Abinaya Nathan is a London-based Eelam Tamil activist and former editor of the Tamil Guardian. Through her writing, she explores how Eelam Tamils in the homeland and diaspora are portrayed in the media and academia. Abinaya currently works in climate campaigns and is undertaking a Master’s degree researching the intersections between conflict and climate activism.
Issue 16 / Writing Tamilness: Perspectives From Tamil Futures and Tamil Guardian
Adele Jarrar (PS, 1992) is an independent curator, cultural worker, and researcher with a focus on self-organization, artist-run initiatives, and alternative modes of cultural production. Adele worked as a curator, researcher, and writer with the collective The Question of Funding at Documenta 15 in Kassel, Germany, and was a resident at the Unidee Residency Summer 2022: Sustaining Embedded Arts Practice in Biella, Italy. She has a BA in Architecture from Birzeit University and an MA in Arts and Cultural Management from Leuphana University Luneburg. She has curated a number of exhibitions in a wide-range of art institutions and platforms, namely The Palestinian Museum, The French Institute Jerusalem, the Khalil Sakakini Cultural Centre, and Decentraland Metaverse, among others. Her writings appeared in many outlets and publications, such as Awham magazine, 7iber, LIFTA volumes, NO NIIN Magazine, Rusted Radishes, and “Reworlding Ramallah: short science fiction stories from Palestine”.
Issue 18 / “For All Wars to Come”: An Interview with Noor Abed
Ahmed Rabbani (b. 1969, Mecca) is a visual artist currently based in Karachi, Pakistan. Ahmed is a painter who first developed his practice during the eighteen years he spent in detainment at Guantanamo Bay, incarcerated without charge after being misidentified as a terrorist. His work ranges in style from abstract and metaphorical to more realistic imagery, providing commentary on the greater political structures at work in his home countries as well as the processing of his experiences of detainment and memories of the outside world. Ahmed has a background as a chef and has recently opened a restaurant called ‘Al Arab Food’ in Karachi.
Issue 19 / The Unforgotten Moon: Liberating Art from Guantánamo Bay
Arvind Ramachandran is an immigrant from India who moved to Finland to study and stayed after to work. He has been involved in various initiatives working towards a more equal Finland. He dreams of a vibrant, multilingual, multi-ethnic, progressive, and inclusive Finnish society, where race, origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, class position, and other personal attributes do not affect one’s possibility of living a good life. He was a Left Alliance candidate in the 2021 local elections in Helsinki and is constantly exploring ways to build solidarity and political power among minorities. Arvind can be reached at arvind@arvind.cc.
Issue 18 / Only Solidarity, Not Respectability, Can Topple Finland’s Dangerous Far-Right Government
Dahlia El Broul is an artist, educator, and curator from New York City. She holds a BFA in Illustration and a minor in Art History from FIT and earned her MA in Curating, Managing, and Mediating Art from Aalto University in Finland. In New York, she was a teaching artist for institutions like BAAD!, the 92nd Street Y Art Center, MoMA PS1, the Hudson River Museum, and Flux Factory. In 2017, she was part of the educational team for documenta 14 in Kassel, Germany. In Finland, she has developed educational programs and collaborated with institutions such as Espoo Museum of Modern Art, Helsinki International Artists Programme, Frame Contemporary Art Finland, Gallery Hippolyte, Kunsthalle Seinäjoki, Museum of Impossible Forms, and Globe Art Point, and currently teaches drawing at Art School Maa. From 2020-2023, she was the chair of Catalysti ry, an arts association focused on anti-racist work, inclusivity, and equity in the Finnish art scene. Dahlia is a doctoral candidate at the University of Fine Arts Hamburg (HFBK).
Issue 19 / Leaving Minimal Imprints on the Landscape: A Conversation with Joasia Krysa
Eetu Viren is a writer and translator based in Helsinki who has published Vallankumouksen asennot (2021) (“Positions of revolution”), Raha ja työvoima (2018) (“Money and labour power”), and Seutu joka ei ole paikka (“The region that is no place. Capitalism and the Metropolis” 2015, with Jussi Vähämäki).
Issue 16 / The Poor Rich People: A Review of ‘The Philosophy of Wealth’
Elyas Alavi is a poet and visual artist whose practice addresses of identity, displacement, race, religion, gender, and sexuality through poetry, painting, installation, performance and moving image. More specifically, his work explores complex histories in the Greater Middle East region. Born in Daikundi province, Afghanistan, Alavi moved to Iran as a child following the intensification of war in his homeland. He is currently based in Australia.
Greeshma Kuthar practiced law before transitioning to a career in media. She served as the head of the social media desk at Firstpost. During her time there, she authored an 18-part series on the rise of Hindu Nationalism in southern Coastal Karnataka. Following her tenure at Firstpost, she has been researching how RSS propagates Cultural Nationalism across southern India. Her most recent work is the cover story for The Caravan titled “All Santhosh’s Men: The BJP’s re-engineering of Karnataka.”
Issue 17 / Blending Art, Friendship & Advocacy: A Conversation With Dr. Aiswarya Rao
Helia Hamedani is an art historian and an independent curator with a particular interest in the intercultural field. She has collaborated with non-profit cultural associations and curated exhibitions in both Iran and Italy. She has also co-curated projects for inclusion and education through art, for public schools in Rome. She is a PhD student in Art History at Sapienza University of Rome and has conducted courses on contemporary art in Tehran. Her doctoral research focuses on the studies and perspectives of Ruyin Pakbaz, intending to analyze the state of Iranian art historiography over the past 60 years.
Issue 19 / Open Wounds, Invisible Bodies: A Conversation with Liryc Dela Cruz
Ioana Țîștea is a PhD researcher at Tampere University, Faculty of Education and Culture. She is finalising her doctoral thesis, Creolizing the epistemologies and methodologies of Nordic migration research: Autoethnographic↔Reflexive↔Collaborative Stories and Entanglements.
Issue 16 / Creating Critical Tools Through Romani Vernacular Storytelling
Jaakko Uoti works in the contemporary arts and as a freelance-writer and editor with a focus in art and visual culture. He’s the former editor in chief of the Finnish online cultural journal Mustekala.info. He holds MA degrees in art history and communication studies.
Issue 18 / There Are No Enfants Terribles Here: A Review of Generation 2023
Jared Maxilom, born in Olongapo City, Philippines, is a Filipino poet based in Sharjah. His poems have been read or appeared in Poetic Heart, DFA Philippines, Postscript Magazine, among many others. Inspired from the narratives of real and imagined lives within the migrant experience, his poems explore themes of solitude, memories, and the profound.
Leonardo Custódio currently works as a postdoctoral researcher at Åbo Akademi. He has founded and coordinates, with Camilla Marucco, the Activist Research Network in Finland. Working at the intersections between academia, activism and organised civil society, Custódio is a leading scholar on collaborative knowledge production about media activism and communication for social change. He has produced the collaborative documentary “Complexos” (Bombozila, 2020), co-authored with Dr. Sabine Harrer, the schoolbook “Fair Play: Confronting Racism and Coloniality in Games” (KAVI, 2022) and published “Favela media activism: Counterpublics for human rights in Brazil” (Lexington Books, 2017).
María Villa (Bogotá 1977) is a facilitator, curator, and researcher based in Helsinki. She works in the crossroads of feminist epistemologies, radical pedagogy, relational art, and embodied practices. She is a multidisciplinary practitioner interested in entanglements of care in complex contemporary forms of interdependence and unlearning binary mindsets. Her work explores varied media, from voice, movement, and performance to experimental writing and cartographic practices. Runner, baker, mother.
Massa Reza (b.1998, Sanandaj) is an artist living and working in Sanandaj, Kurdistan, Iran.
Max Ryynänen is a Helsinki-based ex gallerist (ROR Gallery, Kallio Kunsthalle, Gallery KLEIN) and writer (essayist, novelist). He has written on film, dance, theater, and visual arts for Flash Art International, Ice Hole, Art Pulse, Kunstkritikk, Atlantica Internacional, Filmihullu, Taide, Teatteri and Esitys. As a scholar Ryynänen has studied film, kitsch, rap music, heritage, art systems, sports, aesthetics vs. politics, architecture, and aesthetic/somatic experience. For more information, go to http://maxryynanen.net.
Issue 17 / Many Moves but No Broken Bones: A Review of ‘Flip! Skate & Art’
Natasha Malik is a visual artist and curator based in Islamabad, Pakistan. She sees curation as an extension of her artistic practice and is interested in the synthesis of art making and curation in the context of regional education, history, censorship, and social justice. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally. Visceral reactions to tensions experienced under oppressive patriarchal structures are processed and reimagined through her visual vocabulary. The work produced allows space to confront the frictions between interiority and the predominant systems of patriarchy and capitalism. She is the founder of The Creative Process, which was initially envisioned as a collective and now functions as an artistic platform through which she curates site-specific projects.
Issue 19 / The Unforgotten Moon: Liberating Art from Guantánamo Bay
Natasha Marie Llorens is an independent curator and writer based in Stockholm, where she teaches art theory at the Royal Institute of Art. Llorens is a regular contributor to Artforum and e-flux Criticism. Her writing has also recently appeared in ArtPapers, Art Margins, and frieze, as well as in exhibition catalogs for Djamel Tatah and Ulrike Rosenbach, among others. She was awarded the Andy Warhol Arts Writers grant for short-form art criticism in 2022. Llorens holds a Ph.D. from Columbia University (2021) and an MA from the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College (2011).
Olivia Twist is an Illustrator and Educator from East London.The key threads which can be found in her work are place, the mundane and overlooked narratives. Her striking visual language comprises of a myriad of esoteric layers informed by a propensity for human-centered research methodologies.As a practitioner her aims are to provide her audience with the ‘shock of the familiar’ and to trigger greater intergenerational discussion. She has a strong interest in participatory design, relational aesthetics and documenting social history as it unfolds.
Osheen Siva is a multidisciplinary artist from Thiruvannamalai, currently based in Goa. Through the lens of surrealism, speculative fiction, and science fiction and rooted in their Dalit and Tamil heritage, Siva imagines new worlds of decolonized dreamscapes, futuristic oasis with mutants and monsters, and narratives of queer and feminine power. They work in a variety of mediums, including immersive media, installations, performance art, public art, and digital illustration.
Issue 16 / Writing Tamilness: Perspectives From Tamil Futures and Tamil Guardian
Patrizia Costantin is a lecturer and researcher in curating whose work investigates the curatorial as a site for knowledge production and political worldbuilding. She is particularly interested in exploring the role of curating as a relational practice in negotiating with reality, contemporaneity and the technological realm. Costantin completed her PhD in Curatorial Practice at the Postgraduate Arts and Humanities Centre (Manchester Metropolitan University) in May 2019. Her thesis, machines will watch us die: a curatorial study on the contemporaneity of digital decay, contextualised and reflected upon the research exhibition machines will watch us die, which explored digital decay after the material turn in media studies. It focused on exploring the various layers of the impact of digital materialities on our understanding of time and on the environment. Her research methodology is based on a relational and postmedium approach to the curatorial. She is currently Head of Visual Cultures, Curating and Contemporary Art (ViCCA) and Programme Director of the MA in Art and Media at Aalto University.
Issue 18 / Feedback in Relation: On Friendship, Microcosms & Constructive Criticism
Priyanka Paul aka Artwhoring is a self-taught illustrator, writer and generally funny person from Mumbai, India. Their work revolves around the themes of social justice, marginalisation and self-exploration. In her free time, you can find her hoarding zines, fighting on the internet and drinking copious amounts of iced tea.
Rebecca Close works at the intersection of art, technology and poetry, with a research focus on histories of reproduction and reproductive politics. Their films, ceramic pieces, creative coding experiments and poems often address everyday experiences of the Internet interface, notions of the network and the viral as these intersect and inform sexuality, social relationships, experiences of the familial and access to the commons. Their work has been supported by a fellowship with the Center for Art, Design + Social Research, a residency with Hangar Institute for Arts and Technology and a Kone Foundation grant to support their doctoral research project “Post-internet Queer Reproductive Work and the Fixed Capital of Fertility” at Aalto University, Finland. They are the author of two poetry collections, Valid, Virtual, Vegetable Reality (Melita Hume Prize, 2018) and Réplica (Canal, 2022), and edit Them, All Magazine, for poetry, Net/Software/Code art, critical writing and their intersections.
Renia White is a writer and instructor originally from Maryland. Her poetry can be found in The Recluse, Southern Indiana Review, the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day series, and elsewhere. She’s based in Brooklyn, NY where she’s at work on her next book-length project.
Sanabel Abdelrahman is a bilingual writer (Arabic and English) of fiction and essays. She holds a Ph.D. in Arabic studies with a focus on Palestinian magical realism. She is interested in questions around alternative literatures, re-processing traditional figures into contemporary literature, and studying fictional and distorted spaces. Sanabel is also interested in contemporary art and film.
