In their second Institutional diary, Frame Contemporary Art Finland reflect on the challenges and responsibilities of the 2022 and last year.
Inclusive is a term that seems to be currently popping up in many places and situations when art institutions’ activities are discussed and critiqued. It feels that it can be used in discussion to speak about many different kinds of injustice that the institution is involved with. It almost feels like an over-compassing solution to all the possible challenges and power-related troubles in the activities of art institutions. But If the institution is just inclusive to different marginalised forms of art, bodyminds, participation, and cultural backgrounds is that enough for more socially and ecologically sustainable art organisations practices or is there something else needed? When speaking and thinking about inclusion, the immediate question is: inclusion of who and what and for where?
In the Islands of Kinship project, we tested and developed multiple forms of collaboration and practices of inclusion. We have worked with, for example, how to create accessible language within art context, permaculture and institutions, ableism and neurodiversity in art institutions.
Frame’s programming within the project build around the long-term Rehearsing Hospitalities public programme, looking at politics of hospitality and collaboration. We connected artists, curators and other practitioners in the field of contemporary art and beyond to build up and mediate new practices and engagements with diverse hospitalities. Rehearsing Hospitalities was a far-reaching collaborative process that nurtured the emergence of new practices and paradigms of political and cultural hospitality. We were trying to see hospitality and inclusion as an open-ended skill spreading among multiple social struggles that need to be constantly rehearsed.
During Autumn 2022 in Helsinki week-long programming looked at how to redistribute resources and power in sustainable ways.. The programme highlighted institutional, curatorial and artistic practices that go beyond offers of hospitality and transgress unbalanced forms of power distribution, such as those instilled in host and guest dynamics. Rather than simply working through “inclusion” and “invitation”—which often privileges the host—we were trying to imagine what decentralisation and redistribution of institutions, land and public life and the power they hold might do to support a more equal and just arts ecology. How might redistributing power and wealth remove some of the access barriers which block marginalised communities from participating in and (re)forming the fields of arts and culture?
In January 2023, the Editorial Tables – Reciprocal Hospitalities exhibition organised with The Showroom, celebrated the production and dissemination of knowledge through the act of independent, experimental and artist-led publishing, with a focus on intersecting feminist and decolonial perspectives. The project involves a range of publishing, archiving, print and distribution practices by artists, curators and art workers, bringing these into relation and dialogue in the lead-up to the realisation of the exhibition. The exhibition space aims to open up new connections through live processes of encounter and exchange around the printed matter, where visitors can engage and think with the material in the space. The project challenged who is allowed and has resources to produce, disseminate and archive knowledge.
