the building at street level. The event will have regular breaks every hour. 

Language: English.

LAPSODY: UNIARTS Art. Cult. Edu. Ltd. Coop.

[Performance, 60 min]

5 October
16–17
Studio 1 + other spaces at Theatre Academy of Uniarts Helsinki

Students of Uniarts Helsinki: Yun-Chen Chang, Alyssa Coffin, Maija Holopainen, Amanda Hunt, Tina Jeranko, Hamidreza Keshvarpajuh, Anna-Liisa Nylund, Stefanía Ólafsdóttir and Onur Tayranoğlu 

Hosted by LAPSODY festival

The performance UNIARTS Art. Cult. Edu. Ltd. Coop. will assume the role of real estate agents attempting to sell the institution to potential members/shareholders. The performance will start with a presentation of the product, which will deal with the idea of an institution not as one specified establishment, but as a network of social contracts that is enacted by and between people. This is followed by a tour of the ‘product’ on offer, visiting certain spaces on campus. The idea of the institution is used to interrogate the politics of the host/guest relationship, and to un-tether the institution from its traditional role of ‘host’. The aim is to complicate the concept of an institution and the roles of its members in terms of positioning, and therefore responsibility. Questions worked with during the development of this work include: What is an institution? Do we ‘perform’ institutions, and in what orientation do we perform (towards ourselves, towards each other)? How do these orientations shift if the institution is dislocated from a concrete place/ownership? Can ‘institution’ be a verb? If multiple individuals can ‘own’ an institution, who is in charge and who is the guest?

How to attend

This event requires registration using this form. The event is limited to a maximum capacity of 40 participants. The event takes place at the Theatre Academy of Uniarts Helsinki.

Accessibility 

The building is accessible by wheelchair. An accessible toilet is on the first floor of the building at street level. The event will have regular breaks every hour. 

Language: English.

Promise of Decentralisation and Collectivity

[Discussion, 135 min]
[Audio with captions streamed online]

6 October
10–12.45
Studio 1, Theatre Academy of Uniarts Helsinki

Massimiliano Mollona, Station of Commons  (Grégoire Rousseau, Minerva Juolahti & Eddie Choo Wen Yi), Minna Tarkka, Raija Koli, Farid Rakun (ruangrupa), Paul O’Neill, Xenia Kalpaktsoglou, Pilvi Kalhama and Dahlia El Broul 

Hosted by Frame Contemporary Art Finland

Since the 2008 economic crash in the Western world, the culture and arts scene has been impacted by measures of economic austerity in public funding and an increase in market-driven support structures for public and cultural institutions. Arts, creativity and culture are often supported by grass-roots volunteer-based initiatives and NGOs, or institutions that are either supported by private capital or are entirely driven by it. Working in the arts and exploring its sociopolitical potential mainly involves working within extreme scarcity of economic support or within the constraints set by wealthy foundations or individuals. At the same time, this is not a new situation outside the Western structures of welfare state funding. In many locations in the Global South, artistic initiatives have survived by developing collective forms of common survival and cultural expression which are not dependent on the support of nation-states, markets or private wealth.    

There is increasing interest in other models of economic management, community building and daily life that can offer sustainable futures for cultural expression and everyday survival within the artistic field. The session Promises of Decentralisation and Collectivity zooms into two recent contexts where the contemporary art scene has brought forth notions and ideas of commons and self-initiated collectivity. 

In the aftermath of the 2008 economic crash, Greek society and its cultural scene have seen initiatives and collectives like Athens biennale 2015 – 2017: “OMONOIA” and the Laboratory for the Urban Commons (Neo Cosmos), which have expanded cultural, political and economic agency and community on the streets and neighbourhoods of Athens. The first part of the session includes a presentation from curator Xenia Kalpaktsoglou and writer, filmmaker, and anthropologist Massimiliano Mollona, the key forces behind the Laboratory for the Urban Commons and Athens biennale 2015–2017: “OMONOIA”. Mollona will also reflect his recently published book Art/Commons: Anthropology beyond Capitalism. 

Since 2019, the collective ruangrupa, as the curators of documenta fifteen, has invited other collectives to engage with common lumbung practices that facilitate collective resource management. One of their collaborators, Station of Commons, has facilitated lumbung radio, a broadcasting programme with collectives participating in documenta fifteen. In the session, Farid Rakun from ruangrupa and Grégoire Rousseau, Minerva Juolahti & Eddie Choo Wen Yi from Station of Commons will reflect upon their experiences from working at documenta fifteen.  

In the second part of the session, Helsinki-based curators and art workers discuss possibilities of decentralisation and commoning in the context of their organisations and reflect upon ideas presented in the first part of the session. The participants include Director of m-cult Minna Tarkka, Artistic director of Publics Paul O’Neill, Museum Director of EMMA – Espoo Museum of Modern Art Pilvi Kalhama, Director of Frame Contemporary Art Finland Raija Koli and Chairperson of the Board of Catalysti Dahlia El Broul.

Event Schedule

10  Intro and welcome Jussi Koitela 

10.10  Presentation: Xenia Kalpaktsoglou + Q&A  (20 min)

10.30  Presentation: Massimiliano Mollona + Q&A (20 min)

10.50  Short break 

10.55  Presentation: Farid Rakun (ruangrupa)  + Q&A  (20 min)

11.15  Presentation: Station of Commons + Q&A (20min)

11.35  Short break 

11.45  – 12.45  Responding conversation with Dahlia El Broul, Pilvi Kalhama, Raija Koli, Paul O’Neill and Minna Tarkka 

How to attend

This event requires registration using this form. The event takes place at the Theatre Academy of Uniarts Helsinki. An audio stream from the event will be broadcast live on Frame’s website and YouTube channel and available to watch after the event. 

Accessibility

The building is accessible by wheelchair. Studio 1 space along with an accessible toilet is located on the first floor of the building at street level. The event is captioned live at the venue and on the online stream. The event will have regular breaks every hour. 

Language: English

Pixelache x Ormston House

[Presentation, Discussion, Reading, Performance, 180 min]
[Audio with captions streamed online]

6 October
13.30 – 16.30
Studio 1, Theatre Academy of Uniarts Helsinki

Mary Conlon
El Reid-Buckley
William Keohane
Steve Maher
Eoin O’Dowd
Vishnu Vardhani Rajan
Isa Hukka

Hosted by Mary Conlon and Steve Maher 

After 10 years, two former colleagues deeply involved with artist-led organising – Mary Conlon (Ormston House, Limerick) and Steve Maher (Pixelache, Helsinki) – reconnect for Gathering for Rehearsing Hospitalities. For the preparation of the session, they talk about agency and holding space, the redistribution of resources and responsibility, converging ideas and diverging priorities in the context of finding modes of redistribution that stretch beyond hospitality.