Issue 17 / Approaches to Palestinian Liberation: Magical Realism as Resistance Literature
Satu Herrala is a curator and researcher with a background in dance and choreography. She is interested in how attuning to bodily coexistence informs ways of being, knowing and acting and how collective action emerges from embodiment. Her curatorial works include A I S T I T / coming to our senses contemporary art programme in collaboration with Hans Rosenström (2021), Baltic Circle festival programmes (2015–2019), Make Arts Policy in collaboration with Eva Neklyaeva, Dana Yahalomi and Terike Haapoja (2014), and a series of Sauna Lectures (2011–2015). She is a member of Pauliina Feodoroff’s working group that collaborated with Feodoroff on her performance and installation Matriarchy at the Sámi Pavilion at the 59th Venice Biennale. Satu is a regular mentor and guest teacher at the University of the Arts Helsinki and Iceland University of the Arts (2016-2020). Currently, she is working as a doctoral researcher at Aalto University with the support of Kone Foundation.
Issue 18 / Embodied Curating: Attuning the Body From Artistic to Political
Sergey Isakov is an illustrator and visual artist mainly focused on the editorial market. He graduated with honors from the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in 2019. His work is characterized by its bold use of color, textures, and shapes. He is inspired by printmaking, risograph, and print.
Shaden Abed-Elal (he/him) lives in Jerusalem and is currently a second-year visual communication student at Bezalel Academy for Arts and Design. He has an interest in Palestine, activism, and the humanities, with a particular focus on gender, women, and sexuality studies.
Issue 17 / Approaches to Palestinian Liberation: Magical Realism as Resistance Literature
Shadia Rask (b. 1987, Espoo, Finland) is a PhD and free writer. As a scholar, her research has focused on immigration related health inequity and the manifestations of structural racism. Shadia writes a regular column for Yle and has published an autobiographic essay, ‘Hair play’, on growing up with black curly hair in one of the whitest countries in the world.
Issue 18 / Rewriting and Dreaming Afro Finnish History: A Conversation With Wisam Elfadl
Shohreh Shakoory (1983, Tehran) is an art historian, researcher, and curator based in Berlin. Her work investigates the intersection of modes of knowledge production, social resistances, and the political dimension of contemporary aesthetic practices. She currently works as a cultural producer and researcher in Berlin.
Siddhesh Gautam is a Delhi based multi-discipline, mixed-media artist, designer, treasure hunter, fallen angel, soul searcher and an Ambedkarite. His work is a personification of his personal journey to Begumpura (land of no sorrow). He shares his glasses with the world in the hope of inspiring a deeper connection between people through visual art and encouraging people to live deeply, love fearlessly, and to appreciate this heavenly place called Earth. His work is meant to challenge your preconceptions, expand your mind and evoke feelings of agitation, exploration, and deeper connection with the self. He is currently focusing on the visual documentation of the anti-caste movement.
Sindu Sivayogam, a visual artist from Canada, explores her identity as a Tamil woman through a feminist lens. She creates visual interpretations of various topics including Tamil collective memory and the impact of violence, genocide, patriarchal systems and the militarized state on her community. She approaches her work with the goal of striking a personal harmony between her identity, her politics and her culture. She recently contributed to The Globe and Mail’s Summer Canadian Comic Series (2021).
சிந்துஜன் வரதராஜா (Sinthujan Varatharajah) is an independent researcher and essayist based in Berlin. The focus of their work is statelessness, mobility and geographies of power with a special focus on infrastructure, logistics and architecture. In 2020 Varatharajah participated in the 11th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art with the exhibition “how to move an arch”. They are the co-curator of the Berlin-based multimedia event series “dissolving territories: cultural geographies of a new eelam” and a former Open City Fellow of the Open Society Foundations. Their first book “an alle orte, die hinter uns liegen” (“to all the places we have left behind”) was published in September 2022 in Germany by Hanser Verlag.
Sophia Mitiku (b.1995, California) is a singer, producer, and sound artist. Mitiku is easily recognizable by her explorative sound - gravitating between experimental RnB and avant-pop, she fluently crafts a liminal space of dreams and fantasy, nostalgia, and loss.
Issue 16 / Between Being Political & Being Politicized: A Conversation With Ánnámáret
Stephanie Misa (PHL/ USA) is a visual artist and researcher whose work centers around decolonizing methodologies. She consistently follows her interest in complex and diverse histories through her various multimedia installations and performances. Her artistic practice connects multicultural collaboration, curating and feminist criticism. In her doctoral research, Misa examines phenomena pertaining to the oralities and the richness of multilingualism.
She graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna in 2012. She has a masters from the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU and is a doctoral candidate at the University of Arts Helsinki. Misa currently teaches at the department of Artistic Strategies at the University of Applied Arts Vienna.
Her recent projects include participation in the 9th Bucharest Biennale (2021) and a duo-show at the KODA House on Governors Island, NYC (2022). Upcoming projects are the RMIT Culture Exchange Residency & solo exhibit in Melbourne (2023), a solo at Kunstraum Lakeside in Klagenfurt (2023) and participation in the Mai Ling exhibition, Vienna Secession (2023). Misa was awarded the Art Foundation Merita Prize (now the Nordea Art Foundation Finland) in 2021.
Taru Kallio (b.1986 in Leppävirta, Finland) received an MFA from Universitetet i Bergen, Kunst Musikk og Design in 2017 in Bergen, Norway. Her works form ecosystems where personal experiences, stories, mythologies, dreams, and nightmares intermingle. Her latest exhibitions included: Tm galleria, Helsinki (2023), Tegnerforbundet, Oslo (2023 and 2020), Galleria Huuto, Helsinki (2020), and Kunsthaus Hamburg, Hamburg (2020). She lives and works in Oslo, Norway.
Teo Georgiev (b.1992) is a Bulgarian illustrator, designer and artist based in Helsinki. He is currently pursuing an MA in Visual Narrative at Aalto University, where he explores the intersection of comics and migration studies. His interest lies in Balkan history, migration trends and how feelings of belonging are being communicated and explored through visual means. From children’s books through to editorial illustrations, Teo draws playful characters, surreal stories and whimsical environments, which he then intertwines with inspiration collected from nature, culture and history. His style is a combination of naïve shapes, organic forms and bold colours. His list of past clients includes WWF, Habitat for Humanity, Converse, InVision and FineActs, as well as boutique businesses and local NGOs.
Issue 18 / Feedback in Relation: On Friendship, Microcosms & Constructive Criticism
Tuomas A. Laitinen is an artist who works with video, sound, glass, and chemical processes to explore the entanglements of multispecies coexistence. Laitinen composes situations and installations that inquire into the porous interconnectedness of language, body, and matter within morphing ecosystems. He received the Fine Arts Academy of Finland award in 2013, the AVEK prize for media arts in 2021, and is nominated for the 2023 Ars Fennica prize.
Issue 17 / Contact Reality: A Conversation with Maija Blåfield
Valentina Vitali is Professor of Film Studies at the University of East London and co-director of the Centre for Creative and Cultural Practice (CCP, UEL). Her research explores the intersection of economics, history and film aesthetics from a comparative perspective. Publications include Capital and Popular Cinema, Hindi Action Cinema, and Theorising National Cinema (co-edited with Paul Willemen). She has curated, among other events, Contemporary South Asian Films by Women (FACT, Liverpool) and Alia Syed: Recent Works (Whitechapel Gallery, London), and edited a special issue of BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies on women filmmakers in South Asia. Valentina is currently working on a AHRC-funded project on video online distribution and independent cinema in South Asia.
Issue 16 / South Asian Women’s Cinema: Between Festivals & Streaming
Vanessa Vigneswaramoorthy is a Tamil settler writer, artist, and researcher, born and raised in what is now called the Greater Toronto Area. She has previously worked with the Tamil Archive Project, Tam Fam Lit Jam, and Heritage Toronto, and her creative work has been published in Q/A Poetry, Kiwi Collective Mag, and Living Hyphen Magazine. She is currently working on an MA in Adult Education and Community Development, looking at Tamil diasporic experience and anti-oppressive futures.
Issue 16 / Writing Tamilness: Perspectives From Tamil Futures and Tamil Guardian
Vijeta Kumar teaches Communicative English at St. Joseph’s University, Bengaluru. She has written for The Third Eye, Deccan Herald, India Today, HuffPost, and First Post but is forever rooting for rumlolarum.com, where she writes more regularly. At the moment, she is trapped between doing a PhD and writing short stories but she is truly happiest when she is doing neither.
Yusra Amjad is a Pushcart-nominated poet and comedian from Lahore, Pakistan. She completed her MFA at Sarah Lawrence College on a Fulbright Scholarship, and her work has appeared in The Missing Slate, Crossed Genres, The Noble Gas Quarterly, L’Ephemere Review, Rising Phoenix Press, The Aleph Review, and others. She is currently working on her first poetry manuscript, Sometimes I Imagine My Country Is Mine.
Adele Jarrar (PS, 1992) is an independent curator, cultural worker, and researcher with a focus on self-organization, artist-run initiatives, and alternative modes of cultural production. Adele worked as a curator, researcher, and writer with the collective The Question of Funding at Documenta 15 in Kassel, Germany, and was a resident at the Unidee Residency Summer 2022: Sustaining Embedded Arts Practice in Biella, Italy. She has a BA in Architecture from Birzeit University and an MA in Arts and Cultural Management from Leuphana University Luneburg. She has curated a number of exhibitions in a wide-range of art institutions and platforms, namely The Palestinian Museum, The French Institute Jerusalem, the Khalil Sakakini Cultural Centre, and Decentraland Metaverse, among others. Her writings appeared in many outlets and publications, such as Awham magazine, 7iber, LIFTA volumes, NO NIIN Magazine, Rusted Radishes, and “Reworlding Ramallah: short science fiction stories from Palestine”.
Adel Kim (b.1987) is a curator, manager, and researcher. She received an MA in Art Studies from Hongik University (2018) and MA in Cultural Management from Manchester University and Moscow School of Social and Economic Studies (2020). Currently, she is a researcher in the Reside / Sustain: Finnish & Russian experiences / initiatives / practices project. Previously she ran residency programs at Dom Tvorchestva Peredelkino (Moscow, 2020-2021) and ZARYA CCA (Vladivostok, 2016-2018). She completed the internship at MMCA Residency Goyang (Seoul, 2014). She is active in the Association of Artistic Residencies of Russia and runs AiR of Russia, the website on Russian residencies. In 2020, she received the Innovation prize for IN RESIDENCE. From the collection of ZARYA CCA exhibition (with A. Bagdonaite and A. Vasilenko).
Issue 15 / Taking Off a White Coat: Notes From Under Sanctions
Aleena is a Dalit feminist thinker and writer from Kerala. She often publishes articles in various online and print media about the intersections of caste, gender, sexuality and religion. She expresses her politics and thoughts through poetry written in Malayalam and English. Her poetry collection Silk Route was published in 2021.
Ali Akbar Mehta (b. 1983, Mumbai) is a Transmedia artist, curator, and researcher. Through a research-based practice, he creates immersive cyber archives that map narratives of history, memory, and identity through a multifocal lens of violence, conflict, and trauma. Such archival mappings – as drawings, paintings, new media works, net-based projects, poems, essays, and theoretical texts, as well as performances both of bodies and networks – are rooted in datafeminist posthumanist critical theories of making visible hegemonic power relations and silenced historical materialism. His ongoing doctoral research, tentatively titled ‘Practicing Online Performativity: Constructing Politically Conscious Archives for the Future’, is interested in exploring the performative relations between online archives and its users through mediated interventions of Second Order Cybernetics, to create knowledge systems that outline a vibrant new political public sphere.
Issue 15 / On Recognising the Moment of Hope: Speaking in Echoes With Hiwa K.
Aman Askarizad (b.1986 Iran) is a visual artist, photographer and musician based in Helsinki. He started learning music at the age of 15 and had his first concert in 2010. In Finland he’s had solo and group performances and collaborates with ‘Road Ensemble’, playing Tar and Setar with them since 2017. In his works, as an artist or organiser, he intends to dismantle the dominant narratives and representations within their socio-political contexts.
Anja Sušanj is an illustrator based in Rijeka, Croatia. After studying animation in Zagreb, she got an MA in illustration at the University of the Arts London. She also works as an assistant lecturer in illustration at the University of Applied Arts in Rijeka. Whimsical and peculiar stories and characters are a great source of inspiration to her, especially those from Slavic lore, as well as nature and its many storytelling qualities. Anja is particularly interested in psychology, sociology, history, and how it has shaped geopolitics today. She is an intersectional feminist.
Issue 15 / Cracking the mind: You Are What the Attention Economy Wants
Anna Ruth (MFA 1998) is a visual artist and art event organiser who has worked in Jyväskylä producing, directing and curating the projects: Äkkigalleria (nomadic art gallery since 2009), House Games triennial (2005–2017), Laatikkomo (2013–2019), ti-la2016, 100 Finnish Photographers, 2017 (curated by Hanna-Kaisa Hämäläinen & Markko Hämäläinen), and Tuokaa Tuoli! (a nomadic cinema in collaboration with Juho Jäppinen, Hans-Peter Schütt and KSEK since 2018). She was the XXV Mänttä Art Festival curator in 2020/21.
Issue 14 / From Memory to Memorial: A Conversation With Aishe Vejdani
Anna Tahkola is a multidisciplinary artist working in drawing, painting, writing and performance art. Central to her work is a certain counter-culturalism, a celebration of soft values and a strong sense of living.
Issue 11 / Paintings About Decaying and Growth: A Conversation With Sirkku Rosi
Anni Rupponen is a visual culture professional and artist educator working as Nuori Taide’s producer. She has recently passed the age of 29, a limit of youngness based on Finnish Youth law. Her interests include co-designing better services for youth interested in art and developing discussion-based practices in art.
