Baltic Circle believes in the aesthetic and affective powers of the arts, and in the potential of social and political agency of performance. The works seen at the festival grasp the phenomena and crucial questions of our times, and search for new forms of performing arts and revised modes of production. In addition to festival production, Baltic Circle participates actively in both Finnish and international performing arts networks, takes part in multi-level development and education initiatives, makes publications, organises residencies and artistic exchanges, helps build up and shape the independent performing arts scene, and influences local cultural policy.

Baltic Circle is based on a firm belief in the possibility of the arts to bring people together and to participate in societal change. Art can be a space to imagine what does not yet exist, to make visible what is hidden, to re-organise our ways of understanding the world, and to find forms to share them. Our cornerstone is a trust in artists, partners and colleagues alike, as well as a boldness to tackle new phenomena and hushed realities, without prejudice. Baltic Circle highlights communality, collaboration and commitment as key elements in building a festival, and aims to encourage social justice, solidarity and gender equality.

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Globe Art Point was established in 28.9.2016 by Finnish and non-Finnish born artists and culture workers resident in Finland. The founding members of Globe Art Point ry were Circo Criollo, European Theatre collective association ry, Osuuskunta SummArt, Sivuvalo multilingual literature project, Teatteriyhdistys Metamorfoosi ry and Paola Livorsi, Marek Pluciennik and Tomi Purovaara.

To promote and support the status and working conditions of international artists and cultural actors of different art forms living in Finland. Associations territory is Finland. To implement its aim association organises training and advice workshops with an admission fee, produces information and guide materials and acts as a cultural-political advocate.To support its activities association can organise training and celebration events, implement surveys, receive grants, donates and wills, own real and movable property needed for its activities, implement fund collecting or lottery with a proper permission and raise funds with some other means.

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Art commissioning agency IHME Helsinki (between 2008-2018 IHME Contemporary Art festival) wants to promote art in an ecologically sustainable, democratic society as an important part of people’s lives and everyday existences. IHME Helsinki’s starting points are in contemporary art and one of the main contexts for its work is scientific collaboration. 

Each year, in collaboration with an artist and Finnish and foreign partners IHME produces a work of art in public space in Finland and abroad. IHME Helsinki generates new, experiential knowledge and produces discussions related to the themes of the artwork. IHME shares the content of the art that it produces with new audiences and through that content takes part in debates in society.

Artist Yael Bartana’s True Finn was IHME Project 2014 and commissioned by IHME Contemporary Art Festival. In her film Yael Bartana looks at Finnishness and at the way that national identity serves as a mechanism for inclusion and exclusion. An open call was used to select eight people representing different ethnic backgrounds, religions and political viewpoints, the aim being to create a utopia moment in Finland. They all spent a week living together in a house by a lake in the middle of the Finnish winter, and the life and discussions that took place there were filmed. The film, which combines reality-TV, staged scenes in costume, plus film-archive material, had its world premiere in Helsinki 2014. 

The Finnish word IHME means “miracle” or “wonder”. However, it is in daily use in a variety of phrases meaning something strange, weird, something that wakens curiosity.

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Index has a history of more than 40 years behind it. Firstly, with a focus on photography and publishing, and for the last 20 years with contemporary art as its cultural sphere. Index has been extremely important for the artistic context in Stockholm and the art world of northern and central Europe, however Index is not just history. We work with questions of the contemporary, using clear tools and formats.

The size of Index is “human” and the contact with its visitors is defined as a permanent dialogue. Being placed at the center of Stockholm helps Index to be understood as a key institution and node within contemporary art networks.

Index has multiple public roles as an art institution. We are a platform for artists and for audiences. We understand that the role of an art institution like Index does not begin and end with an exhibition – instead there is an ongoingness to the activities, research processes, learning programs and relationships between Index, artists and audiences. Index works with an artistic conceptual approach that aims to carve out space and time for criticality, dialogue, curiosity and building discursive situations that develop the role of art today.

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In 2005 Max Andrews and Mariana Cánepa Luna founded Latitudes, a curatorial office based in Barcelona, Spain, that works internationally across contemporary art practices. Latitudes has worked in a variety of formats and situations including more than 50 projects encompassing exhibitions, public realm commissions, film screenings and discursive programmes. Expertise includes commissioning site and context-specific artworks, leading online and printed editorial projects, as well as convening and taking part in a wide range of pedagogical formats, symposia and conferences. Latitudes current research focuses on material narratives, biographies of objects, and a world-ecological perspective on art histories.

Latitudes has organised exhibitions and projects for institutions including the CAPC musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux (2017–18), Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA) (2016), Barcelona Gallery Weekend (2015 and 2016), Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Castilla y León (MUSAC) (2011), Kunsthal Århus (2011), the Port of Rotterdam (2010), New Museum, New York (2010) and the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin (2008).

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Kohta is a privately initiated kunsthalle in Helsinki’s rapidly developing Kalasatama area. We have around 160 square meters of exhibition space on the top floor of a 1980s industrial building, divided into a main space and a studio space. We present and promote uncompromising contemporary art in all its forms, deliberately choosing to work with the exhibition as a contemporary format for producing and sharing knowledge and understanding. Our mission is to feature artistic thinking in its many forms and showcase artists from different generations and media.

Our exhibition programme aims to consistently reflect the complexity and capacity of visual art today and its futures-oriented potential.It brings together contemporary artists from Finland and the rest of the world. In addition to producing 5–6 exhibitions a year, we also curate events, such as screenings and talks, with the aim to create a fruitful dialogue around and about contemporary art and connect the dots between different art forms.