Pixelache and Ormston House have different reasons for existing, one began as a festival 20 years ago and one began as an artist-run space 10 years ago. Both organisations have evolved significantly over that history in relation to organisational frameworks, and in relation to the thematics and motivations for their artistic programmes. However, both share a mutual history of inter-collaboration, open membership, and similar challenges as non-commercial, self-organised, and community-centred.

For the gathering, Steve Maher and Mary Conlon have programmed a public-interfacing event in three parts:

In the first part, Mary Conlon and El Reid-Buckley will host a roundtable on trans positionalities within institutions. This roundtable seeks to underscore the structural and material barriers to finding joy and community while steering through issues of tokenism, assimilation, and normativities. This roundtable hopes to signal pathways towards coalition, liberation, and personal interpretations of happiness.
[duration 55 min]

In the second part, William Keohane will read Boxing Day, a 52-poem sequence, one poem for each week of the year. Each offers a fragmentary glimpse into the experience of gender transition. Taken together, the 52 poems present a narrative account of a year of change, apprehension, and grief. This event will question the relationship between reader and audience, the agency of autobiographical writing, and the interpersonal scrutiny when existing in the world as a trans person.
[duration 60 min]

In the third part, Eoin O’Dowd and Steve Maher will share a collaborative dialogical project The Trouble with Doing a Lot with Very Little utilising the structure of an Irish Traditional Session (Sesh) as an experimental tool to discuss redistribution through the oral histories of cultural practice and production, exploring the possibilities for alternative models openly within the free flow of anecdote, critique, folk music, storytelling and song.
[duration 55 min]

Event Schedule

13.30 Introduction by Mary Conlon and Steve Maher 

13.40 Discussion hosted by Mary Conlon and El Reid-Buckley

14.25 Break 

14.30 Reading: William Keohane, Boxing Day

15.30 Break 

15.35 Performance: Steve Maher and Eoin O’Dowd, The Trouble with Doing a lot with Very Little

How to attend

This event requires registration using this form. The event takes place at the Theatre Academy of Uniarts Helsinki. An audio stream from the event will be broadcast live on Frame’s website and YouTube channel and available to watch after the event. 

Accessibility

The building is accessible by wheelchair. Studio 1 space along with an accessible toilet is located on the first floor of the building at street level. The event is captioned live at the venue and on the online stream. The event will have regular breaks every hour. 

Language: English

LAPSODY: The Urban Pigeon Project

[Presentation and discussion, 60 min]

6 October
17–18
Starts at Tori, Theatre Academy
Moves to Majakka, Academy of Fine Arts

Students of Uniarts Helsinki: Sjors Hoogerdijk, Katju Lindqvist, Maija Linturi, Sanna Nissinen and Ladapha Sophonkunkit

Hosted by LAPSODY festival

The Urban Pigeon Project is an initiative for the city to build dovecotes on rooftops​. Urban pigeons are descendants of domesticated pigeons, so they almost solely live in human-shaped environments. Their population in Helsinki is decreasing because of our more hygienic lifestyle, changed architecture and intentional pest control. The Urban Pigeon Project promotes awareness of spaces, cities and histories that we share with the pigeons.

For the programme, The Urban Pigeon Project has a proposal for the City of Helsinki, a panel discussion and an installation. The proposal for the City of Helsinki representatives includes suggestions to offer housing for pigeons and arguments to support the cause. The event brings together representatives of the city of Helsinki and various experts from the field of animal studies, urban planning and/or dove keeping to discuss the topics such as Who does the city belong to? Who is allowed to live in the city? Who do we tolerate in our neighbourhood? Can we co-exist or even flourish in a multispecies city? Details of the panel discussion will be published here soon.

The discussion and installation are located in Majakka at the Academy of Fine Arts building, which is a former bread factory. The place used to be popular among pigeons, but since the closing of the factory, the pigeons have mostly disappeared. Acknowledging the history of the place, the event will  invite also pigeons to join. In the spirit of multispecies sharing and flourishing, there will be snacks offered for both human and pigeon participants. 

The installation will also present the proposal, technical drawings and the scale model for the dovecote, with some additional visual/written material in the form of an installation. The installation will remain there throughout the event.

How to attend

This event requires registration using this form. The event is limited to a maximum of 30 people. The event takes place at the Theatre Academy of Uniarts Helsinki. 

Accessibility

The building and Majakka space are accessible by wheelchair. An accessible toilet is on the first floor of the building at street level. The event will have regular breaks every hour. 

Language: English

Institutions Depowered: Schools, Hospitals and Prisons

[Discussion, 150 min] [Audio with captions streamed online]

7 October
10–12
Studio 1, Theatre Academy of Uniarts Helsinki

Birgit Ærenlund Bundesen & Anna Rieder
Prison Outside / Free Translation (Anastasia Artemeva & Arlene Tucker)
Anissa R. Lewis
Eva Koťátková 

Hosted by Frame Contemporary Art Finland

Penal and care Institutions control and reproduce human life throughout its growth, from its birth to the ageing body-mind. Schools, hospitals and prisons are ubiquitous institutions, they directly or indirectly affect a large number of individuals all over the world. Through institutional control and care, individuals and communities learn to recognise behaviour that is not approved and that is considered productive. 

However, these institutions are also a part of racist, patriarchal and capitalist structures that ban care–as well as direct control–for certain individuals and communities in order to regulate their possibilities to live off common wealth and prosperity. The power of penal, care and educational institutions lies in the reproduction of certain kinds of normalised body-mind and economic orders that benefit the ruling elite. De-powering institutions means to act and live through practices that repair and replace the effects of institutional control and hierarchies within the institution and beyond that. 

Institutions Depowered: Schools, Hospitals and Prisons presents artistic practices situated within and outside of penal, education and care institutions. The conversation brings together artists, researchers, a psychiatrist and a poet to unpack their practices and collectively explore potential de-powering tactics. 

Anissa R. Lewis’ practice departs from arts-based women empowerment classes for a Philadelphia County prison’s drug and alcohol abuse unit. She will open up about how these experiences have helped her work to address matters of identity, civic engagement, and neighbourhood relationships in her home town Covington, KY. 

Artists Anastasia Artemeva and Arlene Tucker have collaborated in the context of the Prison Outside / Free Translation project showcasing international works by currently and formerly incarcerated people as well as anyone affected by imprisonment. They aim to promote self-expression, solidarity and communication between people of all walks of life. 

Psychiatrist Birgit Ærenlund Bundesen & poet Anna Rieder use poetry to engage clinicians and artists in a constructive dialogue. They are presenting poems from the collection March, March again that will be published by the Danish publishing House Gyldendal in the spring of 2023. 

Artist Eva Koťátková presents Futuropolis: School of Emancipation which aims to renew the possibilities of education as societal power for the future by bringing together educators, artists and activists to renew the curriculum. 