Anurag Minus Verma is a multimedia artist and host of Anurag Minus Verma Podcast. He is also a political columnist who writes regularly for many publications.
Issue 10 / Winning the ‘Toss’: A Look at Who Gets a Sports Biopic in India
August Joensalo is a Finland based film director, writer and photographer. Their practice focuses on uplifting trans and queer narratives through storytelling in visual and textual mediums. They are interested in dreams and utopian thinking, as well as time and memories. They find joy in figuring out ways of narrating outside of the binaries of languages, bodies and identities.
Betty Fvck is an award-winning POC and immigrant queer artist based in Helsinki. She has performed in over 12 different countries and she was featured on over 50 magazines and TV. She is a voice for POC and Queer art to be heard.
Camille Auer is a trans-disciplinary artist and writer. Her art practice has always been theory driven, but instead of illustrating existing theories, she uses forms ranging from sound, moving image, performance and text-based installations to contribute to theoretical discourse as modes of thinking in their own right. Her rich body of work is diverse in form and content, but a common theme is the othering of trans and nonhuman bodies, such as herself or queer birds. Her work has been shown and published in The Finnish Museum of Photography (Helsinki), Wäinö Aaltonen Museum (Turku) and Atlas Arts (Skye, Scotland) among others. Her work is currently supported by the Finnish Cultural Foundation.
Issue 14 / The Unbearable Existence of Kittens: A Review of Reija Meriläinen’s Snugglesafe
Chloé Bertron lives and works in Strasbourg. She draws pictures with symbols and characters, which show the mysterious and fair world she dreams of. She also likes to write, read and bake bread.
Issue 11 / The Book as an Art Practice: A Conversation With Hikari Nishida
Edith Hammar is a Helsinki based queer visual artist. Drawing images based on gay memories or maybe parallel intimate realities. They are really good at ice skating and have also watched all the Alien movies maybe 12 times.
Eero Yli-Vakkuri is a recovering survivalist. In the past he made annoying street interventions which made people uncomfortable. Presently he is advancing sustainable design through campaigns and artistic presentations. He serves as the self appointed Speaking Clock of Finland.
Elham Rahmati (b. 1989, Tehran) is a visual artist and curator based in Helsinki. She is the co-founder and co-editor of NO NIIN. In 2019 and 2020, she worked as the curator and producer of the Academy of Moving People & Images (AMPI), a film school in Helsinki for mobile people – those who have arrived in Finland for different reasons, be they immigrants, asylum seekers, students, or employees. AMPI’s aim was to provide a free learning platform where people from different backgrounds acquire tools and methods with which they can tell the stories they find important. Prior to that, she worked as a curator & coordinator at Third Space, an artist-run gallery emerging as a response to the lack of inclusivity and diversity in the art scene in Finland. Elham holds an MA in Visual Arts from the Accademia di Belle Arti di Firenze and an MA in Visual Culture, Curating & Contemporary Art from Aalto University.
Issue 15 / Editorial / Autumn 2022
Issue 13 / Editorial / September 2022
Issue 12 / Editorial / June 2022
Issue 11 / Editorial / May 2022
Issue 10 / Editorial / April 2022
Issue 10 / On Working With Friction and Confrontation: Conversation With Lisa Kalkowski
Elliina Peltoniemi is an artist living and working in Tampere. She enjoys rambling around all medias, and gets inspired by many things, including nature, dreams and music. In her works, you can often find themes like identity, non-belonging, mourning or loss, and bodily/mental illnesses, but also humour, warmth and joy. She is herself working with a decaying multi-ill middle-aged body as her precious vessel. She loves to draw with ink, loves to work with other people making soundscapes/music/films, and misses her cat.
Issue 12 / One Last Exhibition: A Conversation With Sanni Seppä
Elliot Lundegård is a writer and an editor. They’re also a friend, a radical rester and a dreamer. They dream about companion species futures, ecologies, interconnectedness, healing justice and positive peace.
Issue 11 / The Book as an Art Practice: A Conversation With Hikari Nishida
Emily Laakso is a British artist based in Tampere, Finland. She is currently in her third year studying Media and Arts, Fine Art study path, at TAMK. Painting is her primary medium, but she also explores collage and other paper-based techniques. Themes in her work include the climate crisis, community, and identity. Turning 30 (in a pandemic) while retraining for a career most would consider doomed has taken a certain amount of strength and radical hope. She aims to channel those emotions directly into her work.
Issue 10 / On Working With Friction and Confrontation: Conversation With Lisa Kalkowski
Fjolla Hoxha is a writer and performance artist from Prizren, Kosova. She studied Dramaturgy at The Art Academy /University of Prishtina, Critique of Theater & Drama at Istanbul University/ Faculty of Philology and is currently pursuing a graduate degree at the Theater Academy / University of Arts Helsinki, Finland in Live Art and Performance Studies.
As a playwright Fjolla’s work has been staged at the National Theatre of Kosova (‘What Sprouts First When the Earth Burns?’), she has had stage readings at Unicorn Theater in London (Hyber-nation), co-authorships with Luzerner Theater in Switzerland and Die Stelzer Theater in Munich. For several years, Fjolla has devised theater summer camps with children and youth, developing original plays that give voice to the stories of deported/repatriated teens of marginal groups. Fjolla is a selected artist of the itinerant international artist residency, VeiculoSUR. Her current artistic focus is on auto-theory, researching methods of expanding subjective writing through performative space production. Her artistic research ‘Modification as a Mode of Resistance’ is based on deconstructing personal journals and memoirs from various pasts in her life, to enable their embracing by others through fragmented performance stagings in heterotopic spaces.
Gabriella Presnal (b. 2001) is a Finnish-American fine arts student studying for a BA in Media and Arts at Tampere University of Applied Sciences. In their works, they are interested in queerness, philosophy, and the environment. They work in various mediums like installation, moving images, applied fine arts, and painting. They are currently working on their thesis inspired by queer nomads using video projection and sculpture.
Issue 14 / When Home Follows You Home: A Review of Anssi Kasitonni’s Speed Records
Gladys Camilo is a Chicana/Mexican-American painter, dj and textile artist working in Helsinki. She is interested in the intersections of identity and trauma; to dream and explore alternative realities of opacity and agency over her (our) trauma; collective feeling; healing; and the fostering of safer spaces to explore vulnerability and co-care. She is currently working within MYÖS collective, and collaborating Feminist Culture House on various projects.
Hanan Mahbouba (b. 1990 San Jose, CA) is a writer and filmmaker. Her work focuses on storytelling that explores the space between belonging and otherness. Hanan’s interests, in both film and text, revolve around the distillation of the singular moments that end up framing our understandings of ourselves and others. Recently, she wrote and directed the short film Fatima Falling and is currently at work on her first feature. Hanan has an MFA from The Writer’s Foundry at St. Joseph’s College and has worked extensively in NYC as a producer and writer for documentary and independent film projects.
Hanna Moria Lindberg is a 52-year-old Finnish artist. Lindberg paints acrylic and watercolor portraits and runs a handicraft business with her husband, sewing custom-made lingerie. In her paintings, Lindberg portrays not only a person’s accurate physical image but also their inner image, “the soul”; personality, ambitions, dreams and uniqueness, often in strong, vibrant colors, on large canvases.
Issue 12 / Accessibility Is Not Static: A Conversation With Jenni-Juulia Wallinheimo-Heimonen
Helia Hamedani is an independent curator, working between Rome and Tehran. She is particularly interested in the Intercultural field and collaborates with nonprofit cultural associations. She is a Phd student of Art History at La Sapienza University of Rome. Her doctoral research of the studies and visions of Ruyin Pakbaz, intends to narrate the state of Iranian historiography of art over the last 60 years. Hamedani writes for magazines on contemporary visual arts in Iran and Italy.
Issue 15 / Weaving Connections in the Flow: A Conversation With Leila Seyedzadeh
Hira Azmat is a storyteller, editor, and a Pushcart Prize nominated poet. She has been working in the cultural industries in Pakistan for the last 12 years; her professional experience includes working as a curator of cultural spaces, and as an international arts manager. She is interested in arts and culture, movements and subcultures, literary criticism, and good design. She can be reached at hira.azmat@gmail.com.
Iisa Lepistö is a Helsinki-based artist working with writing and sculptural objects. Her interests consist of the origins of sculptural materials and their possible futures, feminist theory and the combination of literary and sculptural expression. Alongside her individual artistic practice, she has worked as a set designer for performative arts. Lepistö graduated with a Master’s degree in Visual Arts from the Academy Of Fine Arts Helsinki in 2020. She has also studied at Taipei National University of Arts in Taiwan and École Supérieure d’art et de Design in Marseille, France.
Issue 12 / Accessibility Is Not Static: A Conversation With Jenni-Juulia Wallinheimo-Heimonen
Jade Lönnqvist is a freelance illustrator and a graphic designer based in Helsinki.
Jani Ikonen (b. 1978 Varkaus) is a visual artist, illustrator and graphic designer. He often finds himself in a gray area where new connections between people, content and form happen. Recently he has been working with policy briefs, circular economy, children’s literature and neighbors – breathing through the feet.
Javaria Waseem is a Pakistani artist who expresses herself through her writings, photography, and films. Her work is a reflection of her culture, her identity, and her creative voice. She did a Bachelor in Mass Communication from the National University of Science and Technology, Pakistan and a Master in Filmmaking with a major in Directing and a minor in Screenwriting from École Internationale de Création Audiovisuelle et de Réalisation, Paris.
Johanna Valjakka (b. 2000) is a freelance writer and world literature student based in Helsinki. In her writing she explores themes of representation, intertextuality, social issues and the human psyche. Having a passion for climate activism, she pursues to capture the beauty and importance of nature in each of her texts. Alongside writing and literature, she enjoys film marathons, hiking and playing chess.
Juha Hilpas works in video, writing and in contemporary art through various mediums of expression. His artistic work deals largely with material experiments in the context of mythologies, language and ”for the fun of it”. His works have been exhibited mostly in the Helsinki area, but have also been featured in various instances and events in Estonia and Croatia. Besides arts, he works to develop media content for finnish nonprofit organizations and has an interest in both fictional and non-fictional writing practices.
Issue 12 / Worry and Play: A Conversation With Kristiina ‘Tikke’ Tuura
Juho Sihvonen (b. 1989) is a visual artist based in Savonlinna. He works as sculptor and cartoonist. He has published many comic books and latest of those is Maalattujen tähtien alla. Sihvonen also have had several exhibitions. His latest group exhibitions was Handmade in Neliö-Galleria, Oulu and Sävyjä in Galleria Myötätuuli, Raahe, with Annamari Kinnunen. He also have had solo exhibitions like Juhlat ovat ohi in Taidekeskus Ahjo, Joensuu.
Issue 12 / Worry and Play: A Conversation With Kristiina ‘Tikke’ Tuura
Juliana Hyrri (b. 1989, Kohtla-Järve, Estonia) is a Helsinki-based visual artist, illustrator and award-winning cartoonist. In her art, Hyrri often deals with the themes of otherness, growth, and events that evoke conflicting emotions. The overlap and layering of narration are essential in her practice. Hyrri holds a Master of Arts degree from Aalto University and is studying for a Master of Fine Arts at the Academy of Fine Arts Helsinki.
Julian Owusu is a dance artist and dance teacher who has been active in the Finnish Hip hop and dance fields since 2004. Julian’s focus has always been on community building practices. Alongside his work with Hip hop, Julian has also worked as dancer, choreographer and actor at, among others, Zodiak – Centre for New Dance, Jojo – Oulu Dance Centre and the Oulu City Theatre. Julian Owusu worked as Regional Artist for Youth Culture at the Arts Promotion Centre (Taike) in Northern Ostrobothnia and Kainuu regions between 2016 and 2021. Since completing his five-year bid at Taike, Julian has returned to freelance artistic and pedagogic work.
Issue 14 / Dreaming Utopias Into Existence: A Conversation With Sonia Boyce
Mumbai-based Jyoti Nisha is an academic, writer, screenwriter and filmmaker with a focus on cinema, gaze, caste, gender and media, and she has ten years of experience in print, radio and television. Her article ‘Indian Cinema and the Bahujan Spectatorship’ in the Economic and Political Weekly is credited with conceptualizing a theory that opposes the popular culture’s casteist male gaze and stereotypical representation of the marginalized, earlier called untouchables, on the silver screen. Bahujan Spectatorship explores the consumption and experience of spectatorship of popular cinema’s representation of caste, gender, and sexuality by the marginalized Bahujans of India. She also worked as a director’s assistant to Neeraj Ghaywan for Geeli Pucchi (a short film that explores gaze, caste, gender, and patriarchy), a part of Netflix’s Ajeeb Daastans anthology. Nisha directed, produced and crowdfunded her upcoming feature-length documentary film, Dr. Ambedkar: Now and Then, in collaboration with Pa Ranjith’s Neelam Productions, which is soon to release. She currently works as a Producing faculty at Whistling Woods International, Mumbai. Jyoti has written for Al Jazeera, Economic and Political Weekly, The Verve Magazine, The Routledge, The Times of India, The Indian Express and NDTV.
