Open Up and Shape Helsinki Symposium is free and being held as part of the Open Up, a project that has been co-funded by the European Commission under the Creative Europe Programme.
Thursday 9 June
10:00 Coffee and Introduction by Paul O’Neill
10:30 Keynote by Carolina Rito, with Joasia Krysa
12:00 Lunch
13:00 Rants & Raves, reflection by Dahlia El Broul
13:30 Keynote by Bassam El Baroni, with Constantinos Miltiadis
15:00 Closing notes
Screening of Deep Structure by Ilona Sagar
Six Chairs Book Shop & Drinks
Friday 10 June
12:00 Introduction by Jussi Koitela; Rants & Raves, reflected by Henna Harri
12:30 Keynote by Cynthia Cruz, with Niko Hallikainen
14:00 Panel Conversation: Justina Zubaitė-Bundzė, Helen Kaplinsky, Maria Mkrtycheva, Irina Mutt and Henri Terho
16:00 Closing notes
17:00 Drinks and Evening Programme at Kohta
The Open Up and Shape Helsinki Symposium discusses how equity, labour, money and structures of power are configured globally, while reflecting these questions back onto Helsinki’s cultural scene, inviting three position papers and three Helsinki-based respondents:
Carolina Rito, co-editor of Institution as Praxis – New Curatorial Directions for Collaborative Research (Sternberg Press, 2020); followed by Joasia Krysia, Curator of Helsinki Biennial 2023
Bassam El Baroni, editor of Between the Material and the Possible: Infrastructural Re-Examination and Speculation in Art (Sternberg Press and Edith Russ Haus, 2022); in with architect and researcher Constantinos Miltiadis
Cynthia Cruz, author of The Melancholia of Class: A Manifesto for the Working Class (Repeater Books, 2021); with poet and novelist Niko Hallikainen
On Friday 10th Justina Zubaitė-Bundzė, Helen Kaplinsky, Maria Mkrtycheva, Irina Mutt and Henri Terho will participate in a public panel discussion around the three focuses of the Symposium: Infrastructures of power, and (re-) distribution; class, money and access; institutional reimagining and future publics.
In conjunction with SHAPE, a mapping of art spaces and public events across the city, initiated in 2021 by PUBLICS and Kohta, the Symposium offers a platform for voicing individual and common challenges. Over 100 Helsinki-based art organisations and institutions have been invited to join in Rants & Raves of four minutes and thirty-three seconds each, inspired by John Cage’s composition 4’33’’. ‘Ranting’ and ‘Raving’ are immediate and liberating forms of public expression. They tell about the present, while pointing at long-coming conditions of pressure, uncertainty and search for alternatives.
Rants & Raves will form a choral, humorous and situated picture of Helsinki’s art scene; reflected by curator, artist and educator Dahlia El Broul, chair of the board at Catalysti, and Henna Harri, director of the Association of Photographic Artistsand Photographic Gallery Hippolyte.
The Open Up and Shape Helsinki Symposium programme is planned in collaboration with Kunsthalle Kohta in the framework of the three-year Open Up (Creative Europe) project, for which PUBLICS is a partner. Through Open Up and Shape Helsinki, PUBLICS will map out, invite, and nurture new audiences for its activities. Frame Contemporary Art Finland joins the collaboration by co-hosting one session in the context of Rehearsing Hospitalities public programme.
Bassam El Baroni is associate professor in curating at the School of Arts, Design and Architecture, Aalto University, Finland. Formerly, he has lectured at the Dutch Art Institute, ArtEZ University of the Arts, Arnhem and was artistic director of the now folded non-profit art space ACAF – Alexandria Contemporary Arts Forum in Alexandria, Egypt (2005–2012). His current research engages with financialization in relation to artistic practices, artists’ engagement with infrastructural futures and histories, and new forms of artist-led activism. Recent curatorial projects include: Infrahauntologies at the Edith-Russ-Haus for Media Art, Oldenburg, Germany, and La Box, ENSA Bourges, France (2021, 2022). He is the author of various essays on artists, art and curating, and editor of Between the Material and the Possible: Infrastructural Re-examination and Speculation in Art (Sternberg Press and Edith Russ Haus, 2022) and co-editor, together with Ida Soulard and Abinadi Meza, of Manual for a Future Desert (Mousse Publishing, 2021).