Event Schedule 

10  Intro and welcome Jussi Koitela 

10.10  Presentation by Anissa R. Lewis + Q&A  (20 min)

10.30  Presentation by Anastasia Artemeva & Arlene Tucker + Q&A (20 min)

10.50  Short break 

10.55  Presentation Birgit Ærenlund Bundesen &  Anna Rieder  + Q&A  (20 min)

11.15  Presentation by Eva Koťátková + Q&A  (20 min)

11.35  Short break 

11.45  – 12.30 Conversation 

How to attend

This event requires registration using this form. The event takes place at the Theatre Academy of Uniarts Helsinki. An audio stream from the event will be broadcast live on Frame’s website and YouTube channel and available to watch after the event. 

Accessibility

The building is accessible by wheelchair. The Studio 1 space along with an accessible toilet is located on the first floor of the building at street level. The event is captioned at the event space and on the online stream. The event will have regular breaks every hour. 

Language: English

Recipes for Commoning

[Conversation, Food preparation, Performance, 120 min] [Audio with captions streamed online]

7 October
13–15
Tori, Theatre Academy of Uniarts Helsinki

Federica Bueti
Anna Talasniemi
K-oh-llective (Nada Elkalaawy, Engy Mohsen, Mohamed Al Bakeri, Soukaina Joual, Rania Atef)

Hosted by Farbod Fakharzadeh

Recipes For Commoning is a series of intimate and informal conversations with art professionals across different geographies who work with ideas and practices related to commoning, collectivity, funding, economical sustainability and resource sharing between various actors in art and culture. The goal is to create a possibility for dialogue in an intimate space between the participating guests/hosts in which we can reflect on these ideas.

In each session, one participant will take the role of the host and share a simple recipe of a dish that has significance for them in relation to the idea of food sharing. The session will continue as the meal is prepared together with a conversation starting from the story behind the specific dish and delving into the host’s outlook, experiences and experiments around their ideas and practices. 

Two of the sessions with Federica Bueti and Anna Talasniemi will be conducted online, documented and presented as an installation. One session with K-oh-llective will happen in person in Helsinki during the Gathering for Rehearsing Hospitalities with a live audience, members of which will be invited to participate in both the meal preparation and the accompanying discussion.

“Can hospitality be expanded through the act of pooling resources? Think of it as if you are sharing a living space with someone, would you share your food or keep it for yourself?…”

This initial question inspired the format of the project. It comes from a conversation inside a text written by K-oh-llective for Rehearsing Hospitalities Companion 4.

The socio-economic climate in northern Europe is in part shaped by the presence of a social welfare system that ensures basic life security for individuals by the government and other institutions. This presence has, in some regards, led to a rather individualistic outlook towards life and life-skills.

Economic cuts and attacks on the core of this welfare system by austerity measures and neoliberal economic tendencies have impacted, among other things, the structure of art funding. Today, there is a prevailing anxiety among art professionals as to how our practices could be sustained when these privileges and possibilities are threatened. 

Event schedule

13.00  Introduction by Farbod Fakharzadeh

13.10  Cooking session and discussion with K-oh-llective

How to attend

This event requires registration using this form. The event takes place at the Theatre Academy of Uniarts Helsinki. An audio stream from the event will be broadcast live on Frame’s website and YouTube channel and available to watch after the event. 

Accessibility

The building is accessible by wheelchair. Tori space along with an accessible toilet is located on the first floor of the building at street level.  The event is captioned live at the venue and on the online stream. The event will have regular breaks every hour. 

Language: English

The Quarry and the Peasant

[Film screening and artist presentation with discussion, 150 min]

8 October
10–12
Studio 1, Theatre Academy of Uniarts Helsinki

Marwa Arsanios (online) in conversation with Jussi Koitela
Sigrid Holmwood in conversation with Ida Enegren 

Hosted by Frame Contemporary Art Finland

The Quarry and the Peasant includes a screening of Marwa Arsanios’ film Who is Afraid of Ideology? Part 4 Reverse Shot and a presentation by artist Sigrid Holmwood. It presents two artistic positions, one that connects questions about commons to those about land and labour, and another that bridges the displacement of peasants with the colonial history of pigments. The session puts forth artistic practice and research as ways to open up the interlinked matters concerning how contemporary forms of capitalist economic governing dismiss historical alternatives for economies and agencies which were based on solidarity, communing and sharing. The practices and research of Arsainos and Holmwood make visible how economic and colonial extraction treats materials and labour that are connected to land and food production. Through their practices, they seek new forms of agency, representation and communities for better futures. 

Marva Arsanios’ film Who is Afraid of Ideology? Part 4 Reverse Shot is set in a quarry in the mountains of northern Lebanon. It is only the beginning of a much longer effort that aims to set the groundwork for a different future. Arsanios’ main goals in this endeavour are to communalise a section of the private quarry in the mountains with the help of an agricultural cooperative, to work on solutions for bettering the soil quality, and to make the local community part of the process.

Sigrid Holmwood’s practice expands painting by addressing its materiality and circulation through the relationship between painting and the figure of the peasant. She challenges and provincialises the Western European bourgeois concept of painting and its material backgrounds by highlighting the figure of the peasant and the conflict it has with current modernising projects around the world. Holmwood develops a conception of the peasant-painting – rather than being a passive figure serving to construct the bourgeois modern subject, the peasant becomes a point-of-view: the peasant paints. 

Event Schedule

10.00 Introduction: Jussi Koitela 

10.10 Screening: Marwa Arsanios, Who is Afraid of Ideology? Part 4 Reverse Shot (36min)

10.50 Marwa Arsanios in discussion with Jussi Koitela

11.05 Break (10 min) 

11.15 Introduction: Ida Enegren 

11.20 Presentation: Sigrid Holmwood, Cannibal and Witch Eat the Rich (35min)

11.55 Sigrid Holmwood in discussion with Ida Enegren 

How to attend

This event requires registration using this form. The event takes place at the Theatre Academy of Uniarts Helsinki. 

Accessibility

The building is accessible by wheelchair. The Studio 1 space along with an accessible toilet is located on the first floor of the building at street level. Part of the event is captioned live at the venue and on the online stream. The event will have regular breaks every hour. 

Language: English

Power on a dinner plate – hierarchies, pedagogy, and organising in arts

[Workshop, 120 min]

8 October
13.30–15.30
Studio 2, Theatre Academy of Uniarts Helsinki

Hosted by Iida Nissinen & Kaura Raudaskoski

Power on a dinner plate – hierarchies, pedagogy, and organising in arts is a discursive workshop that centres on artistic-pedagogical practices and intuitions that drive redistribution of power in organising, collaboration, curatorial practice, and community building. How do we wield power in our work in arts and culture? How are learning and power interlinked? What is the role of pedagogy in contemporary art and mediation? Why do we downplay our power positions or hierarchies? How do these positions change in relation to context?

Using the symbols and conventions of dining together, the facilitators will create a situation for sharing and conversation. During the ‘main course’ of the workshop, they will discuss how pedagogical methods can be integrated into arts and cultural work. They will question why pedagogy is still often overlooked, and hard to verbalise, communicate and apply. The workshop is carefully and transparently facilitated, and its very facilitation also becomes a permeating theme.