Issue 15 / Who Gets Love in Popular Culture? A Review of Pa Ranjith’s Film Natchathiram Nagargiradhu
Katri Sipiläinen (b. 1979 Savonlinna) is a visual artist working with painting, animation and comic art. She plays in a trio called Olimpia Splendid.
Issue 9 / Countering Cohesive Narratives: Conversation with Azar Saiyar
Kazu Ahmed is a resident of East Helsinki. He is researching for his doctoral degree at the University of Helsinki and is a practitioner of participatory visual methods (PVM) for research and social change. He has worked with a wide range of communities helping them create their own visual narratives about their worlds. He studies the application of such a methodology for dialogue, peacebuilding and reconciliation in ethnic conflicts. Currently, Kazu is working with a diverse group of people in Helsinki to explore how a combination of participatory methods and digital technology can facilitate collaborative work between researchers, artists and community workers.
Issue 13 / Finding Anarchy: A Review of Helsinki International Film Festival
Kimberlie Clinthorne-Wong is an illustrator, designer and ceramicist from Hawaii. Her diverse range of work includes conceptual editorials to whimsically surreal and playfully imagined worlds for children’s illustrations. Select clients include 7-Eleven Hawaii, Starbucks, The Washington Post, and World Vision. On top of digital illustration she is the co-founder and one of the principal artists of Two Hold Studios, a collaborative ceramic design studio.
Issue 10 / The Real Housewives Franchise: Series of Problematic -Isms and Car-Crash TV at Its Finest
Koshy Brahmatmaj is a Mumbai based artist who makes works about daily life in the form of books, paper art, fibre art, embroidery, sculpture, drawing, study, research and documentation.
Laiba Raja is a visual artist and writer based in London. Her socially engaged work is primarily rooted in exploring the expansive nature of love. Through music, colour and joy, she illustrates the strength of sisterhood, community and most importantly— the devotion to knowledge, to learn and attempt to understand the spectrum of experiences of womanhood.
Issue 10 / Aurat March: Reimagining Justice Through Sisterhood & Solidarity
Lee Marable is an architect and writer based in Helsinki. He presently edits BUM, a risograph-printed arts and architecture magazine, and has written for publications including Arkkitehti - Finnish Architectural Review, ICON and Bauwelt.
Lin Chih Tung is a curator and artist based in Taiwan and Finland. Lin graduated from Praxis Exhibition Studies Master Programme at the University of the Arts Helsinki in 2021. They curate, do performance art, and make illustrations, but primarily their practice lies between these mediums. They often deal with communication, social relations, and play in their works. Lin Chih Tung is currently appointed a co-artistic director at Catalysti, a non-profit art association dedicated to transcultural art workers in Finland.
María Villa (Bogotá 1977) is a facilitator, curator, and researcher based in Helsinki. She works in the crossroads of feminist epistemologies, radical pedagogy, relational art, and embodied practices. She is a multidisciplinary practitioner interested in entanglements of care in complex contemporary forms of interdependence and unlearning binary mindsets. Her work explores varied media, from voice, movement, and performance to experimental writing and cartographic practices. Runner, baker, mother.
Issue 14 / Transdisciplinarity in Higher Education: Wicked Problems, Dreams, and Nightmares
Marja Viitahuhta is a media artist and filmmaker, who lived her youth in Inari and her adult life in Turku and Helsinki. Her first film 99 Years of My Life was edited by Azar Saiyar. They also have had exhibitions together and in collaboration with installation artist Ida Palojärvi. For a few years she’s been working with Sami musician Ánnámáret, accompanying the music live with video works and creating experimental music videos. Besides working with moving images she has created collages, using imagery of people that remain unrecognized in family albums, directed performances with teenage performers about prophecies of the future, carried out site-specific works such as the sound installation Flood at Teijo church and designed feminist cakes. She would like to invite Azar Saiyar to karaoke with her.
Issue 9 / Countering Cohesive Narratives: Conversation with Azar Saiyar
Milka Njoroge is a researcher and writer whose work focuses on how black people in Finland make space through various forms of cultural production.
Minou Norouzi is a filmmaker, film curator and film scholar based in London and Helsinki.
Issue 13 / Confessions of a Documentary Junkie: 2022 Love & Anarchy Festival Picks
K-oh-llective (or KOH in short) is an artist group of five visual artists who have a shared desire to facilitate collective conversations around art practices. The platform they put together is used for resource-sharing among artists, writers and curators in Egypt and the Arab world who are in need of this content and critical discourse. The platform features an open-source library with a database of essential tools for arts practitioners, as well as a selection of podcasts, texts and discussions. It stages online/offline studio visits and acts as a conduit for future art-making and cross-disciplinary collaboration
Engy Mohsen (b. 1995, Cairo), is a interdisciplinary artist and architect interested in the notions of ‘discursivity’, ‘participation’ and ‘collectivity’.
Mohamed Bakeri (b. 1990, Cairo), is a visual artist interested in the social politics of how everyday gestures are performed in male-dominated spaces.
Nada Elkalaawy (b. 1995, Alexandria), is a visual artist interested in storytelling exploring loss, traces of memories and fictioning.
Rania Atef (b. 1988, Cairo), is a multi-disciplinary artist interested in maternal, reproductive, and labor discourses on individual and collective levels.
Soukaina Joual (b. 1990, Fes), is a multi-disciplinary artist interested in the body’s reflection of various tensions, dynamics and differences.
Najia Fatima is an interdisciplinary artist and a writer. She graduated with a Masters in Critical, Curatorial, and Conceptual Practices at the Columbia Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation and earned her B.A. in Architecture and Visual Studies from the University of Toronto. Fatima’s independent art practice engages with themes of occupation, displacement, and geopolitical tensions. She has produced a collection of visual, performance, installation and photography projects; her writing, considering how the built environment manifests structural inequality, has been published in various magazines.
Issue 15 / On Love? A Review of the Exhibition ‘Unity’ at SIC Space
Naomi Scott is a printmaker, visual artist and chef living in the mossy mountains of North Wales. She discovered printmaking while producing banners and posters for the Scottish climate movement and her work since then is fed into by activism, nature and an obsession with mushrooms. Instagram @namamiprint.
Naomi Shefali Joshi is a multi-disciplinary, Los Angeles based creative. She is passionate about and skilled in storytelling, community building, language and literature, multi/cross/intercultural communication, identity politics and making space for Black, Indigenous voices of colour. Her practice is rooted in empathy, vulnerability and collaboration.
Naomi is dedicated to building spaces for healing and growth and cultivating belonging for folks, specifically marginalised communities and racialized bodies, through writing, research, artistic practice and cultural and justice-based work.
Issue 13 / On (the lack of) Diversity in Academia: A Conversation With Vivetha Thambinathan
Nathi Sihlophe is a photographer and curator based in Helsinki. His photographs have been shortlisted for the Belfast Photo Festival and are also in the permanent collections of the National Museum of Finland. In 2020, he curated the multi-award-winning photo publication, No Justice, No Peace.
Issue 14 / Dreaming Utopias Into Existence: A Conversation With Sonia Boyce
Nathi Sihlophe is a photographer and curator based in Helsinki. His photographs have been shortlisted for the Belfast Photo Festival and are also in the permanent collections of the National Museum of Finland. In 2020, he curated the multi-award-winning photo publication, No Justice, No Peace.
Issue 15 / On Recognising the Moment of Hope: Speaking in Echoes With Hiwa K.
Ndéla Faye is a journalist and writer, based in Helsinki. Drawing from her own experiences, her writings often focus on identity, culture, rootlessness, motherhood and mental health. She is also an avid reality TV follower and is fluent in all the Real Housewives melodrama, along with the stormy weather and smooth sailings of Below Deck. Her articles have featured in The Guardian, VICE, Al Jazeera, HuffPost and CNN, among other publications. In 2016, she spoke on multiculturalism and being a ’Third Culture Kid’ at TedXWarwick. Ndéla holds a MA in journalism from Birkbeck, University of London.
Issue 10 / The Real Housewives Franchise: Series of Problematic -Isms and Car-Crash TV at Its Finest
Nova Kaspia is a visual artist and drag performer. He often works with the themes of identity, power, queer, anti-empowering narratives, and tackiness. To his joy, he is no longer afraid to paint with abundant and incompatible colours.
Issue 10 / “Most of the Time, It’s Just a Wonderful Thing”: Conversation With August Joensalo
Olga Spyropoulou (b. 1985, Athens) is a Helsinki-based performance artist and writer. In her work, she experiments with various modalities of spect-actorship and non-hierarchical methodologies. She is interested in how we relate to one another in different contexts. Her artistic research revolves around legal contracts as performance scores, with respect to both private and public commitment.
Orlan Ohtonen is a freelance curator and writer based in Helsinki, Finland. They are a Co-Founder of the curatorial platform ‘Feminist Culture House’; one half of queer feminist curatorial duo ‘nynnyt’; and a Co-Founder of feminist and anti-racist workspace Poimu. Their curatorial research is currently focused on what could be learned from trans and queer communality in relation to conviviality and cultural spaces.
Issue 10 / “Most of the Time, It’s Just a Wonderful Thing”: Conversation With August Joensalo
Pehmee aka The Soft Collective’s mission, is to create representation and spaces for marginalized bodies in media, art, fashion and culture. We want to upkeep and improve methods and practices that we have learned through our activism and created ourselves. Our focus is on evolving, and pushing towards equality is way beyond representation issues and community work, but we believe grassroots is where we can make the biggest impact with the resources we have available for us.
As a collective, we create, produce and curate content, events and spaces. We have worked with several different media like podcast, radio, video and social media. We have designed festival concepts and journalistic content with the most interesting art and cultural platforms in Finland, like Ruisrock and Ruskeat Tytöt Media. The Soft Collective is the most known for their events that are based on safer spaces guidelines and BIPOC queer liberation.
Issue 9 / Pehmee’s Watchlist: Breaking Stereotypes, One Music Video at a Time
Pranita Thorat is an Ambedkarite and a social sciences researcher. She is actively researching notions of ‘conformity’ and ‘obedience’ in an Indian context. Currently residing in Kalyan, Mumbai, she is pursuing a master’s in Social Work in Dalit and Tribal Studies. Aside from that, she is a musician who has been playing the guitar for eight years.
Issue 13 / Stories of Resistance: A Conversation With Filmmakers Omey Anand and Jyoti Nisha
Priyanka Paul aka Artwhoring is a self-taught illustrator, writer and generally funny person from Mumbai, India. Their work revolves around the themes of social justice, marginalisation and self-exploration. In her free time, you can find her hoarding zines, fighting on the internet and drinking copious amounts of iced tea.
Psycollagist considers collage a boundless medium to work with, where you start off with fragments of imagery and end up creating a story inside a story. It comes extremely close to mimicking the deepest part of the human subconscious. Psycollagist lives in Bombay, creating work that reflects the surrounding environment in an overdose of colour, around self-exploration and free thought.
Rajyashri Goody is from Pune, India. She lives and works in Amsterdam, Netherlands. Goody completed her BA in Sociology at Fergusson College in Pune in 2011 and an MA in Visual Anthropology at the Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology at the University of Manchester, England, in 2013. Goody’s art practice is informed by her academic background and her Ambedkarite roots. She is interested in creating space and time for thinking through everyday instances of Dalit resistance and incorporates reading, writing, ceramics, photography, printmaking, and installation in the hope that these mediums enable further conversations about caste and hierarchies. Goody has had two solo shows, Is the water chavdar?, at Galleryske, New Delhi, in 2022, and Eat With Great Delight, at Clark House Initiative, Mumbai, in 2018. She is currently an artist-in-residence at the Rijksakademie Van Beeldende Kunsten, Amsterdam.
Riikka Kuoppala is a maker and enabler, artist and legal practitioner, crazy cat and plant lady. Riikka’s one-person law firm Vegan & Legal started as a bike café in 2020 and has since developed into a radical legal practice where sustainability, non-discrimination, and kindness are the driving forces. Her alter ego, the Tax Potato, gives tax advice to artists on Vegan & Legal’s social media channels. One of Riikka’s objectives is to develop alternative strategies for working with legal issues, such as creating feminist agreement and contract writing practices, queer approaches to family and inheritance law, and taxation emancipation for the precariat.
Riikka Stewen is an art historian, writer and occasional critic living in Helsinki. In her art historical research, she is fascinated by histoire à longue durée, by the power of stories and images to persist through time. She is also studying the history of an alternative tradition of materialist-spiritualist aesthetic thought based on the idea of universal creaturely solidarity.
Issue 11 / Playful Personification of Death: A Conversation With Melina Paakkonen
Roberto Fusco, M.Phil. Music and Media Technology, D. Sc. (Technology), ITA/FI, b. 1980, is an Italian media artist based in Helsinki. At the intersection of physical and computational processes, Roberto focuses his artistic research on the use of digital techniques capable of recording, reconstructing and simulating reality, exposing the role of technology itself in mediating our perception and experience.
His work, in the form of installations or audiovisual performances with real-time and interactive elements, combines material and digital elements towards the creation of hybrid forms in which the processes of negotiation with technology become manifest and the materiality of the world, with its complexity and unpredictability, transcends what is computable.
