Helsinki Biennial 2023 is created together with five curatorial collaborators
Helsinki Biennial and Joasia Krysa, head curator of the biennial’s second edition, 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 HAM Helsinki Art Museum’s collections to bring attention to what is not immediately visible to human perception, and to make new versions of the biennial.
Joasia Krysa, head curator of Helsinki Biennial 2023, says:
“Helsinki Biennial is committed to responsible exhibition-making and inclusive principles – not as a theme but an ethical position and a method – and this extends to the curatorial process. Curating is a practice that is best shared, and so the next edition of Helsinki Biennial is conceived as an exercise in co-creating to explore the ways of thinking and doing a biennial otherwise. I have invited a number of arts collectives, research institutions, and other kinds of entities – as ‘curatorial intelligences’ – to join the process and to think through the issues pertinent to the biennial together.”
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, as well as online.
The programme starts already in the fall of 2022 with the “Environment, Data, Contamination” course at the University of Arts Helsinki, part of Helsinki Biennial’s collaboration with the Critical Environmental Data research group led by Professor Jussi Parikka (Aarhus University). The course works as a year-long collaborative artistic research studio that engages with the themes of environmental data, sensing, and contamination. More info here.
Later in the fall of 2022, a public symposium will take place at HAM, produced in collaboration with Aalto University’s ViCCA programme.
Read more about the collaborators:
Museum of Impossible Forms (MIF) is a cultural centre located in Kontula, East Helsinki, and the coming together of communities of art and cultural workers invested in building anticolonial, antipatriarchal and non-fascist practices and futures. Over the past six years, MIF has unfolded as a heterogeneous platform to engage with experimental, marginal, and migrant forms of expression, and as a laboratory for experiences, critical thought, and radical imagination. MIF is a collaborative project that seeks to defy prejudices of otherness and structural asymmetries, working for dignity, diversity, equity, allyship and solidarity, and towards developing and strengthening a plurality of knowledges and practices in the arts.
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.
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.
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.
Photo: Verna Kovanen