How to attend

This event requires registration using this form. The event is limited to a maximum of 20 participants. The event takes place at the Theatre Academy of Uniarts Helsinki.

Accessibility

The workshop is held in English. The building is accessible by wheelchair. The Studio 1 space along with an accessible toilet is located on the first floor of the building at street level. The event will have regular breaks every hour. 

Marwa Arsanios is an artist, filmmaker, and researcher who reconsiders the politics of the mid-twentieth century from a contemporary perspective, with a particular focus on gender relations, urbanism, and industrialization. She approaches research collaboratively and seeks to work across disciplines.

Anastasia Artemeva is a visual and socially-engaged artist based in Helsinki. She creates sculptural installations and process-based works in art and non/art context, often together with or based on communication with people with different life experiences. Her practice is focused on spaces and rituals: How people survive, live, and make themselves at home in the most challenging and isolated environments. Anastasia’s long-term projects include Prison Outside – art and research work on issues of incarceration. She is a diversity agent in the arts and a support person for new families. 

Arlene Tucker’s socially engaged work utilises Translation Studies, Semiotics, and Feminist Practices. “As an artist, educator, and diversity agent, I realise my art through installation and dialogical practices. Always a co-creation with the public, my work allows us to share perspectives about identity and belonging through different mediums and approaches such as memories, hair, and letter writing. My work (i.e. Story Data, Dear You, Knots) brings people together worldwide through a process-based artistic practice and makes voices heard.” With roots in Taiwan and the USA, Tucker has been based in Finland since 2011.

Prison Outside is an independent international artistic research work focused on the role of the arts in the relationships between incarcerated persons and those on the other side of the prison wall. We focus on artistic practices, be it prisoners’ own initiatives or designed educational projects that promote self-expression, solidarity and communication between people of all walks of life. Spaces, both geographical and ephemeral, that surround prison, are an integral subject of the art and of the research. We are here to support persons affected by institutionalisation, and to help break the stereotypes. Free Translation is an ongoing project where translation techniques are used to open dialogue and make art together with persons affected by incarceration. It is a collaboration with Translation is Dialogue (TID, 2009). TID is an art installation and methodology of how to raise awareness of our communication, understanding and subjective meaning-making processes through creative applications of translation techniques. 

Federica Bueti writes, edits, teaches, and occasionally curates exhibitions. She is the author of Critical Poetics of Feminist Refusals: Voicing Dissent Across Differences (Routledge, 2022), and writing tutor of the MFA program at Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam, NL. Between 2011 and 2015, she edited …ment, a journal for culture, art and politics, which collaborated, among others with SKOR| Foundation for Art and the Public Domain (2012), Book Works (2013), and Glänta Magazine (2013).  For SAVVY Contemporary, she co-edited the volumes Whose Land Have I Lit On Now? Reflections on the notion of Hospitality, (SAVVYbooks/Archive Books, 2020); We Have Delivered Ourselves from the Tonal. Of, With, Toward, On Julius Eastman (SAVVYbooks/Archive Books, 2020), The Incantation of the Disquieting Muse: On Divinity, Supra-Realities, or the Exorcisement of Witchery (The Greenbox and SAVVY Contemporary, 2017). Bueti is part of the Onassis AiR Community, and is actively involved in the process of reimagining the model of the artist residency, in terms of self-governance and redistribution of resources. Her interests focus on practices and forms of creative refusal, modes of self-organizing and decolonial feminist strategies and modes of self-organizing and sharing and redistributing resources. 

Birgit Ærenlund Bundesen is a psychiatrist and holds a BA in comparative literature. She is a senior consultant at Mental Health Care Centre Amager in Copenhagen, founder of the Danish Centre for Arts and Mental Health, and leader of the research program REWRITALIZE.

Anna Rieder is a poet educated at The Danish Academy of Creative Writing in 2019. Her debut poetry collection Hindebæger was published on Arena in December 2020. She subsequently published pamphlets addressing psychiatric doctors with Sidsel Ana Welden in 2021 on Amulet. Anna has curated and contributed to Hjertet er en fold med heste – a book by people with a connection to the psychiatric system in collaboration with Sidsel Ana Welden on Amulet in 2022. She is also deputy chairperson and writing teacher in The Association of Arts and Mental health.

Anna and Birgit work with tenderness-activism using poetry to engage clinicians and artists in a constructive dialogue. They have written a collection of poems together titled March, March again that will be published by the Danish publishing House Gyldendal in the spring of 2023. 

Mary Conlon is a curator based in Ireland. She holds degrees from UCD and IADT, and is currently completing a practice-led PhD in Curatorial Studies at the Technological University of the Shannon, on Consistency, Context and Curatorial Practice. Mary is the founder and Artistic Director of Ormston House, a meeting place for the arts in the heart of Limerick city. She recently negotiated the purchase and long-term lease of the historic property. She is an elected representative on the local government’s Strategic Policy Committee for community and culture, and on the Executive Committee of the European network of cultural centres, Trans Europe Halles.

Dahlia El Broul is an artist, educator, and curator, from New York City and based in Espoo. For many years she has cemented her creative practice on dialogical methods and a strong focus on multi-positional cultural identities through the lens of intersectional feminism and epistemic plurality. In May 2021, she became the Chair of Catalysti ry; an arts association focused on anti-racist work, inclusivity, and equity in the Finnish art scene. Dahlia is currently a PhD student at the University of Fine Arts Hamburg (HFBK). Her research is at the intersection of children’s picture book production and critical pedagogy—crisscrossing the terrain of illustration, collaborative practices, theory, education, and critique.

Ida Enegren is finalising her master’s degree in exhibition studies at the Praxis-programme at the University of the Arts Helsinki, Academy of Fine Arts. She is interested in food production and its socio-ecological entanglements. As part of her thesis, Enegren is curating a parallel artistic programme to Kunsthalle Seinäjoki’s Art and the Rural Gathering -seminar held in August 2022. Enegren has previously worked as a Coordinator at Women in Film & Television Finland and as an Associate Programme Assistant at Frame Contemporary Art Finland.

Sigrid Holmwood works with the figure of the peasant and how she has been used to construct modernity. Central to her practice is the research of plant dyes, unearthing their relationships with folklore, colonialism, and modernity. She has a PhD in art from Goldsmiths College, London. She has work in the collections of the Saatchi Gallery, Hallands Art museum, Statens konstråd, and Moderna Museet. Recent exhibitions include The Commons: Reenchanting the World, at the Museum of English Rural Life, Reading, UK, and Cannibal and Witch Eat the Rich, at Celsius Projects, Malmö.

Isa Hukka is a writer, artist and philosophy student. They are based in Helsinki, although parts of them always live in Pohjois-Pohjanmaa, Copenhagen and Montréal/Tiohti:áke. In addition to participating in radical access & care grassroot organizing and making performances in Helsinki, they have worked with translating. Various magazines have also published their award-winning queer crip poetry. This year they are facilitating rampa associations, an international working group of chronically sick artists, that performs at the Baltic Circle International Theatre Festival in November 2022. Hukka wants to continue on exploring crip political theory & action, creating more sustainable and trauma-informed working structures for (crip/sick) artists, and dancing with questions of pleasure/pain.