He has presented his work in festivals such as LUX Helsinki, Mänttä Art Festival, Ars Electronica, VAFT (FI), NIME, RIXC (LT), FLUSSI (ITA), Currents New Media 2016 (USA), Videoforma (RU), PIXELACHE (FI), AAVE (FI), Borealis (NO), Plektrum (EE) and CARTES FLUX (FI) and Loikka (FI) and in galleries such as Kuopio Art Museum, ArsLibera, Third Space, Titanik, Rajatila, MUU Galleria (FI), the Science Gallery (IE) and EYEBEAM (NY, US).
He co-funded with Andrea Mancianti the audiovisual duo and media art studio QUIETSPEAKER.
Rohan Stevenson (he/him) is a sociology student and bicycle courier based in London. He has worked in the courier industry for four years, formerly in Edinburgh and Helsinki. Alongside platform capitalism and workers’ rights, his main research interest is eco-fascist online communities. He specialises in qualitative research methods; particularly online ethnography, participant observation, discourse analysis and research with archives. In his own time, he writes fiction and rap, takes photographs and romanticises his melancholic solitude.
Issue 12 / The Value(s) of Verkkosaari: Urban Safety and Subculture in Gentrifying Helsinki
Roman Sakin (b. 1976, Kursk) graduated from the Abramtsevo Art and Industrial College named after V. M. Vasnetsov (1997) and from the Moscow Art and Industrial University named after S. G. Stroganov (2005). He developed the theory of controlled sculpture and created the first samples, and in 2009 he was nominated for the Kandinsky Prize in the nomination “Project of the Year” with the controlled sculpture Forest. Then he worked on the theory of space and in 2012 was nominated for the Kandinsky Prize in the nomination “Project of the Year” with the work Master of the 3rd category. He created the doctrine of space and human perception of space, and created the Athenian school on the basis of this doctrine. An installation of the same name was shown in 2014 at the Pechersky Gallery. Continuing to work with a controlled sculpture in 2015, in the courtyard of the Tretyakov Gallery on Krymsky Val, he installed an eleven-meter controlled sculpture Signal Tower. In 2019, he created the Curaspatia health-philosophical system and the book of the same name was shown in the XL gallery. In 2020, he came up with and created a new type of art objects “measuring systems” which were shown in Stella Art Foundation and nominated for the Kandinsky Prize in 2021. He was the author of two curatorial projects Goszakaz at the Winzavod center for contemporary art and Conservation in the Pereletny Kabak space.
Issue 15 / Taking Off a White Coat: Notes From Under Sanctions
Sakari Tervo is a university teacher at Aalto ARTS and prior to that he was a lecturer of exhibition studies at the Academy of Fine Arts, Uniarts. Tervo has done independent curatorial work with a series of online publications and has been an active member of the artist-run spaces Sorbus in Helsinki and Titanik in Turku. “For me, art is a social weave where other possible worlds exist.”
Issue 11 / Paintings About Decaying and Growth: A Conversation With Sirkku Rosi
Born in the 80s, educated in the 10s, living in the now, Sami Juhani Rekola tries to recalcitrantly keep bios and himself undefined by using fancy umbrella terms like a post-medium thinker, hands-on explorer, and precarity art worker. Current areas of interest include mythical love, enlightenment, digital doppelgängers, prima vista performances, and AI as future experience design.
Issue 15 / Cracking the mind: You Are What the Attention Economy Wants
Sanabel Abdelrahman is a writer and a PhD student currently researching magical realism in Palestinian literature. She is interested in folktales, surrealism, Gothicism, and the study of literary spaces. She publishes short stories in Arabic as well as essays on literature and visual arts.
Sepideh Rahaa (b.1981, Amol) is a multidisciplinary artist, researcher and educator based in Helsinki. Through her practice, she actively investigates and questions prevailing power structures, social norms and conventions while focusing on womanhood, storytelling and everyday resistance. Currently she is pursuing her doctoral studies in Contemporary Art at Aalto University. Her practice and research interests are representations in contemporary art, silenced histories, decolonisation, Intersectional feminist politics and post-migration matters.
Issue 15 / Mommy, Say Something to the Camera: A Conversation with Paola Fernanda Guzmán Figueroa
Setare S. Arashloo (b. 1988, Tehran) is a multi-disciplinary artist who is interested in the intersections of art and social, political and environmental movements. She graduated with an MFA in Studio Art from Queens College and an Advanced Certificate in Critical Social Practice from Social Practice Queens (SPQ). She had worked as a museum and art educator in different institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), Queens College, and Empire State College (SUNY). Her collaborative and individual works have been exhibited internationally in the US, Iran, Afghanistan, France, Germany, and Australia.
Shayma Nader is an artist, curator, and translator from Palestine. For the past few years, she’s been developing and organizing workshops and projects focussed on forging and reactivating memories of and in the land through walking, listening and fictioning to move towards anti-colonial and land-centered imaginaries and practices. She is part of Qanat Collective and a PhD candidate in artistic research at Sint Lucas School of Arts and the University of Antwerp.
Sheherazade Amin is a Pakistani advocate and activist. She completed her legal studies in the United Kingdom before moving back to Pakistan. “The Meesha Shafi” case was one of the first cases of her legal career. Her areas of expertise include but are not limited to defamation, death row inmates and sexual harassment cases. She is currently completing her LL.M in Intellectual Property Law from the University of California, Berkeley. Sheherazade also enjoys reading, writing poetry and playing the violin.
Issue 10 / Aurat March: Reimagining Justice Through Sisterhood & Solidarity
Shehzil Malik is a designer and illustrator with a focus on human rights, feminism and South Asian identity. She leads a studio that works on social impact projects through digital art, publications, textile and public art. Her work has been featured in CNN, DW, BBC and Forbes with clients including Sony Music, Penguin Random House, Oxfam, New York Times, GIZ and Google.
Shrujana Niranjani Shridhar is an illustrator and designer practising in Mumbai. Her research interests revolve around exploring and defining a Dalit aesthetic that has existed in the Indian sub-continent for centuries in its myriad heterogeneous forms. Her work examines socio-political relations at the intersection of gender, caste, and class. She’s a founding member of Mavelinadu, an anti-caste publication and community space by and for marginalised castes and indigenous people. In 2016, she co-founded the Dalit Panther Archive, documenting the Dalit Panther movement of the 1970s.
Issue 10 / Winning the ‘Toss’: A Look at Who Gets a Sports Biopic in India
சிந்துஜன் வரதராஜா (Sinthujan Varatharajah) is an independent researcher and essayist based in Berlin. The focus of their work is statelessness, mobility and geographies of power with a special focus on infrastructure, logistics and architecture. In 2020 Varatharajah participated in the 11th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art with the exhibition “how to move an arch”. They are the co-curator of the Berlin-based multimedia event series “dissolving territories: cultural geographies of a new eelam” and a former Open City Fellow of the Open Society Foundations. Their first book “an alle orte, die hinter uns liegen” (“to all the places we have left behind”) was published in September 2022 in Germany by Hanser Verlag.
Sirkku Rosi works with watercolours and performance art. She is interested in the absurd poetry of everyday gestures and flesh as a place for thinking. Physicality and skin as a porous, leaking boundary between a human and the surrounding world are at the heart of her works. She examines the connection between bodily and visual art, femininity, the lived body and flesh as a shared experience. Her works are a restrained carnival of the flesh.
Taina Rajanti is a (retired) researcher, university teacher and intellectual activist whose academic background is in social sciences, but who has throughout her career engaged in trans-disciplinary projects and extra-academic activities. She is especially interested in issues of space and place – construction of social space, urban spatial practices, spatial interventions, and everyday material existence of human beings. Her interests range from philosophy and social theory to children’s books and fantasy fandoms – from theoretical experimentation to collaboration in artistic and extra-academic projects.
Issue 11 / STOP Cutting Funds for Higher Education in the Arts!
Taneli Viitahuhta (b. 1978), is a Helsinki-based writer, translator, and saxophone worker. Publications include Free Jazz Communism, together with Sezgin Boynik (Rab-Rab, 2020), Walter Benjamin’s Keskuspuisto, translated together with Eetu Viren (Tutkijaliitto, 2014), as well as starting from 2021 translations and writings with the text collective Komeetta (komeetta.org), including translation of “Idioms and Idiots” by Ray Brassier, Jean-Luc Guionnet, Mattin and Seijiro Murayama. As a musician, he performs currently with the experimental poetry group Preerioiden Pääelinkeino and the fresh free jazz unit “jazz DVD”. Recent publications include Pug Life: L’Année Perrotique (Akti Records, 2021) and Horst Quartet: Edged Timbre (Intonema, 2017). Viitahuhta is currently working to finalize his Ph.D. thesis for Jyväskylä university on the theoretical implications of Theodor Adorno’s critique of jazz. He shares his life with the artist Marja Viitahuhta and their two children.
Issue 15 / May you live in interesting times: A Review of The Woodcutter Story
Tara Anand is an illustrator and visual artist from Bombay, India based in New York City. Her work tends to draw from books, history and her surroundings. She graduated in 2022 from the School of Visual Arts with a BFA in illustration and has since worked primarily on editorial and children’s book projects.
Teo Georgiev (b.1992) is a Bulgarian illustrator, designer and artist based in Helsinki. He is currently pursuing an MA in Visual Narrative at Aalto University, where he explores the intersection of comics and migration studies. His interest lies in Balkan history, migration trends and how feelings of belonging are being communicated and explored through visual means. From children’s books through to editorial illustrations, Teo draws playful characters, surreal stories and whimsical environments, which he then intertwines with inspiration collected from nature, culture and history. His style is a combination of naïve shapes, organic forms and bold colours. His list of past clients includes WWF, Habitat for Humanity, Converse, InVision and FineActs, as well as boutique businesses and local NGOs.
Dr. Timo S. Tuhkanen (they/them) is an Omani born artist-composer and academic working at the intersection between contemporary music, art, and research on the historical and cultural aspects of touch. Currently based in Helsinki Timo is the founder of experimental publishing house Pteron Press, the director of Myymälä2 gallery, and Affiliated Researcher at the Department of Music, University of Turku. Timo’s writings have been published in online magazines such as Arachne.cc, The Kitchen Poet, and Red May Seattle, as well as in artists catalogues published by Al-Mamal Foundation, and books on artistic and curatorial research published by die Angewandt Editions | De Gruyter.
Issue 12 / Problematizing Perspectives and Positions: A Review of ARS22
Toshiya Kamei is a fiction writer working in English and Spanish. Their short fiction has appeared in venues such as New World Writing, Revista Korad, and SmokeLong en Español.
Umar Riaz is a former Student Academy Award-nominated filmmaker and photographer, currently based in Pakistan. He is a graduate of the prestigious Graduate Film Program at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts where he was an Ang Lee Scholar. His award-winning films have been screened at film festivals internationally. He was an Artistic Consultant for director Terrence Malick on Knight of Cups (2016) and as well as an Additional Editor for Mr Malick’s film Song to Song (2017). He was the contributor to a scene in director Spike Lee’s Chi-raq (2015). Recently, his music videos for independent Pakistani musical artists have garnered more than 6 million views on Youtube. His photography has been published internationally in Forbes and Hyperallergic. His works reside in the permanent collection of the Koel Gallery in Karachi.
Uzair Amjad (b. 1989, Sahiwal) is a Pakistani filmmaker, multimedia artist, and writer based in Helsinki. He holds an MA in Visual Culture, Curating, and Contemporary Arts from Aalto University, Finland. Amjad’s works borrow greatly from his original training as an image-maker and from oral traditions of storytelling. In 2020, Amjad’s first short film Paper Promises had its National Premiere at Helsinki international film festival (HIFF) and its international premiere at the academy awards qualifying Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival (PÖFF). Paper Promises received the audience choice award at HIFF. Currently, Amjad is preparing a new body of work which will be showcased at Mänttä Art Festival 2021.
Issue 11 / Crouched! Crouched Is My Position: A Review of the Adventures of Harriharri
Vanessa Kowalski is a Polish-American independent curator, writer, editor, and artist. She received a BFA in Photography from the School of Visual Arts in New York City, and an MA in Curating, Mediating, and Managing Art from Aalto University in Helsinki, Finland. Her artworks and writing have been featured in publications such as Clog x Artificial Intelligence, Take Shape Mag, Precog Mag, Speed of Resin, Spectra and more. She currently lives and works in California where she loves making a mess and cleaning it up.
Varya Yakovleva is an artist, illustrator, animator based in France. She has participated in over forty group exhibitions, and has had four solo exhibitions. She’s the art-director of a full-length animated film The Nose or the Conspiracy of Mavericks and the director of animation shorts such as The Square», Anna, Cat and Mouse, Life Is a Bitch, Oneluv. She’s an illustrator of books, and collaborates with several publishers and magazines.
Issue 14 / Transdisciplinarity in Higher Education: Wicked Problems, Dreams, and Nightmares
Vidha Saumya (b. 1984, Patna) is a Helsinki-based artist-poet whose body of works – drawings, murals, books, poems, sculptures, embroidered textiles, videos, and digital artefacts – are wry and warm in their politics and kaleidoscopic in their aesthetics. The concept of Heimat / (Home)land is at the core of her praxis. She is the co-founder and co-editor of NO NIIN – an online monthly magazine in Finland, and a founding member of the Museum of Impossible Forms – an award-winning cultural para-institution in Kontula, Finland. She has recently published a collection of seven books of poems, Monumentless Moments: the Utopia of Figureless Plinths. She holds a MA in Visual Culture, Curating & Contemporary Art from the Aalto University; a BFA in Painting from the Sir J. J. School of Art, and a Diploma in Visual Communication Design from Srishti Institute of Art, Design and Technology.
