Visual identity created by the Rodina.
Helsinki Biennial is an international art event that brings outstanding contemporary art to Vallisaari Island and locations around Helsinki. The second edition is curated by Joasia Krysa and takes place from 12 June to 17 September 2023. Helsinki Biennial 2023 will comprise exhibitions, a discursive and performative public programme, film screenings, publications, and an online programme. It will take place on Vallisaari Island, HAM Helsinki Art Museum and other venues and public places in the city. HAM Helsinki Art Museum is responsible for producing the biennial.
Joasia Krysa is a UK-based, Polish-born curator and scholar working at the intersection of contemporary art and technology. She is Professor of Exhibition Research at Liverpool John Moores University. Between 2012–2015 she was Artistic Director of Kunsthal Aarhus, Denmark. She was part of the curatorial team for Documenta 13 (2012), and co-curator of the 9th Liverpool Biennial (2016). Past projects have been presented at, amongst others, The Whitney Museum of American Art, ZKM Center for Art and Media, and Tate Modern. Her current research focuses on AI and curating.
Back row from left: Bassam El Baroni, Ali Akbar Mehta, Giovanna Esposito Yussif, Marianne Savallampi, Patrizia Constantin. Front row from left: Jussi Parikka, Joasia Krysa, May Ee Wong. Photo: Verna Kovanen
Helsinki Biennial and Joasia Krysa have invited five arts, research, and technological entities as curatorial collaborators in the upcoming biennial. The collaborators are Museum of Impossible Forms, a cultural centre and queer-feminist project located in East Helsinki; TBA21–Academy, a research centre and cultural ecosystem fostering a deeper relationship to the ocean through the lens of art; Critical Environmental Data, a transdisciplinary research group at Aarhus University in Denmark; ViCCA @ Aalto ARTS (Visual Cultures, Curating and Contemporary Art), Aalto University’s transdisciplinary major; and an A.I. Entity that will explore museum collections to bring attention to what is not immediately visible to human perception, and to make new versions of the biennial.
Museum of Impossible Forms (m{if}) is a cultural centre and queer-feminist project located in Kontula, East Helsinki, whose praxis reconfigures the notion of Museum to transgress the boundaries/borders between art, politics, practice, theory, artist and spectator. Museum of Impossible Forms was awarded the Tutkijaliitto Award in 2019 and the State Art Prize 2020 in the field of multi-disciplinary art by The National Arts Council and the Arts Promotion Centre Finland (Taike).
Project led by: Ali Akbar Mehta, Marianne Savallampi, Giovanna Esposito Yussif
TBA21–Academy is a research centre and cultural ecosystem fostering a deeper relationship to the ocean through the lens of art to inspire care and action. Established in 2011, the Academy has been an incubator for collaborative research, artistic production, and new forms of knowledge by combining art and science for more than a decade. In 2019, TBA21–Academy launched Ocean Space, an exhibition venue located in the Church of San Lorenzo in Venice, as well as Ocean-Archive.org, a user-based online platform.
Project led by: Markus Reymann
Critical Environmental Data is a transdisciplinary research group that focuses on the interaction of aesthetics, digital culture, and worlds of environmental damage. Part of Aarhus University in Denmark, the group conducts research and participates in international curatorial projects in art and design in order to address architectures and infrastructures of environmental data. The group investigates forms of sensing and aesthetics as well as spaces and places of data and environmental change.
Project led by: Jussi Parikka, May Ee Wong and Paolo Patelli
As part of the Helsinki Biennial programme, Critical Environmental Data and Uniarts’ Research Pavilion are hosting a course called Environment, Data, Contamination. The course is a collaborative artistic research studio that engages with the themes of environmental data, sensing, and contamination.
Doctoral candidates and master’s students attending the course have written artistic and theoretical writings engaging with the themes. You can read them here.
Related events:
An online guest talk by Cindy Lin on Rethinking Errors in Machine Learning.
A symposium on 9 March with the theme “Contamination, Art & the Environmental Condition”. More information coming later.
ViCCA @ Aalto ARTS – Visual Cultures, Curating and Contemporary Art (ViCCA) is a major at Aalto University’s School of Art, Design and Architecture. ViCCA engages with emerging knowledge and practices at the intersections of multiple fields through an arts-driven engagement with societal, economic, ecological and philosophical concerns. ViCCA is characterised by a strong transdisciplinary approach across art, curating, science, and technology.
Project led by: Bassam El Baroni, Patrizia Constantin