I am part of the working group of The Curatorial School of May: a project initiated by ViCCA, Aalto University as part of The Helsinki Biennial Art Mediation Forum 2023.
My text 'Never Ours' features in the publication The Helsinki Biennial Art Mediation Forum 2023: An Anthology produced by The Curatorial School of May as an imaginative reader around some of the key themes and concerns of the biennial.
The text lays out the interests and questions which are further explored in two thematic guided tours that I curated and facilitated on the 16th and 23rd August 2023.
The tour invited the visitors to consider how belonging to place and shared identities are constructed through inhabiting the land. Visiting five artworks installed in Vallisaari, the tour connected situated cultural productions, to people’s collective use of natural resources, and different practices of moving across and beyond borders. Hence, three main focus points thread through the visits: nomadism, borderisation, identity. The dialogue encouraged to notice how cultural expression negotiates power dynamics and shifting living conditions. The relations produced as people move, grappling with identities and borders, are reflected and documented in their making of culture and language. These influence how people navigate and participate in the world everyday, how they shape and impact communal living.
Artists featuring in the tour: PHOSfate (Mohamed Sleiman Labat and Pekka Niskanen), Asunción Molinos Gordo, Sepideh Rahaa, Matti Aikio, RED FOREST (Oleksiy Radynski, David Muñoz-Alcántara, Diana McCarty and Mijke van der Drift).
A booklet accompanied the tour gathering research and literary references: The Neverending Story of (Art) Utopia
Tour held on August 16th 2023. All photo credits on this page: Emma Curatolo.
Visitors listening to RED FOREST, On the Loss of Energy, www.redforest.world
Helsinki Biennial 2023 'New Directions May Emerge' is curated by chief curator Joasia Krysa and five invited collaborators:
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 (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.
Helsinki Biennial 2023 opens from 12 June to 17 September 2023 on Vallisaari island, HAM Helsinki Art Museum, STOA Kulttuurikeskus, and other locations.
The Helsinki Biennial Art Mediation Forum 2023: An Anthology, ed. Patrizia Costantin and Bassam El Baroni.