Issue 15 / Editorial / Autumn 2022
Issue 13 / Editorial / September 2022
Issue 12 / Editorial / June 2022
Issue 11 / Editorial / May 2022
Issue 10 / Editorial / April 2022
Issue 10 / On Working With Friction and Confrontation: Conversation With Lisa Kalkowski
Viivi Koljonen is an art historian from Helsinki and an Italian translator. She is currently the Deputy Executive Director of Galleria Huuto.
Issue 12 / One Last Exhibition: A Conversation With Sanni Seppä
Wambui Njuguna-Räisänen (she/her) is a trauma-informed Ashtanga Yoga teacher. She is Yoga Alliance E-RYT 500, and TCYM-T certified. Based in Finland, she’s passionate about making wellness through yoga and meditation seamlessly engaged in equity and justice so that more people of the global majority can live well and thrive.
Wambui is deeply inspired by spiritual teachers and communities that apply the insights from their practices to social, racial, political, environmental and economic suffering and injustices. She would like to see wellness spaces engage more in social justice + activist spaces learn to breathe deeply and practice sustainable self-care in the midst of dismantling systemic oppression. This is her definition of community care.
Wambui provides consultation services for individuals and organizations who strive to operate from an ethic of embodied collective liberation. She is also a writer and public speaker.
Yara Bamieh Illustrator and architect based in Ramallah. Yara is particularly interested in illustration as a form of communication and storytelling, with nature as a dominant source of inspiration. She wrote and illustrated three children’s books: The Little Secret 2012, Bulqash, which won the “Etisalat” award in 2016 and Where is my Beak, 2019. She is currently pursuing the Society of Botanical Artists Diploma.
Alba Ala-Pietilä (b. 2001) is an aesthetics and film studies student at the University of Helsinki. At the moment she’s especially interested in feministic approaches to art and the way it is studied as well as surrealism and surrealistic qualities in art. Painting herself, she’s currently examining the associative prospects of the abstract form, both in the method and the result.
Ali Akbar Mehta (b. 1983, Mumbai) is a Transmedia artist, curator, and researcher. Through a research-based practice, he creates immersive cyber archives that map narratives of history, memory, and identity through a multifocal lens of violence, conflict, and trauma. Such archival mappings – as drawings, paintings, new media works, net-based projects, poems, essays, and theoretical texts, as well as performances both of bodies and networks – are rooted in datafeminist posthumanist critical theories of making visible hegemonic power relations and silenced historical materialism. His ongoing doctoral research, tentatively titled ‘Practicing Online Performativity: Constructing Politically Conscious Archives for the Future’, is interested in exploring the performative relations between online archives and its users through mediated interventions of Second Order Cybernetics, to create knowledge systems that outline a vibrant new political public sphere.
Aman Askarizad (b.1986 Iran) is a visual artist, photographer and musician based in Helsinki. He started learning music at the age of 15 and had his first concert in 2010. In Finland he’s had solo and group performances and collaborates with ‘Road Ensemble’, playing Tar and Setar with them since 2017. In his works, as an artist or organiser, he intends to dismantle the dominant narratives and representations within their socio-political contexts.
Amanda Hunt is a performing artist newly residing in Helsinki. They are currently pursuing an MA at UniArts Helsinki in the Live Art and Performance Studies Program. Previous engagements have included living and working as an artist in Dublin, Ireland, as well as NYC, where they performed on streets, beaches, piers, as well as in galleries, museums and theater spaces. They also ran a DIY space for performance art that they built out inside of an old auto body mechanic shop in Brooklyn NY, called Parallel Performance Space.
Andrea Coyotzi Borja (b. 1984. México) is an artist based in Helsinki. Her artistic practice focuses on the subject of the quotidian and its relationship to the artistic event. This developed to her current research on the infraordinary in her Doctoral studies at Aalto University. Her artwork has been exhibited in different countries such as México, United States, Italy, Hungary, Poland, Spain, Bulgaria, and Finland.
Issue 8 / Taidekirppis: What Happens When an Archive-Based Project Ends Prematurely?
Aneta Atsova is a visual artist and musician based in Finland. She also goes under the musical pseudonym Annie Trippah. A former Aalto master’s graduate in Visual Culture, Contemporary Art and Curation, she specializes in various disciplines including sculpture, video and audio, painting and digital media. Her work is characterized by naively exaggerated perspectives and forms revealing immanent psychic paradoxes. In both music and visual art, she’s predominantly interested in satire, absurdism, kitsch, melodrama, as well as the broad field of philosophical anthropology, in which she has earned her bachelor’s degree.
Anna Varfolomeeva is a postdoctoral researcher at Helsinki Institute of Sustainability Science (HELSUS) and Faculty of Arts, University of Helsinki. Her current project focuses on indigenous notions of sustainability in industrialized areas of the Russian North and Siberia. Anna received her PhD at Central European University in Budapest and previously worked at the School of Advanced Studies, the University of Tyumen in Siberia. She is the co-editor of Multispecies Households in the Saian Mountains: Ecology at Russia-Mongolia Border (with Alex Oehler, 2019). @arcticscapes (Twitter)
An Paenhuysen is a curator, art critic and educator living in Berlin. She loves blogging on art and started in 2020 the publishing project AAAAA PPPPP Publishing. An is the director of the art project space The House of the Deadly Doris.
Issue 7 / Moment of Welcoming: Conversation With Eleni Tsitsirikou
Anthony Herman is a student of the University of Helsinki, studying English Philology. He is a dedicated writer and reader, writing a mixture of prose, poetry and drama. He is also active in theatre: he has produced, directed, and acted in different productions, and he is an avid fan of musicals.
Issue 8 / Transformations: The Secret Worlds Inside Baltic Circle Festival's "Undertone"
Athanasía Aarniosuo (b.1981) is a visual artist, printmaker, curator, and art journalist currently based in Vantaa, Finland. Aarniosuo’s artistic and curatorial practice appreciates the beauty of human experience through creating and sharing stories. She creates romanticised, sentimental, and strongly subjective environments. In her current work, she focuses on exploring the concepts of ‘longing’, ‘utopia’ and especially ‘nostalgia.’ She holds an MA in art history from the University of Helsinki and a BA (Hons) in fine art printmaking from Gray’s School of Art in Aberdeen, Scotland. She is currently studying at Aalto University’s MA programme Visual Cultures, Curating and Contemporary Art.
Issue 7 / Moment of Welcoming: Conversation With Eleni Tsitsirikou
Aurora Lemma is a Helsinki-based freelance writer, medical doctor and a student of world politics. She has written to various Finnish media and is currently co-editing an essay collection on death, to be published by WSOY in the spring of 2022.
Carlota Mir is an independent curator, researcher and translator working simultaneously across these fields. She works and does research at the intersection of feminisms, migration, sexual minorities, translation, histories and practices of curating in various European contexts. Currently, Carlota works as a curator for the Danish refugee community centre Trampoline House, a lumbung member at documenta fifteen (Kassel 2022), and she is also a PhD candidate at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. Other current projects include the volume Propositions for Translocal Solidarity (Berlin: Archive Books/Stockholm: Konstfack), which she is a co-editor of. An art historian, translator and curator by training (BA in Art History and French, University of Sussex, UK/Paris Sorbonne IV) she graduated in 2013 and she holds an MA in Contemporary Art and Visual Cultures (UAM/MNRS, Spain, 2016) and postgraduate degree in Curating (CuratorLab, Konstfack, Sweden, 2020).
Issue 2 / About My Mother: A Series of Open Letters to Chris Kraus — Part I
Ceyda Berk-Söderblom (b.1976, Izmir) is a Helsinki-based independent art manager, curator, festival programmer and entrepreneur specialising in change management; and has 20 years of background experience in the arts. Ceyda grew up in a cosmopolitan family and has always been fascinated by complex and fluid social identities. Originally trained as a journalist, she also studied communication, critical thinking, business administration, arts management, and leadership in arts. In 2015 she founded MiklagårdArts, an innovative platform, facilitator and connector for promoting transnational collaborations between Finland and the dynamic art scenes around the world.
Danai Anagnostou (b. 1993, Athens) is a Producer for Film, Media & Live Art based in Helsinki. She is the Curator for the Society of Cinema the Museum of Impossible Forms. In 2020, Anagnostou began her Doctoral Studies at Aalto University, School of Film, Television, and Scenography, where she studies hybrid models for production, curation, and education in the field of filmmaking.
Platform for the epistolary form Dear, is an Amsterdam based initiative by artist Martha Jager, which initially emerged to bridge a time marked by distance, encircle the enforced slowness of everyday life and contrast the acceleration of online production, during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Adopting the intimate practice of writing letters as a form of publishing, Dear, invites artists, writers and poets to compose a letter which is distributed by post to readers worldwide. For each series of four letters, Dear, collaborates with another cultural organisation, through which the project is understood anew, and is provided with a new contextualisation of the time we are living.
The current series Dear, don’t forget to bring a carton of milk on your way home x is made in dialogue with Stockholm based curatorial study program Mourning School. Former collaborations include Poetry Foundation Perdu, Casco Art Institute: Working for the Commons and Vleeshal Center for Contemporary Art.
Issue 6 / Dear, don’t forget to bring a carton of milk on your way home x
Edith Hammar is a Helsinki based queer visual artist. Drawing images based on gay memories or maybe parallel intimate realities. They are really good at ice skating and have also watched all the Alien movies maybe 12 times.
Issue 2 / Finding Forms to Recognise Warmth: A Conversation With Bogna Luiza Wisniewska
Eero Yli-Vakkuri is a recovering survivalist. In the past he made annoying street interventions which made people uncomfortable. Presently he is advancing sustainable design through campaigns and artistic presentations. He serves as the self appointed Speaking Clock of Finland.
Issue 5 / Our Efforts to Show Solidarity for Palestine Are Tested at Kiasma
Egle Oddo, MA in visual arts. Her work focuses on linear and non-linear narration as an art form, combining photography, moving images, installation, sculpture, environmental art, and experimental live art. In her pieces industrial production morphs towards delicate handcraft, life forms appear and emerge out of sculptures and objects, film photography appropriates digital images, selected trash mixes with fashion, precious edible minerals and ancestral recipes are served as part of ritual meals. Her work is present at international biennials, museums and relevant institutions, as well as independent alternative spaces and events. She works with operational realism meant as the interest for the functional sphere, its presentation in an aesthetic arrangement and its inter-relations. Since 2007, she has been researching plant seeds, vegetal consciousness and agency, plant analogies and plant imagery, patents applied to plants, natural and artificial reproduction of plants, regional biodiversity, economic and ecologic impact when there are restrictions with the exchange of local seeds. She was a member of La Sala Naranja and she co-founded Namastic Art Collective. Presently she is a member of Catalysti Association, a board member of Myymälä2 Gallery, and a chair of Pixelache Trans-disciplinary Platform for Experimental Art, Research and Activism. Egle Oddo lives and works in Helsinki.
Issue 6 / Curating from the perspective of an artist: conversation with Anna Ruth
Elham Rahmati (b. 1989, Tehran) is a visual artist and curator based in Helsinki. She is the co-founder and co-editor of NO NIIN. In 2019 and 2020, she worked as the curator and producer of the Academy of Moving People & Images (AMPI), a film school in Helsinki for mobile people – those who have arrived in Finland for different reasons, be they immigrants, asylum seekers, students, or employees. AMPI’s aim was to provide a free learning platform where people from different backgrounds acquire tools and methods with which they can tell the stories they find important. Prior to that, she worked as a curator & coordinator at Third Space, an artist-run gallery emerging as a response to the lack of inclusivity and diversity in the art scene in Finland. Elham holds an MA in Visual Arts from the Accademia di Belle Arti di Firenze and an MA in Visual Culture, Curating & Contemporary Art from Aalto University.
Issue 8 / Editorial / December 2021
Issue 6 / Editorial / October 2021
Issue 5 / Editorial / September 2021
Issue 4 / Editorial / June 2021
Issue 2 / Editorial / April 2021
Issue 1 / Editorial / March 2021
Elina Johanna Ahonen is a visual storyteller who likes to get lost in the woods – and in her thoughts too. Elina enjoys wide-ranging projects and digging up new ideas. Elina works as a freelancer and in her studio she creates magazine layouts, illustrations, short animations and cartoons. Elina is studying for a master’s degree at Aalto University.
Issue 4 / All I Want to Do Is to Hold Your Hand and Cry the Tears of Joy
Elina Nissinen (b.1991) is a visual artist based in Helsinki, Finland. She works with paint/ing and clay but also with other materials, space, and collaborators. Her curiosity in artmaking leans towards enigmatic matter(s) and objects, sensibilities, relationalities, narrativities, and magic. Elina holds an MA from the Aalto University School of Arts, Design and Architecture (2018) and is currently pursuing her MFA in the University of the Arts Helsinki, Academy of Fine Arts.