K-oh-llective (or KOH in short) is an artist group of five visual artists who share a desire to facilitate collective conversations around art practices. The platform they put together is used for resource-sharing among artists, writers and curators in Egypt and the Arab world who are in need of this content and critical discourse. It features an open-source library with a database of essential tools for arts practitioners, and a selection of podcasts, texts and discussions. Additionally, it stages online/offline studio visits and acts as a conduit for future art-making and cross-disciplinary collaboration.

Engy Mohsen is an interdisciplinary artist and architect interested in the notions of ‘discursivity’, ‘participation’ and ‘collectivity’.

Mohamed Bakeri is a visual artist interested in the social politics of how everyday gestures are performed in male-dominated spaces.

Nada Elkalaawy is a visual artist interested in storytelling, exploring loss, traces of memories and fiction. 

Rania Atef is a multi-disciplinary artist interested in maternal, reproductive, and labour discourses on individual and collective levels.

Soukaina Joual is a multi-disciplinary artist interested in the body’s reflection of various tensions, dynamics and differences.

Pilvi Kalhama is a director of EMMA – Espoo Museum of Modern Art and a chair of the board of Publics Curatorial Agency. As curator and doctoral researcher her focus is in the dynamics of avantgarde and institutional criticism. Kalhama is an author of the recently published anthology Konrad Mägi – The Enigma of Painting (2021) and curator of Mägi’s retrospective tour in three venues in Finland, Denmark and Norway. Kalhama has worked both in the private and public sector, profit and non-profit alike: as teacher and curator in the Fine Arts Academy in Helsinki and as one of the founders and artistic director of Helsinki Contemporary.

Xenia Kalpaktsoglou is a curator and a founding member of the Athens-based collective Laboratory for the Urban Commons (Neo Cosmos). Her curatorial practice is rooted in collaboration, the creation of (trans-)local projects and initiatives, and the reconsideration of the protocols of exchange and production between cultural producers and institutions/organisations. She co-founded the Athens Biennale and co-directed it from 2005–2016; during those years she was primarily active with the curatorial team XYZ. Between 2006-2008 she was the director of the DESTE Foundation. She is currently a PhD candidate in the Artistic Research department at the Zurich University of the Arts / Linz University of the Arts. www.neocosmos.gr

Kaisa Karvinen works as a spatial designer and researcher. She graduated with a master’s degree in Architecture from Aalto University (2017), and a master’s in Research in Art and Design from Sint Lucas Antwerpen (2021)

William Keohane is a writer from Limerick. In 2021, he was shortlisted for the Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award, received a Literature Bursary Award from the Arts Council of Ireland, and was one of ten poets selected for the Poetry Ireland Introductions series. His poems have appeared in Poetry Ireland Review and Queering the Green, an anthology of post-2000 Queer Irish poetry. William holds an MA in Creative Writing from the University of Limerick, where he focused on non-fiction writing and the lyric essay. His essays have been published in British GQ, The Tangerine, Banshee literary journal, and his collection-in-progress was longlisted for Canongate’s 2021 Nan Shepherd Prize for Nature Writing.

Raija Koli is the Director of Frame Contemporary Art Finland since 2012. As Director of Frame, she is the Commissioner of the Pavilion of Finland at the Venice Biennale. Prior to this, Koli worked as the Director of the Finnish Institute in London from 2007–2012. In her previous positions, she has commissioned and produced events for the Helsinki Festival and Helsinki 2000 – European City of Culture Foundation as well as for several theatre companies and cultural organisations. Koli holds an MA from Tampere University, where she also worked as a lecturer in the Faculty of Art.

Eva Koťátková’s large-scale installations explore how social structures such as community, family, and institutions relate to individual experiences and the creative process. Her immersive environments, built from diverse imagery drawn from historical and contemporary culture, resemble magnified cabinets of curiosity or tangible dreamscapes. For her celebrated installation Asylum (2013), presented at the 2013 Venice Biennale, Kotatkova explored how institutions organize and archive their activities, and how these systems affect the individuals involved. She layered images and objects, which were suggestive of cages, walls, blindness, and secrecy, to create a dense psychological topography related to confinement. Kotatkova’s small-scale collages and sculptures fuse portraits of unidentified people and images of the human body with everyday objects, creating surreal hybrids.

After receiving her MFA from Yale University School of Art, Anissa R. Lewis moved to Philadelphia, PA where her deep belief in community, identity, agency, justice, and voice led her to many projects and collaborations. Some of these include arts-based women empowerment classes for a Philadelphia County prison drug and alcohol abuse unit; a rites of passage program for black and brown teenage girls; student-driven mural projects aimed to address civic engagement, neighbourhood relationships and identity, and others. She has created murals, and given talks on community, story and voice, and race and justice as it relates to place. She has taught classes in social practice and print at the University of Cincinnati College of Design, Art, Architecture and Planning. Her work has been viewed at the Hampton University Museum, The Carnegie, the Riffe Gallery, the Contemporary Arts Center, and the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art. Her work has also been collected by the Sara Vance Waddell Collection. She lives in her childhood home, Covington, KY, with her family and works at the Art Academy of Cincinnati as the Director of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging.

Gemma Medina Estupiñán is an art historian, independent curator, educator, and writer working internationally. She is focused on the relationship between art, art institutions and society, researching socially engaged practices, activating other possible pedagogies, and participating in processes that fall outside standard artistic discourse to bring art closer to non-specialized audiences. In doing so, she fosters connections and collaborative projects with artists, designers, and communities as a medium to reflect on the role of art and art institutions, the idea of the canon, and the very construction of art history. She has worked with the Van Abbemuseum Eindhoven (NL) in diverse experimental and speculative projects like Be(com)ing Dutch (2008), Play Van Abbe (2009), Agents of Change (2015-2020) and the artists-in-residency program Artistic Strategies in Psychiatry (2017). 

Alessandra Saviotti is a curator and art educator who lives in Amsterdam. She is a PhD researcher at the Liverpool John Moores University – School of Art and Design. Her focus is on socially engaged art, collaborative practices and Arte Útil. Her work aims to realise projects where the public becomes a co-producer in the spirit of usership. Her reflection considers collaborative processes where cooperation is foundational in undermining the notion of competition. She is a co-founder of the art collective Aspra.mente (2006-2016), a group which, through artistic-led research, seeks the contribution of operators in fields other than art for interdisciplinary projects free from time constraints. Since 2014 she has been collaborating with the Asociación de Arte Útil especially aiming to emancipate usership around the Arte Útil Archive. She is currently busy researching how alternative education models framed as Arte Útil could be successfully implemented within the institution of education fostering sustainability, hacking the institution itself. 