Cynthia Cruz is a PhD candidate at the European Graduate School where her dissertation work focuses on Hegel’s concept of Verrüktheit and the possibility of emancipation. Cynthia Cruz teaches writing at Sarah Lawrence College. She has previously taught at the Juilliard School, Fordham University, the Rutgers-Newark MFA Program, Eugene Lang College, and in the MFA Writing Program at Columbia University, and amongst others. Born in Germany, Cruz grew up in Northern California, where she earned her BA at Mills College. Cruz earned an MFA in creative writing at Sarah Lawrence College, an MFA in art writing & criticism at the School of Visual Arts, and an MA in German language and literature at Rutgers University. She has published essays, interviews, and book and art reviews in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Hyperallergic, Guernica, and the American Poetry Review. The author of The Melancholia of Class: A Manifesto for the Working Class, and Disquieting: Essays on Silence, she is the author of seven critically acclaimed collections of her poetry including Hotel Oblivion as her latest just published by Four Way Books, and is currently working on a book-length study of negative freedom and the working class.
Carolina Rito is Professor of Creative Practice Research, at the Research Centre for Arts, Memory and Communities (CAMC), at Coventry University; and leads on the centre’s Critical Practices research strand. Rito is a researcher and curator whose work explores ‘the curatorial’ as an investigative practice, expanding practice-based research in the fields of curating, visual arts, visual cultures and cultural studies. Rito is the co-editor of Institution as Praxis – New Curatorial Directions for Collaborative Research (Sternberg, 2020), Architectures of Education (e-flux Architecture, 2020), and FABRICATING PUBLICS: the dissemination of culture in the post-truth era (Open Humanities Press, forthcoming). Rito is editor of “On Translations” (2018) and “Critical Pedagogies” (2019) issues (The Contemporary Journal). From 2017 to 2019, she was Head of Public Programmes and Research at Nottingham Contemporary, leading the institution’s research strategy with Nottingham Trent University and University of Nottingham. She holds a PhD in Curatorial/Knowledge from Goldsmiths, University of London, where she taught from 2014 to 2016.
Joasia Krysa is a curator and scholar working at the intersection of contemporary art, technology and cultural studies. She is Professor of Exhibition Research and Head of Art and Design at Liverpool John Moores University, with an adjunct position at Liverpool Biennial. Formerly, she served as Artistic Director of Kunsthal Aarhus, Denmark, part of the curatorial team for dOCUMENTA (13). (Kassel, 2012), and co-curator of the 9th edition of Liverpool Biennial (2016). She is currently appointed curator of the 2nd edition of Helsinki Biennial opening summer 2023.
Constantinos Miltiadis is a transdisciplinary architect and researcher, occasionally also programmer, media artist, curator, teacher, and librarian. His work focuses on aesthetic phenomena between technology and culture, and more formally on spatiotemporal environments inconstructible in the physical world, specific to and experienceable through technological mediation. Since 2019 he is a doctoral researcher in the Departments of Design and of Architecture at the School of ARTS of Aalto University. Between 2015 and 2019 he was assistant professor at the Institute of Architecture and Media at TU Graz. Constantinos has developed and taught courses on creative computation and experimental game design in academic contexts and festivals and contributed to multiple conferences and symposia. He was founder and curator of the IAM Open Lecture series (TU Graz, 2015-2019), co-curator of the experimental electronic music event series ◯ (Graz, 2019), co-founder of the Spatial Aesthetics and Artificial Environments special interest group (SAR, 2020), and co-chair for CAAD Futures 2021: Design Imperatives (University of Southern California).
Niko Hallikainen is a performance poet and novelist born and based in Helsinki. He teaches creative writing in the dance performance programmes at University of the Arts Helsinki. Niko is currently finishing his second novel, dealing with spectres, libido and bad luck in the landscape of a Nordic class system.
Justina Zubaitė-Bundzė is a contemporary art librarian and a bookseller. She is responsible for the collection and the event’s program at the Reading Room of the Contemporary Art Centre (CAC), Vilnius and owns an independent art bookshop Six Chairs Books. Since 2019 Zubaitė-Bundzė curates an educational program at the Kaunas Art Book Fair, organised by Kaunas Photography Gallery and currently is the head of literature festival – Paviljonas Book Festival. One of her parallel projects – compiling archives of contemporary and historical artists’ books by Lithuanian artists, on the invitation from Nida Art Colony.