Issue 5 / On Soft Alphabets and the Hues of an Inside: An Interview With Corinna Helenelund
Elle Kokkonen is a mobile artist working in the fields of experimental music, performance, and writing. They come from a tiny village called Partakko on the Finnish side of Sápmi. Elle’s main interests lay in the small, overlooked and domestic things and DIY art practices. Their psychedelic lo-fi folk moniker is njihe – the name comes from the Aanaar Sámi name of their home base, Njihenjargâ, which roughly translates into “the headland of the tree askew towards the water”. At the moment they are trying to finish their MA degree in sound design at the Theatre Academy of Helsinki.
Emma de Carvalho is a writer and artist with an interest in identities, cultures, embodiment, and changing artistic practices. She is completing her Master’s thesis at the University of Helsinki. Her current research explores femininities in film and TV (a project she is very excited about).
Emma Hovi (1989, Vaasa, Finland) is an art educator and artist. She has studied and exhibited in different cities internationally, such as Berlin, Montréal, Vienna and Helsinki, where she is currently based. As an artist, she works with feminine-coded labour and constructions of agency. Her artistic practices are based in performance, moving image, photography and text. She is currently extending her master’s thesis research on monstrosity and Otherness in educational philosophy and pedagogy through the arts. As an art educator, her experience spans work both in public schools and in established cultural institutions. She has worked in several Finnish contemporary art museums, where she has given guided tours and art workshops for groups of all ages. She has also produced pedagogical exhibition material and worked artistically with differently abled youth. Her essays, poems and illustrations have been published both in print and online. She has also facilitated writing workshops internationally as a board member of the feminist journal Astra. Her working languages are Swedish (mother tongue), Finnish, English and German.
Emma Larkovuo is a visual artist based in Helsinki. Her work includes drawing, painting, writing and sound, in which she combines spoken word and ambient music. Currently, she is working with her second self-published poetry zine and pastel drawings, exploring colors, forms, still lifes and interiors. She holds a BA in fine arts from the Turku Arts Academy.
Issue 3 / Movement and Resistance: An Interview With Noora Geagea
Evangelos Androutsopoulos is a cartoonist and artist and has been making comics since 2006.
Even Minn is a writer and dramaturg working in the fields of performance and contemporary art. They are fascinated by the dancing body, the spiritual body, the animal body and our shared ancestry with other cellular lifeforms. Their practice is informed by trans feminism and somatics.
Issue 2 / To Be a Verb Sometimes, Sometimes a Noun
Issue 4 / Mixing Everything With Everything in Everything — an Interview With Hertta Kiiski
Farbod Fakharzadeh (b.1986) is an Iranian artist, curator and storyteller based in Helsinki, Finland. In 2018 he received a Master’s degree in Visual Culture, Curating and Contemporary Art from Aalto University. He is interested in using the magical, the comical and the absurd to create his version of social critique and he often works with history, archives and recycled material as tools for storytelling, re-imagining the possible and dreaming about parallel realities. He is also a co-founder of Taidekirppis, an archive project (currently on hold) in Helsinki.
Issue 8 / Taidekirppis: What Happens When an Archive-Based Project Ends Prematurely?
Issue 2 / I Can’t Believe What You Say, Because I See What You Do
FEMMA Planning is an urban planning company led by two urban geographers Milla Kallio and Efe Ogbeide. At the heart of their work is commitment to understanding different urban realities and experiences. FEMMA Planning transforms place-based and residential data into guidelines that architects, urban planners or decision-makers can use in their work. The main aim of FEMMA Planning is to bring other perspectives to the planning process than the purely technical; it’s not enough to know what the experts think, planners and policymakers need to also be aware of the lived experiences of city-dwellers.
Issue 5 / We should change the way we talk about the suburbs in Finland
Fjolla Hoxha is a writer and performance artist from Prizren, Kosova. She studied Dramaturgy at The Art Academy /University of Prishtina, Critique of Theater & Drama at Istanbul University/ Faculty of Philology and is currently pursuing a graduate degree at the Theater Academy / University of Arts Helsinki, Finland in Live Art and Performance Studies.
As a playwright Fjolla’s work has been staged at the National Theatre of Kosova (‘What Sprouts First When the Earth Burns?’), she has had stage readings at Unicorn Theater in London (Hyber-nation), co-authorships with Luzerner Theater in Switzerland and Die Stelzer Theater in Munich. For several years, Fjolla has devised theater summer camps with children and youth, developing original plays that give voice to the stories of deported/repatriated teens of marginal groups. Fjolla is a selected artist of the itinerant international artist residency, VeiculoSUR. Her current artistic focus is on auto-theory, researching methods of expanding subjective writing through performative space production. Her artistic research ‘Modification as a Mode of Resistance’ is based on deconstructing personal journals and memoirs from various pasts in her life, to enable their embracing by others through fragmented performance stagings in heterotopic spaces.
Francisco Rangel holds a bachelor’s degree in Media and Communication from Universidad Iberoamericana. He is currently a graduate student from the Master’s Programme of European and Nordic Studies and the Master’s Programme of Intercultural Encounters at the University of Helsinki.
Golnoosh Nour is a poet, prose writer, and lecturer. She’s the author of The Ministry of Guidance and other stories – shortlisted for the Polari Prize 2021. Her work has also appeared in Granta, Spontaneous Poetics, and Columbia Journal amongst others. She has co-edited Magma 80 and an anthology of contemporary queer writing forthcoming from Muswell Press.
Golrokh Nafisi (b. 1981, Isfahan, Iran) is an illustrator, animator, writer, and contemporary artist based between Amsterdam and Tehran. Golrokh has studied at the Art University of Tehran in Iran and at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in the Netherlands. She has frequently exhibited her work in galleries, as interventions and performances, and at film festivals, among which Art Rotterdam in the Netherlands, MACRO in Italy, and the Beirut Art Center in Lebanon. Nafisi’s aesthetic is strongly influenced by popular local handicrafts of the cities that she travels to and works in. Her illustrations are inspired by the political uprisings of the people in different geographies, and are usually distributed among the demonstrators during the social-political movements.
Issue 4 / Celebration of Distant Bodies
Good Hair Day is an antiracist movement that works towards the wellbeing of AfroFinns. Good Hair Day is a collective, community and event celebrating AfroFinns & afro hair through hope and joy.
Dr. Hanna Järvinen currently works as a university lecturer at the doctoral programme of the Theatre Academy of the University of the Arts Helsinki, Finland. She is also Honorary Visiting Research Fellow at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Dance at De Montfort University, Leicester, and holds the title of Docent in Dance History at the University of Turku.
The author of Dancing Genius (Palgrave Macmillan 2014) and five edited collections as well as a number of articles and book chapters, her research combines dance scholarship with performance studies, history, cultural studies, and artistic research. In particular, she has been interested in authorship and canonisation, postcolonialism and decolonisation, and questions of materiality and contemporaneity in art practice. She enjoys making performances and collaborating with artists and her current research takes place in the Vetenskapsrådet workshop project Spectral Collaborations, and the Academy of Fine Arts, Finland project How to Do Things with Performance.
Hector Sanchez (he/him/él) is a Mexican anthropologist who has been building his career, empathy, and critical thinking on a transnational journey. Having been living in Mexico, Ireland, India, and Finland, he specialized in the fields of Indigenous Studies, Interethnic Conflicts, Contemporary Music, and more recently, Hip hop Studies. He is currently interested in inquiring the value of subaltern contemporary music for Indigenous peoples and how they shape the global music market. Hector Sanchez has been working as a writer, editor, and research assistant in spaces such as “Asian Ethnicity” Journal, the University of Helsinki website, the Indira Gandhi National Tribal University (India), the Arctic Youth Network, and a number of NGOs in Mexico. He holds an MA in Contemporary Religions from University College Cork (Ireland) and an MA in Intercultural Encounters from University of Helsinki (Finland), and plenty of learning from his coexistence with the Wixárika (Virrarika) people in México and Sámi musicians in Finland.
Helga West, also known as Biennaš-Jon Jovnna Piera Helga, is a theologian and poet from Deatnu river valley in the Finnish side of Sápmi. West is a doctoral candidate in the University of Helsinki, and in her theology dissertation, she examines topical Sámi issues connected to reconciliation. West also works in the literature field, and is particularly interested in the potential of art to give words to painful colonial experiences. In her most recent essays, she has combined elements of Sáminess and Western pop culture.
Issue 7 / Seeing My Self-Image in Dolls That Imitate the Sámi People
Ilina Schileru is a Romanian artist, curator, and cultural manager. She has an MA in Graphics at Bucharest University of Arts, completed in 2010. She is a member of UAP Romania and the founding director of EBienale and an art teacher for migrant children in a local NGO.
Starting in 2021, she developed MNTRplusC, a contemporary artist-run space program under the National Museum of the Romanian Peasant’s aegis, aiming for international collaborations between the Romanian local scene and foreign fellow artists and curators. As a Special Projects Curator there, she focuses on themes such as housing crisis, gender distribution in power structures, cultural transitioning/ adaptation/ disappearance of traditions/rituals in urban and rural sites. She is announced as the curator for the Roma Exhibition Collateral Event at the 59th La Biennale di Venezia, organized by ERIAC (The European Roma Institute for Arts and Culture) to be held between 23 April – 27 November 2022 in Venice.
Issue 6 / E T A J Artist-Run Space, the ‘Make It’ Experience in the Art World
Ingrid Fadnes is a Norwegian journalist, currently working at the feature department in the newspaper Klassekampen. Fadnes has lived in Latin America for more than a decade and has followed political occurrences especially surrounding the conflicts between agriculture and indigenous peoples. She has made several radio documentaries from Latin America, as well as the Sápmi region. Between 2015 and 2018 she spent time in the state of Bahia in Brazil investigating and documenting the substitution of natural forest by eucalyptus plantations designated for paper production. As part of this work, she made the documentary film MATA.
Isa Komsi is a writer based in Helsinki. She desperately needs more positive queer stories in her life—especially funny and weird romantic comedies that make you cry from laughter.
Issue 8 / Two of Us: On Ageing Queer Love & Aged Queer Stereotypes
Jade Lönnqvist is a freelance illustrator and a graphic designer based in Helsinki.
Jakub Bobrowski is currently learning traditional crafts: weaving wicker baskets and textiles, ceramics and others. He finds working with his hands therapeutic and likes to use materials that can be found in our surroundings. He’s working now on making edible books printed with linoleum blocks.
Johanna Rojola or roju studied la bande dessinée in Angouleme, France. Their career has evolved around comics: producing exhibitions and events, editing, educating etc. They are a founding member of Kutikuti comics collective and Femicomix Finland. Currently they are studying MA in Praxis programme at Uniarts Helsinki.
Issue 1 / To Follow a Ball of Yarn: A Conversation With Shubhangi Singh
Juha Hilpas works in video, writing and in contemporary art through various mediums of expression. His artistic work deals largely with material experiments in the context of mythologies, language and ”for the fun of it”. His works have been exhibited mostly in the Helsinki area, but have also been featured in various instances and events in Estonia and Croatia. Besides arts, he works to develop media content for finnish nonprofit organizations and has an interest in both fictional and non-fictional writing practices.
Julia Kartesalo is a curator and cultural manager from Germany, based in Helsinki. She majored in Cultural Studies, and nowadays focuses her curatorial practice and research on issues related to cultural memory and photography. Among her exhibitions are “Fokus Bauhaus” at Design Museum Helsinki and the exhibitions “alex wollner brasil. design visual“ and “Secret Compartments“ at Museum Angewandte Kunst in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. Kartesalo is currently studying at the Faculty of Education and Culture, University of Tampere to expand her knowledge in the field of art education.
Issue 3 / Movement and Resistance: An Interview With Noora Geagea
Julian Owusu is a dance artist and dance teacher who has been active in the Finnish Hip hop and dance fields since 2004. Julian’s focus has always been on community building practices. Alongside his work with Hip hop, Julian has also worked as dancer, choreographer and actor at, among others, Zodiak – Centre for New Dance, Jojo – Oulu Dance Centre and the Oulu City Theatre. Julian Owusu worked as Regional Artist for Youth Culture at the Arts Promotion Centre (Taike) in Northern Ostrobothnia and Kainuu regions between 2016 and 2021. Since completing his five-year bid at Taike, Julian has returned to freelance artistic and pedagogic work.
Katie Lenanton (she/her) has worked within, outside of, and counter to institutions, aiming to understand, corrupt, and change their ways of working. She strives to practice curatorial responsibility. In 2018, she began researching and building alternative institutional structures through the intersectional feminist curatorial collective Feminist Culture House. She continues to work there alongside friends and co-directors Neicia Marsh (she/her) and Orlan Ohtonen (they/them). She’s also collaborating with Bogna Wiśniewska (she/her) on a durational project, Weathering, a practice of working slowly, responsively, and with care in the face of unknowns, in dialogue with different artists and contexts.
Issue 2 / Finding Forms to Recognise Warmth: A Conversation With Bogna Luiza Wisniewska
Kihwa-Endale is an artist based in Helsinki who paints, draws, writes and performs spoken word. She is a half-Korean, half-Ethiopian Gemini. Inspired by curiosity, she seeks to understand the world around her as well as the one inside of her. She finds her references mainly from ridiculous amounts of Youtube videos.
Her art is rooted in her ancestry, spirituality, social issues, myths, and hermetic principles. Also, in Love.
She is currently establishing a spoken word organization, KAIROS, to create platforms for voices that have been marginalized. At its heart, this project aims to find a holistic way to create social change through poetry.