Steve Maher is an award-winning conceptual, electronic and relational artist from Limerick, Ireland, based in Helsinki, Finland, and working internationally. At the core of his practice is the exploration of cultural artefacts and rituals. Language is central to Steve’s work, both through the dialogical methodologies he implements in his relational projects, as well as in its direct use as a material in his work concerning languages themselves (both constructed and naturally evolved). An important aspect of his work is also the use of technology and its metaphors. Maher is interested in the dichotomy between how science and technology work versus how they are perceived at a cultural, ideological and social level.

Massimiliano (Mao) Mollona is a writer, filmmaker, and anthropologist. He is an associate professor at the Department of Art (DAR) at the University of Bologna. He has a multidisciplinary background in economics, anthropology and visual art, and his work focuses on the relationship between art and political economy, with a specific angle on work, class, and post-capitalist politics. His fieldworks combine pedagogy, artistic prefiguration, and activism. He is a co-founder and member of the collective freethought; the Institute of Radical Imagination (IRI); and the Laboratory for the Urban Commons, (LUC) Athens. 

Iida Nissinen is a Helsinki-based multidisciplinary artist, art pedagogue & curator-in-the-making. Nissinen has a strong background in collaborative and collective work that centres on critical questions of intimacy, power, and agency. Queer ontologies, logics of magic and posthumanist materiality form an enduring motif and framework for their practice. Currently, Nissinen does artistic research on avatars and alter-egos via sculpting and installation.

Eoin O’Dowd is an artist and curator from Dublin, Ireland, living and working in Helsinki, Finland. Eoin is a multimedia artist, utilising collage of objects and video, both found and authentic. Increasingly his work has been in collaboration with composers and musicians, while utilising homemade instruments, live field recordings and performance across a wide range of media. Eoin’s work is often made up of recurring visuals of archetypal scenery and allegorical motifs. Thematically, the work concerns frustrations and fragility born of an emotional illiteracy, taught and ubiquitous, in reactionary masculinity. Eoin seeks to promote a subjective and pluralistic interpretation of the masculine. Eoin’s work has been exhibited internationally and is held in private and public collections. 

Paul O’Neill is an Irish curator, artist, writer, educator and the Artistic Director of PUBLICS. From 2013-17, Paul was Director of the Graduate Program at the Centre for Curatorial Studies (CCS), Bard College, New York. Paul has co-curated over 60 exhibitions and is the author of numerous agenda-setting books on curatorial practice, public art, and exhibition histories, including the critically acclaimed book The Culture of Curating and the Curating of Culture(s), (The MIT Press), which has been translated into many languages. Most recent publications include Curating After the Global: Roadmaps to the Present and Maryam Jafri: Independence Days. Paul is working on a book called CURED.

Trained as an architect (B.Arch from Universitas Indonesia and M.Arch from Cranbrook Academy of Art), Farid Rakun wears different hats, dependent on who is asking. He is also a part of the artists’ collective ruangrupa, with whom he co-curated TRANSaction: Sonsbeek 2016 in Arnhem, NL, and currently provides collective Artistic Direction for documenta fifteen (Kassel, DE, 2022).

Vishnu Vardhani Rajan is a Body-Philosopher. Performance Artist and a Filmmaker. They are a hyphenated identity, multidisciplinary practitioner, who builds connections between art, science, witchcraft, history, and the cultures that define them. They explore shame through dance, acting, and stand-up comedy. Instrumental to their praxis is their intent to oscillate between cultures, languages, methodologies, and sexual identities, each different from the other. Sleep, rest, conflict, and nutrition are both their research interests and recurring themes. Vishnu’s drag king persona is Vamp Master Brown. Vishnu has been proudly bastardising yoga practices since 2005. Since an orthopaedic enhancement in their knee, Vishnu is a self-proclaimed cyborg witch!

Kaura Raudaskoski is a Helsinki-based art and community educator, artist and philosopher. In their work Kaura often combines contemporary art with pedagogical thinking, moral philosophy, gender studies and feminist practices. Alongside artistic work, recently they have been working with unveiling Finnish queer history, equity consulting, queering museums and cultural institutions, and they study as well as teach feminist pedagogy with their colleague Jemina Lindholm.

El Reid-Buckley is a sociologist, writer, and collage artist based in Limerick, Ireland. They are currently completing a PhD in Sociology on bisexualities in post-marriage equality Ireland. Their research, writing and artistic practice are broadly focused on issues of genders and sexualities; with research interests in a wide number of areas such as trans theory, pop culture, media studies, archival and memorial practices, and the politics of space. Overall, their work aims to connect art, academia, and activism, to celebrate the beauty, joy, and diversity of queerness and trans identity. 

Station of Commons

Gregoire Rousseau is an artist and educator based in Helsinki. He graduated both as an Electrical Engineer and Master of Fine Arts, and is currently, a doctoral candidate at Aalto University with the research Commoning Education, Educating the Commons. His artistic work questions the role of the machine, the algorithm within the digitally controlled society, and the complexity of neoliberal interests in relation to public knowledge, to commons within the technological space. Besides his artistic practice, Rousseau has been teaching in the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts for ten years where he developed and implemented the first space dedicated to technology in 2013. He regularly lectures on art within the technological space; Aalto University, ENSBA Paris, French Institute in Finland, CAC Shanghai. In 2001, he founded the electronic music record label Tuulanauhat; in 2014, he co-founded Rabrab Press with Sezgin Boynik, Journal for Political and Formal Inquiries in Arts. In 2018, he authored the publication Learning from electric energy in the arts, Knowledge happens together; in 2020 he initiated Station of Commons – a platform of commoning practices within the technological space. He exhibits regularly both in Finland and internationally; his work has been shown at Titanik gallery, Kunstpavillon Munich, Oksasenkatu11, Cite internationale de Paris, Palais des Beaux-Arts museum in Paris, Manifesta13 and Documenta fifteen.

Eddie Choo Wen Yi was born in Selangor, Malaysia. Her parents worked as farmers cultivating starfruit, coconut and rambutan. Upon graduating high school she earned a Diploma in Fine Arts after three years of studies at Dasein Academy of Arts in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. As the wish for a deeper understanding of her own artistic work arose, she travelled to Singapore and Abu Dhabi to work in cement carving at theme parks as a means to finance her studies in Fine Arts in Taiwan. In 2013, Her work Diary of a Madline was honoured with a solo show at Lostgens’ in Kuala Lumpur. She won the Outstanding Art Prize from the Fine Arts Department at the Taipei National University of the Arts. The Madline series was exhibited in the Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts. In 2018, She received her B.F.A from the Taipei National University of the Arts. She currently lives in Finland and continues her studies at the Academy of Fine Arts, Helsinki. Her works revolve around questions of belonging and purpose, the experience of existing in the midst of different social groups and an ever-changing cityscape.