Kohta is a Finnish word that means both ‘space’ and ‘soon’. The members of the Kohta Council are artists Magdalena Åberg, Martti Aiha, Thomas Nyqvist, Nina Roosand, Hans Rosenström, Richard Misekand and Anders Kreuger, who also directs Kohta’s daily activities. Kohta is initiated and partly supported by the EMO Foundation. In 2019 Kohta also receives support from the City of Helsinki, the Swedish Cultural Foundation in Finland and Stiftelsen Tre Smeder.

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The Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art (LCCA) is the largest institution of contemporary art in Latvia that curates and produces contemporary art events of national and international scale. As of 1993, it has researched and curated contemporary art processes both in Latvia and abroad to provoke critical reflection on issues topical for contemporary society. We are widely recognized for our annual international contemporary art festival SURVIVAL KIT, regular exhibitions at the Latvian National Museum of Art, as well as Latvia’s representation at the Venice Biennale, Manifesta, São Paulo Art Biennial, Kochi-Muziris Biennale, Rauma Biennale of Contemporary Art among others. We are engaged in developing the world as a polyphonic utopia where many views and voices can exist side by side complementing one another. Here people participate instead of consume, use contemporary art to shed light on a wide range of issues, think critically, with tolerance and minds open to what is different; here change is encouraged and people seek answers outside their habitual trajectories.

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The MA Degree Programme in Live Art and Performance Studies (LAPS) is a meeting place for graduate students with training in various fields of art or other fields in the humanities and sciences relevant to the study of performance, such as philosophy, psychology, gender studies, ethnography, anthropology, cognitive science et al. The programme combines critical thinking with experimentation in artistic work and artistic research. The objective of the programme is to enable artists coming from different environments, classes, cultures, and upbringing, but where the substance of their work is in the present and future.

LAPS is a residential MA programme based in Helsinki, Finland that comprises an intensive schedule of seminars, courses, workshops, mentor meetings, and space for individual research. Credits are tied to the completion of various courses and workshops, performance and personal/collaborative research. The LAPS programme provides a platform for developing practice in connection with the academic research environment and experimental practice of performance and live art.

The Live Art and Performance Studies (LAPS) programme provides a platform for students to practice and research the future potential of performance and live art in the context of the post-human. In this way LAPS is a unique programme that updates live art and performance studies to the 2020s. The programme’s ethos is broadly post-humanist, and aims to explore performance as a mode of inquiry into four contemporary themes: Futures, Humans, Technologies and Economies, explored over the duration of the 2-year programme. The emphasis is instead on the critical evaluation of any prognosis of futures, through practice and research.

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Museum of Impossible Forms is a cultural space. For us the Museum is a contested Space and it represents a contact zone, a space of unlearning, formulating identity constructs, norm-critical consciousness and critical thinking. Impossible Forms are those that erase and facilitate the process of transgressing the boundaries/borders between art, politics, practice, theory, the artist and the spectator.

The Museum of Impossible Forms is a space in flux, a platform for experiences and a laboratory of thought. The core of the space is a library and an archive – real, imagined and embodied. Museum of Impossible Forms – M{if} was founded by an independent group of Helsinki artists/curators/philosophers/activists/pedagogists in spring 2017 as an antiracist and queer-feminist project, a heterogeneous space, and as an experimental and migrant form of expression. The Museum of Impossible Forms opens up a broad horizon though its political character, its accessibility and openness, its multilingual library, an ongoing archive, and through its workshops and events.

For 2019-2020, M{if} operates under the curatorial theme of ‘The Atlas of Lost Beliefs (For Insurgents, Citizens and Untitled Bodies)’

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Curated by Eva González-Sancho Bodero and Per Gunnar Eeg-Tverbakk, osloBIENNALEN FIRST EDITION 2019-2024 is a five-year programme of art in public space and the public sphere that will evolve and grow, adding and announcing new projects and participants as the biennial moves forward in time. osloBIENNALEN is initiated and financed by the City of Oslo, Agency for Cultural Affairs, Norway. The project is the outcome of OSLO PILOT, a two-year experimental and research-based project that laid the groundwork for the biennial.

A new format for art in public space, a film and audio production unit, a publisher and a headquarter shared with over 50 subsidised artist studios, osloBIENNALEN on May 25th 2019 launched 16 projects, and will launch a further 10 in October 2019. Both programme launches are accompanied by professional symposia and seminars. The 2019 symposium will focus on the first of four biennial headlines, ‘Art Production Within a Locality’, co-organised with urbanist Marius Grønning. The film season and seminar ‘Where Memories are Made’, co-organised with Kunstnerens Hus, will focus on artists film production. The osloBIENNALEN FIRST EDITON 2019-2024 programme will continue to take place in public space and the public sphere over the next five years, offering the citizens of Oslo and international visitors a prolific programme and many opportunities to see and interact with a wide variety of contemporary art projects by local and international visiting artists with varying rhythms, tempos, and life-spans.

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PUBLICS is a curatorial agency with a dedicated library and reading room in Vallila. The newly established space also works as an educational platform where artists, curators, cultural workers, students and communities are invited to engage with social issues, as well as gain and share knowledge. PUBLICS collaborates and supports other art initiatives who share the investment in exploring the public life of art and its relevance. 

The organization is driven by the ambition to recognize changes within society and create connections between different groups by providing an open and ethically led platform for creative synergies. Under the artistic direction of curator Paul O’Neill, with program manager and curator Eliisa Suvanto, PUBLICS explores a “work together” institutional model with multiple overlapping objectives, thematic strands and collaborations. 

PUBLICS develops out of Checkpoint Helsinki, a contemporary art initiative established in 2013. In its spirit, PUBLICS continues this organization’s commitment to critical social thinking, contemporary art and publicness.