Helen Kaplinsky (she/her) is a curator and writer based in Helsinki and London. Her most recent exhibition is GENDERS, Science Gallery London (2020). She is currently undertaking a PhD in Curating at Liverpool John Moores University, Exhibition Research Lab (UK) and is part of Beyond Matter, a research collaboration across several European galleries. Her research spans cyberfeminist legacies, postdigital identity and ownership. In 2015 she co-founded Res., workspace/ gallery (London). Collections research includes fellowships with the Contemporary Art Society, the Arts Council Collection and initiating alternative collection model #temporarycustodians with Islington Mill studios.
Maria Mkrtycheva is a curator, educator and researcher. She is currently conducting PhD research at the University of Wolverhampton, part of the FEINART network, focusing on the relationships between the art institutions and the public(s) through the notions of situatedness, asymmetrical reciprocity and in-betweenness. Maria’s previous roles include Curator of “Characters” – a long-term public engagement project in the Museum of Norilsk; Museum Designer at Solarsense Bureau, specializing on setting up and reinventing museums across Russia; Curator of Public Program in the industrial town Vyksa; Head of Education at the V-A-C Foundation, Moscow.
Irina Mutt is an in(ter)dependent writer and curator from Barcelona currently based in Helsinki. She has been part of the public program commission at Hangar BCN and for the Catalan Critic Association. Some of her exhibitions have been “Undoing text” for Ineditos Casa Encendida in Madrid or “A break can be what we are aiming for” with Barcelona Producció. Since living in Helsinki, she has collaborated with Frame, the gallery Myymälä2, Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart, and is a current board member of Pixelache. Her research goes from video games to post-porn, experimental publishing and temporalities outside the hegemonic sense of productivity or linearity. Always doing and thinking from intersectional feminism.
Henri Terho is the Head of Arts Support in Arts Promotion Centre Finland. He is also the chair of Finnish State Art Commission.
Dahlia El Broul is an artist, educator, and curator, originally from New York City, where she received her BFA in Illustration and a minor degree in Art History. She holds an MA in Curating, Managing, and Mediating Art from Aalto University. She has collaborated with various cultural organisations and worked with independent projects as an educator, resident-artist, and producer. In New York, she worked with such institutions as BAAD! Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance, the 92nd Street Y Art Center, MoMA PS1, the Hudson River Museum, and Flux Factory. She was part of the educational team for documenta 14, in Kassel Germany. In Finland, she developed the educational programme for the exhibition Ote/Points of View at the Espoo Museum of Modern Art, has worked for the Helsinki International Artist Programme and Frame Contemporary Art Finland and is currently an editor for their upcoming publication on curatorial research. She is the Chair of Catalysti; an arts association focused on anti-racist work, inclusivity, and equity. Dahlia is currently a PhD student at the University of Fine Arts Hamburg (HFBK).
Henna Harri is the director of the Association of Photographic Artists and Photographic Gallery Hippolyte in Helsinki, Finland. She has vast experience in managing and organizing in the field of contemporary art, and an endless curiosity of how structures and agencies play together in and outside of institutions. The years from 2011 till 2016 she was Lecturer of Manging and Mediating Art at the Aalto University in Helsinki, and co-director of a masters’ programme of Curating, Managing and Mediating Art together with Professor Nora Sternfeld. Before that she has worked as a regional artist in Arts Council of Lapland, as a coordinator in FRAME, and as an interim director at HIAP–Helsinki International Artist Programme. At her current position she is co-directing Art Fair Suomi, a biennial contemporary art festival in Helsinki.
Ilona Sagar, lives and works in London. Using a diverse range of media spanning moving-image, text, performance and assemblage, she has formed a body of work which responds to the social and historic context found in the public and private spaces we inhabit. By instrumentalising historical archives and their institutions, not as an encounter with a safely sealed past, but as something current and unstable that speaks urgently to our present condition, she explores the links between language, surface, technologies and the body through our increasingly mediated encounters in social, political and experiential space. Ilona Sagar is the Stanley Picker Arts Fellow 2021 and the Saastamoinen Foundation, Helsinki, artist in residence for 2022. Forthcoming commissions include ‘The Radio Ballads’ Serpentine Gallery, where she is one of four new commissions with Sonia Boyce, Helen Cammock and Rory Pilgrim (2021/22), and is embarking on a new solo commission with Firstsite Gallery, Colchester (2023).
View:
→ Announcement: Open Up and Shape Helsinki Symposium
→ Open Up Project: openupeu.com