Minerva Juolahti is a visual artist and performance maker working at the intersection of body, sound, and space. Juolahti is interested in how the ideas of space and movement could be approached through the idea of translation, as well as voice and noise as an embodied and conceptual phenomenon. Public discussion, affect, bodily place relationships and memory are recurring concepts in their body of work. They work artistically especially with sound performance and use the sounds produced by the body as a starting point in their work. Juolahti graduated as Visual Artist in 2018 from Art School MAA and a Master of Social Sciences from the University of Helsinki in 2019. Their master’s thesis discussed the relationship between art and public discussion from the art maker’s point of view. Part of the research was conducted by the means of artistic research that forms an essential approach in their practice in general. At the moment, Juolahti is finalising their studies in the Live Art and Performance Studies master’s programme at the Theatre Academy of the University of the Arts Helsinki. They live and work in Helsinki, Finland.

lumbung Radio is the online community radio project of documenta fifteen. It started in April 2022 and is broadcasting 24/7 during the 100 days of documenta fifteen, and hopefully also afterwards, from and to the whole planet. It’s the result of the radio working group (consisting of the initial members Grégoire Rousseau, Malene Saalmann, Gözde Filinta, Ayşe Güleç, and Reza Afisina) that started meeting in August 2021 between Kassel, Jakarta, and Helsinki, with the aim of envisioning a collective audio practice based on principles of commoning as a shared space between inter-local nodes of the documenta fifteen ekosistem. 

MA Anna Talasniemi has worked in the field of arts and culture since 2004. Until recently, she served as the Executive Director of Kone Foundation, one of the major private arts and research funders in Finland. Currently, she is completing a Master’s programme in cultural environment research with a specialisation in arts education at the University of Jyväskylä. She has also written two cookbooks and is a saunaphile.

Minna Tarkka, director of M-cult, has been active as a critic, educator, producer, and curator of media art and culture. Her key areas of interest include media and digital art, the commons as well as socially engaged and collaborative artistic processes.

Yvonne Billimore is an artist-curator who works as the associate curator of Rehearsing Hospitalities at Frame Contemporary Art Finland. She has worked as co-artistic director of ATLAS Arts on the Isle of Skye and Programme Manager at Scottish Sculpture Workshop in rural Aberdeenshire. Her work facilities situations for collective learning, exchange and experiences with particular attention given to feminist and ecological matters.

Florian Carl is a community organiser supporting multi-front anti-colonial struggles, decolonization initiatives, and climate justice. He has long worked alongside frontline communities of the climate crisis, for example, as a project coordinator and campaigner for the People’s Climate Case. Florian has recently been awarded a four-year PhD scholarship at the Centre on Social Movement Studies, writes debate articles, and is passionate about creating electronic music.

Johanna Hedva (they/them) is a Korean-American writer, artist, and musician, who was raised in Los Angeles by a family of witches, and now lives between LA and Berlin. Hedva is the author of Minerva the Miscarriage of the Brain, a collection of poems, performances, and essays; and the novel On Hell. Their albums are Black Moon Lilith in Pisces in the 4th House and The Sun and the Moon. Their essay “Sick Woman Theory,” published in 2016 in Mask, has been translated into ten languages.

Isa Hukka is an artist, older sibling, and a student whose own bed is a sacred place for them. They are based in Helsinki, although parts of them always live in Pohjois-Pohjanmaa, Copenhagen and Montréal. Currently, Hukka studies humanities, focusing on feminist theory. They work as an artist, centring on crip practices. In addition to making performances, they have worked with translating, and have published their award-winning poetry in various magazines.  

K-oh-llective (or KOH in short) is an artist group of five visual artists who share a desire to facilitate collective conversations around art practices. The platform they put together is used for resource-sharing among artists, writers and curators in Egypt and the Arab world who are in need of this content and critical discourse. It features an open-source library with a database of essential tools for arts practitioners, and a selection of podcasts, texts and discussions. Additionally, it stages online/offline studio visits and acts as a conduit for future art-making and cross-disciplinary collaboration.

Nada Elkalaawy (b. 1995, Alexandria) is a visual artist interested in storytelling exploring loss, traces of memories and fictioning. 

Engy Mohsen (b. 1995, Cairo) is an interdisciplinary artist and architect interested in the notions of ‘discursivity’, ‘participation’ and ‘collectivity’.

Mohamed Al Bakeri (b. 1991, Cairo) is a visual artist interested in the social politics of how everyday gestures are performed in male-dominated spaces.

Soukaina Joual (b. 1990, Fes) is a multi-disciplinary artist interested in the body’s reflection of various tensions, dynamics and differences.

Rania Atef (b. 1988, Cairo) is a multi-disciplinary artist interested in maternal, reproductive, and labour discourses on individual and collective levels.

Jussi Koitela currently works as Head of Programme at Frame Contemporary Art Finland and as an independent curator. Lately, his curatorial work has entangled art, embodied research methodologies, feminist philosophy of science and materiality in different exhibitionary forms and modes of knowledge production. His curatorial projects have been presented among others at Pori Art Museum, Konsthall C, Treignac Projet, Contemporary Art Museum of Estonia (EKKM), De Appel Arts Centre, SixtyEight Art Institute, Trøndelag Centre for Contemporary Art and Kiasma Theatre. Koitela was a participant of De Appel Curatorial Programme in 2015–2016.

Jenni Laiti is a Sámi artivist, Duojár (Master of Traditional Sámi Crafts), Indigenous Rights activist and Climate Justice advocate. She is engaged in the anti-mining movement in Gállok, Jokkmokk, advocating for climate justice in Sápmi and working with local Sámi communities to strengthen Sámi self-determination and local governance.

Jemina Lindholm is a contemporary artist and a museum worker based in Helsinki. Their works revolve around the themes of intimacy, sickness and health, and collaborative processes, often taking the forms of video, photography or slightly choreographed encounters. They love working collectively as togetherness provides effectiveness, radical safety and immediate feedback. At the moment their main field of interest is the intersection of contemporary art, sickness, and crip theory. They are currently working on a new project on guided tours and their historical trajectories with their colleague Kaura Raudaskoski.

Meenakshi Thirukode is a writer, feminist killjoy and cultural theorist currently based out of New Delhi, where she gardens and lives with her two cats, Ginger and Sundari. You can find her navigating and contaminating the many intersections of her politicised being on Instagram @kanmanponmani. 

Sandra Ruiz is the Sue Divan Associate Professor of Performance Studies in the Department of Theatre and a Conrad Humanities Scholar in the Department of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Ruiz is the author of Ricanness: Enduring Time in Anticolonial Performance (NYU Press, 2019) and co-author with Hypatia Vourloumis of Formless Formation: Vignettes for the End of this World (Autonomedia Press/Minor Compositions 2021). She is a co-series book editor of Minoritarian Aesthetics (NYU Press), co-founder of The Brown Theatre Collective, creator of La Estación Gallery, and the Mellon funded project the Minor Aesthetics Lab. Her book Left Turns in Brown Study is currently out for review.

