Rehearsing Hospitalities, Frame Contemporary Art Finland’s new public programme for 2019-2023, connects artists, curators and other practitioners in the field of contemporary art and beyond to build up and mediate new practices, understandings and engagements with diverse hospitalities.
The programme takes the form of yearly autumn gatherings, public dialogues, a series of publications and peer-to-peer learning situations. This far-reaching collaborative process fosters the emergence of new practices and paradigms of political and cultural hospitality. It acknowledges hospitality as an open-ended skill that needs to be constantly rehearsed.
“Hosting and guesting entail emancipatory openness towards the unknown as well as problematic situations rooted in Western dualism,” says Frame’s Head of Programme Jussi Koitela.
“I firmly believe that rehearsing hospitalities and ‘sticking on to the trouble’ of hospitality is something that Frame cannot do alone or without acknowledging the diverse artistic, curatorial and socio-political work that is being constantly done within the art field in Finland and internationally in initiatives and organisations such as the Liverpool Biennial 2012, Asematila art space, the Museum of Impossible Forms and Publics.”.
Frame’s Director Raija Koli sees Rehearsing Hospitalities as introducing a new template for Frame. “Hosting and visiting are core practices for Frame Contemporary Art Finland, whose mandate is to foster and support international connections and networking with and within the contemporary art field in Finland. Until 2023, hospitality will be Frame’s key practice for asking what kind of urgent international and worldly exchanges are crucial and meaningful.”
Events year round
During 2019 the programme will address art and its institutional potential to facilitate and mediate diverse epistemic hospitalities. It asks, for example, what kind of power structures of knowledge and knowing are contemporary art and artistic institutions dependent upon, and can diverse and hybrid ways of being situated between social classes, genders and cultural traditions open up a new epistemic process within the artistic field.
The programme kicks off on 13 March 2019 with a one-day event in Helsinki, Epistemic Hospitality, which is to be organised in collaboration with the Bioart Society, Instituto Iberoamericano de Finlandia and the Goethe Institute Finland.
The event in March brings together a wide spectrum of art practitioners to present and discuss their practice. It asks: how can decolonization of the Western museum and feminist curatorial practice foster diverse knowledges and ways of knowing? How can artistic practices bricolage and engage with knowledges situated within the broad range of human-non-human transcultures? One of the event’s key concerns is what or who within the community of living and intelligible subjects plays the decisive role in determining whose knowledge and ways of knowing are considered valid.
In 2019 Frame will launch an annual gathering bringing together curators and other practitioners within the global field of contemporary art to connect with the Finnish art scene. It will rehearse and materialise new hospitalities and knowledges through public discussions, performances, studio visits and other situations of sharing and exchange.
The first edition of autumn gatherings will be organised in Helsinki in September 2019. As a part of the programme, a reader will be launched yearly. The event is co-organised together with a wide range of collaborators such as Publics, AV-arkki The Distibution Centre for Finnish Media Art, the Bioart Society, the Museum of Impossible Forms and the Finnish Cultural Institute in New York.
For more information
Rehearsing Hospitalities website
Jussi Koitela, Head of Programme
jussi.koitela@frame-finland.fi, 050 471 7711
Laura Boxberg, Head of Communications
laura.boxberg@frame-finland.fi, 044 739 6079
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