Rehearsing Hospitalities (2019–2023) concludes after 40 events, 240 contributors and 10 000 participants

Throughout Rehearsing Hospitalities, fostering new and existing collaborations has been critical in how we explore diverse practices of hospitality with others. The five-year programme has aimed to provide a platform for and connect the contemporary art field in Finland to current international debates and emerging developments.

Rehearsing Hospitalities has consisted of offline and online events such as talks, exhibitions, performances, gatherings, workshops, readings and podcasts to encourage different levels of access and engagement. Events and exhibitions have been organised and curated in collaboration with a wide range of partners, from institutions and organisations to individual artists and curators.

Through Rehearsing Hospitalities Frame has brought together 38 organisations, and 185 artists, curators and other practitioners, both from Finland and abroad, who have contributed to the programme. Nearly 10 000 guests have attended the events and exhibitions and also the online programme has received over 10 000 views.

“The programme has served as a platform for building meaningful, long-term relationships and ways of redistributing curatorial and cultural power. In Rehearsing Hospitalities, it has been important to bring forward artistic practices reflecting various approaches, backgrounds and ways of thinking and working in the contemporary arts”, say the programme curators Yvonne Billimore and Jussi Koitela.

The programme has explored interconnected questions concerning hospitality towards different ways of knowing and understanding access, safety, security and re-distribution of power. 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 on expanding 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 revisited some of the central threads explored in the past years.

“Rehearsing Hospitalities has acknowledged hospitality as an open-ended skill that needs to be constantly rehearsed also by art organisations. For Frame, it has also been a tool to navigate contemporary challenges and to claim co-agency amid changing political, social, and cultural environments.”