Ailie Rutherford is a visual artist working at the intersection of community activism and creative practice. Her collaborative artworks bring people together in conversations about our social and economic landscape using print, performance, sci-fi visioning, games and technology as playful means to work through difficult questions and radically re-think our shared futures. The resulting works range from proposed new models for living and working together to the building of new infrastructure.

Hypatia Vourloumis is a performance theorist and received her Ph.D in performance studies at NYU. She is co-author with Sandra Ruiz of Formless Formation: Vignettes for the End of this World (Autonomedia Press/Minor Compositions, 2021) and completing a monograph on the politics of postcolonial Indonesian paralanguage. She teaches at the Dutch Art Institute.

Mike Watson (PhD from Goldsmiths College) is a theorist, critic and curator who is principally focused on the relation between culture, new media and politics. He has written for ArtReview, Artforum, Frieze, Hyperallergic and Radical Philosophy and has curated events at the 55th and 56th Venice Biennale, and Manifesta 12, Palermo. In September 2021 he published his third book with ZerO Books, The Memeing of Mark Fisher: How the Frankfurt School Foresaw Capitalist Realism and What to Do About It.

Live Art and Performance Studies (LAPS) at Theatre Academy of Uniarts Helsinki is a two-year master’s programme in English that combines critical thinking with experimentation in artistic work and artistic research. It empowers its students to develop and activate new knowledge in performance and theory. It is one of the very few master’s programmes in the world that focuses on the intersection of performance studies and the practice of live art/performance art.

Ormston House is a meeting place for the arts in the heart of Limerick City, Ireland. Our programme is co-designed with artists and citizens, resulting in community partnerships, multi-annual projects and cultural events that are responsive to the city and its context. We have developed a participatory model to connect curatorial practice with local knowledge and activism.

Pixelache Helsinki is a transdisciplinary platform for emerging art, design, research and activism. Pixelache is an association of artists, cultural producers, thinkers and activists involved in the creation of emerging cultural activities. Amongst our fields of interest are: experimental interaction and electronics, code-based art and culture, grassroot organising & networks, renewable energy production/use, participatory art, open-source cultures, bioarts and art-science culture, alternative economy cultures, politics and economics of media/technology, audiovisual culture, media literacy & ecology and engaging environmental issues.

IHME Helsinki: Geomancers

IHME Helsinki presents a free screening of video works offering perspectives on the future of humanity and our planet at 5.30 pm on 5 October 2022 at Finnkino Maxim in Helsinki. 

Geomancers features nine video works that share a concern about the accelerating environmental crisis, the sixth wave of extinction, the marginalization of indigenous communities, and the loss of traditional knowledge. The title refers to geomancy, literally “foresight by earth” – chosen as a poetic framework for bringing together video works that reflect on the current state of the planet. This ancient divination method has its roots in the Arabic-speaking regions of North Africa and interprets the random patterns formed by objects, sand, or stones thrown on the ground. Geomancy was once used to understand the subtle interdependencies that shape the universe.

The film programme has been curated by Anna Lovecchio and Magdalena Magiera, curators at NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore, a research centre of Nanyang Technological University. The video works were originally selected as part of the multimedia exhibition Free Jazz IV. Geomancers (NTU CCA Singapore, 14–23 January 2022). There are video works by: Martha Atienza (Philippines); Zarina Muhammad (Singapore) and Zachary Chan (Singapore); Rice Brewing Sisters Club (South-Korea); Carolina Caycedo (Colombia/USA) and David de Rozas (Spain/USA); Pedro Neves Marques (Portugal); Ursula Bieman (Switzerland); Liu Chuang (China); Chu Hao Pei (Singapore); and Robert Zhao Renhui (Singapore).

The screening celebrates IHME Helsinki’s 15th anniversary. The screening lasts 3 hours and 30 minutes, including a 20-minute intermission. The video works are subtitled only in English. The screening is at Finnkino Maxim’s (Kluuvikatu 1) auditorium 2, which has balcony accessibility for wheelchairs. Seats are limited and will be filled in order of arrival.

Geomancers
Wednesday 5 October at 5.30 pm
Finnkino Maxim, auditorium 2
Kluuvikatu 1, Helsinki 

Learn more on IHME Helsinki’s website.

PUBLICS: Today Is Our Tomorrow

Today is Our Tomorrow is an annual transdisciplinary public gathering by PUBLICS, the Helsinki-based curatorial and commissioning agency, event space and educational resource. The gathering happens on Saturday 8 October from 4 pm onwards. 

Today Is Our Tomorrow is scheduled as a satellite to Frame’s Rehearsing Hospitalities programme, and includes a series of three public vocalizations of work in progress by PUBLICS Youth, PRAKSIS (PTAB) and Index (ITAB) developed in collaboration with artists Harold Offeh, Laia Estruch, Irina Mutt and Sayed Sattar Hasan.

Beginning in October 2022 and for the duration of one year, Today Is Our Tomorrow will focus on the current futurity and presentness of the voice in its many sonic forms, vocal modes and acoustic modalities. Through a series of connected public moments and gatherings curated across twelve months, Today is Our Tomorrow will frame much of PUBLICS activities for the next year focusing on the recurrent thematic and evolving concept of the voice. 

This October’s gathering explores the interaction between people, their acoustic worlds and the sounds of the environment that the listener hears and imagines. Here, the voice is explored as material where the agencies of language, sound, silence, noise, music, field recording, as well as the agential qualities of listening, speaking, singing, dancing, and the performative voice as embodied practice.

Today is Our Tomorrow
Saturday 8 October at 4–9 pm
PUBLICS
Sturenkatu 37-41 4b, 00550 Helsinki 

See full programme on PUBLICS’s website.

Frame Contemporary Art Finland’s Safer Space Guidelines

With these principles, we work to create safer spaces:

Respect and support. Respect everyone present in the shared space, their speeches, and their participation. Act with good intentions and take care of each other. 

Assumption and generalisation. Let’s not make assumptions about people’s gender, pronouns, sexual orientation, health status, background, abilities etc. without them being told. Respect everyone’s right to self-determination and privacy. 

Consent. Don’t touch or take pictures of anyone without consent. Ask for consent and respect the answer received. In digital spaces, get consent before taking a screenshot or recordings of participants. Be willing to apologise, be open to critique, and change your behaviour if someone asks. 

Accountability. Everyone present is involved in the realisation of a safer space. If you witness or encounter discrimination or inappropriate behaviour, please inform this to Frame’s staff onsite or please use the feedback form. 

We welcome feedback before, during, and after the events. You can provide this anonymously via the event feedback form. Alternatively, you contact the events named contact person. You can approach the named contact person onsite or after the event to give feedback or to tell about discriminatory or other interference.

These guidelines were updated during spring 2022 and published in August 2022. They include adaptations from The Peace Education Institute’s Guidelines for Safer Space document and Commonfield and Community Agreements. Please feel free to borrow and adapt our guidelines for your needs while creating safer spaces for events.

This event’s named contact person is: jussi.koitela@frame-finland.fi / +358 (0)50 471 7711