Additionally, she is preparing for her first solo exhibition in Helsinki, titled Hands Up.
Kiia Beilinson (b.1986, Espoo, she/they) is a freelance graphic designer and artist based in Helsinki. She DJ’s by her alias Cute Cumber and is a co-founder of MYÖS, a collective and non-profit organisation promoting accessibility, equality and safer spaces in electronic music & club culture. Currently, Beilinson is also working part-time teaching in Aalto University and as press coordinator for Baltic Circle festival and fills her daily duties as a caregiver to a rescue dog.
Ksenia Kaverina (b.1988, Saint Petersburg) is a curator and researcher with a special passion in languages, translation and transdisciplinary collaborations. Her doctoral dissertation in the making considers globalisation-conditioned changes in knowledge production and perception, in exhibitions, biennales, museums, universities and other potential sites of curatorial interventions.
Issue 3 / Producing and Practicing Presence. Digital Commoning Practices in Oksasenkatu 11.
Laureline Tilkin-Franssens (b.1991, Leuven) is a visual artist based in Helsinki, mainly focusing on photography and video art. Her work focuses mostly on experiences related to her own identity and has been exhibited all around Belgium and Finland. In 2017, Tilkin-Franssens founded Tuonela Magazine, an online magazine dedicated to the Finnish rock and metal scene, promoting both young and established bands. In 2021, Tuonela Magazine merged with Musicalypse and as a result, is now the biggest English online music media in Finland. Aside from art photography, Tilkin-Franssens focuses on music and event photography. Tilkin-Franssens graduated with an MA in Fine Arts (Photography) from the Media, Arts, and Design Faculty at Catholic University College Limburg and holds an MA in Visual Culture & Contemporary Art from Aalto University.
Issue 3 / Producing and Practicing Presence. Digital Commoning Practices in Oksasenkatu 11.
Issue 2 / A Long Line of Characters: Getting to Know the Life and Work of Kirsti Tuokko
Issue 1 / To Follow a Ball of Yarn: A Conversation With Shubhangi Singh
Malaika Mollel is an artist, clothing designer and entrepreneur from Helsinki, with Finnish and Tanzanian roots. She paints characters with African origins, who carry a name and a story of their lives. Malaika gets inspiration for her art from music, people, nature, second-hand fashion and literature. She’s currently based in Amsterdam to grow as an artist and an entrepreneur. @mollelmalaikaart (IG & FB).
Issue 6 / Continuance between Art, Art-Space and Audience: conversation with Kihwa-Endale
Maria Koskivirta (b. 1999) is a Helsinki based audiovisual artist, with a key interest in cinema. Studying the medium of film, her intent is to bring forward all the subtle moments in the film that are left unsaid. Regardless of the piece, there’s always more that can be explored through the subjective perception of someone else’s eyes.
Issue 6 / Never Gonna Snow Again: a hypnotic take on the environmental downfall
Mariam Haji is a Bahraini multidisciplinary fine artist who currently lives and works between Finland and Bahrain. She was most recently featured at Mänttä XXV Art Festival, while previously represented The Kingdom of Bahrain in the 55th Venice Biennale 2013. Her work is also a permanent public display at the National Theater in Bahrain, part of the permanent collection of The National Museum of Bahrain.
Her works involve observations of social practices and interactions between the ways in which European art history has had an effect on postmodern Arab Art. She is particularly curious about sociopolitical and religious environments where the subject of being ‘She/Her’ is themed. You will find that Haji achieves the above by translating ‘Her’ into a legend through visual language. By tracing intersections between European classical paintings with early European feminist performance practices Mariam creates various re-enactments of western art through an Arab lens and an autobiographical narrative.
Issue 6 / Curating from the perspective of an artist: conversation with Anna Ruth
Mariana Núñez Sánchez aka Mare (b.1988) is a Mexican designer and illustrator based in Helsinki. She has worked in interior, furniture, and textile design, but the last major interest for her has been illustration, animation and creating children’s creative workshops. She views creativity as an important tool for change and a vital element for children to practice and develop. Working and learning with children is one of the most satisfactory things she has encountered during her creative process. She loves creating make-believe objects, surprise balls, and eating quesadillas. She has a passion for food and everything that surrounds it, especially the cultural significance of cooking and eating together.
Mariliis Rebane is a freelance curator and researcher based in Helsinki. Their research interests revolve around topics such as history, heritage, time, duration and processes. Rebane’s work is currently supported by the Kone Foundation.
Marina Valle Noronha is an independent curator and doctoral researcher at Aalto University, Finland where she investigates curatorial theory and ethics of care within museum collections development. In her work, Marina puts forward different ways to look at art that leads to new forms of engagement with objects. Through extensive curatorial research and collaborations with collecting institutions, she explores the relationships between permanent collections and temporary exhibitions, including display methods that experiment with environmental features. Marina has an MA in curatorial studies from Bard College, USA and a B. Sc. (Honours) in architecture from UFMG, Brazil.
Martina Miño Pérez (Quito, Ecuador, 1990) is a visual artist, cook, and cultural manager who currently lives between Helsinki, Quito and Berlin. Martina did her master’s degree in Visual Culture, Curation and Contemporary Art at Aalto University of Arts, Design and Architecture in Finland and focused her thesis on The Sense of Taste and the Act of Eating as Metaphorical Tools. Previously, she completed her undergraduate degree in Culinary Arts and Contemporary Arts at the San Francisco de Quito University. At the moment she works as an artist creating edible installations and exploring various ways in which food functions as symbolic devices in contemporary art. Her research investigates domesticity as a sphere of radical thought and the body as a tool for sensitive interpretation.
Martina has exhibited her works in spaces such as Project N.A.S.A.L, Gallery N24, TIER: The Institute of Endotic Research (Berlin); Pori Biennale IV (Finland), Arte Actual FLACSO and at the moment she is doing a residency at Centro de Arte Contemporáneo de Quito. Martina has shown her work in Finland, Sweden, Japan, Germany, Estonia, Mexico, and Ecuador. Her texts have been published in magazines and publications such as Index: Revista de Arte Contemporáneo, RabRab: Journal for Political and Formal Inquiries in Art, Feminist Culture House Helsinki, Simulacrum (Holland), among others.
Issue 4 / Written on Ice: Edible Memories of the Neighborhood of San Juan
Based in Seasalter, Whitstable, a little town by the sea in South East England, Mary Stockton Smith is an artist/ illustrator with over forty years experience in delivering art and design education and following her own practice of drawing and printmaking. Some of her early work includes making illustrations for poets.
My name is Melanie Popp and I am an art teacher currently caring for my two children full time. Though I am out of the traditional classroom setting for now, you can’t take the art teacher out of me! I’ve been creating opportunities for process based art play for my children since before they could wield paintbrushes.
I knew I wanted to be a teacher when I was still a child. My mama, also an art teacher, offered my three younger siblings and I ample opportunity to explore our growth as artists, and I continued that exploration through my undergraduate degrees in Studio Art and K-12 education, six years of teaching high school Art (and some pre-k art) in Oakland, California, a life changing two year MA program in Visual Culture and Contemporary Art at Aalto University in Espoo, Finland and almost four years and counting of facilitating projects and art experiences for my kids. My own practice as an artist has wavered between printmaking, participatory installations and mixed media painting. My latest body of work can be found here. Right now my independent practice is limited as child care of littles envelopes most waking (and sleeping) moments of my life.
My goal in creating Eat, Play, Paint is to help you create process based art experiences for your children at home. I hope you find meaningful tools and ideas here to help your children learn and grow through sensory visual art exploration in a way that feels natural and easy to you.
Miia Laine (she/her) is a Helsinki-based audio producer, arts worker and educator. Coming from a social science and ethnomusicology background, her work in radio and the wider arts seeks to critically examine and redress existing power dynamics. While living in the UK, Miia’s participation in an oral history project made a deep impression on her method of working and instilled a great love for interviews and listening to people. Her work often focuses on music, migration, gender and race, but also features processes of emotional growth.
Issue 8 / On the Limits and Possibilities of Decolonising Universities
Milka Njoroge is a researcher and writer whose work focuses on how black people in Finland make space through various forms of cultural production.
Issue 6 / Diaspora Mixtapes: Towards a Politics of Black Filmmaking
Mina Jafari (b. 1987, Tehran, Iran) has pursued a BA in Painting from Sepehr Art University of Isfahan. Her works are strongly inspired by the notion of dreams and how can one recreate a world within them. The reimagined illusive world of her paintings/prints is a peculiar space that humorously summons the viewers to its narrative. Not knowing what has happened before or what is going to happen after, the viewers are invited to pick up where the artist has left. Mina uses the chalcography technique as it lets her reproduce an image, like having the same dream over and over again.
Minjee Hwang Kim is a visual artist from Seoul, South Korea and based in Helsinki. In her works she explores time, space, and belonging through the theme of a journey. Kim’s works have been shown in multiple solo and group shows in Helsinki, Seoul, New York, and online platforms. Kim holds an MFA from the Academy of Fine Arts Helsinki and BFA from Korea National University of Arts.
Minkki Nurmi is a queer, nonbinary and neuro-divergent visual artist and gardener. They work with personal emotions, experiences and situations, which get documented in their work. Nurmi mainly works with drawing and text, but occasionally also uses photography and installation. At the moment they are working on a book called Soft. It studies how to be emotionally softer towards self and others from queer and neuro-divergent perspectives. The book will consist of poems, drawings and photographs. Their work is currently funded by Koneen Säätiö.
Issue 7 / Vulnerability is coming
Issue 2 / Mitäpä jos (What if)
Issue 7 / Guest Editorial / November 2021
Issue 2 / A Long Line of Characters: Getting to Know the Life and Work of Kirsti Tuokko
Mourning School is an artistic study program on the notion of being in grief as the stuff of our everyday, initiated by Lucie Gottlieb and Rosa Paardenkooper. In a series of exhibitions, public programming and publications, we imagine new ways of collective mourning to give name to and make space for the feelings that come with death, dying, loss and mourning. The vulnerability of life, threatened by the climate crisis, the global COVID-19 pandemic, political, social and economic violence, inequity and precarity, loneliness and isolation, makes the proximity to death and loss more tangible. Central to Mourning School lies the question: who gets to live and die, who is remembered and who is deemed ungrievable? In response, Mourning School proposes queerness, in its most expansive form, as a method and framework to subvert and unsettle Western understanding and norms of death and mourning - as an individual problem or medical diagnosis - and the stigma that surrounds them.
Issue 6 / Dear, don’t forget to bring a carton of milk on your way home x
Nadezhda Atanasova was born and raised in Bulgaria. She moved to Finland in 2016 where she eventually started pursuing a career in film. She is currently studying acting in Actors Academy Finland while also working on her short film production.
Ndéla Faye is a journalist and writer, based in Helsinki. Drawing from her own experiences, her writings often focus on identity, culture, rootlessness, motherhood and mental health. She is also an avid reality TV follower and is fluent in all the Real Housewives melodrama, along with the stormy weather and smooth sailings of Below Deck. Her articles have featured in The Guardian, VICE, Al Jazeera, HuffPost and CNN, among other publications. In 2016, she spoke on multiculturalism and being a ’Third Culture Kid’ at TedXWarwick. Ndéla holds a MA in journalism from Birkbeck, University of London.
Niko Skorpio is a transdisciplinary artist, researcher and educator based in Finland. Through his works Niko Skorpio explores various forgotten, abandoned, obscure and secluded areas in culture, nature and the psyche. Niko Skorpio holds an MA in Visual Culture and Contemporary Art from Aalto University, Helsinki.
Niko Tii Nurmi Sipiläinen estas artisto, verkisto, reality show-kameraisto kaj afiŝa distribuisto loĝanta en Helsinko. Ili nuntempe estas subtenataj de Arts Promotion Centre Finland.
Nimco Kulmiye Hussein is a multidisciplinary writer/critic who works at the intersections of research, visual culture and art. They are the founder and co-editor of Ante Nouveau, a magazine focusing on contemporary art and culture as well as critical thinking and practices. Kulmiye Hussein holds a Master of Arts from Aalto University, School of Arts, Design and Architecture.
Issue 5 / On “The Feeling of Being on Display and Under Pressure” — a Conversation With Man Yau
Nina Mufleh is an artist, currently living in Jordan.
Nisha Ramayya grew up in Glasgow and now lives in London. Her poetry collection States of the Body Produced by Love (2019) is published by Ignota Books. Recent poems and essays can be found online in CCA Annex, JUF, and Spam Zine; and in print in Wasafiri and Magma. She teaches Creative Writing at Queen Mary University of London.
Issue 8 / Choreographing Dissonance: A Response to Mishandled Archive
Noura Selmi is a published writer and a translator from Gaza.
Pipoca (Paola De Ramos) was born in Curitiba, Brazil in 1986. Pipoca creates performance and installation to stimulate body sensation and perception, challenging peoples’ notion of their private and public psychological space. Most of her work is charged with intense colours, complex combinations of different materials and with a pitch of sour humour. All of Pipoca’s works are born in her subjective and inner questions brought up in her daily life; throughout the process, they lose their personal approach to open up for more political and socially engaging actions.
The artist has already shown her work in the UK, Brazil, Russia, Portugal, Estonia, Slovenia and Finland. Pipoca had done lectures at the University of East Anglia and the University of East London. Also, she had curated and organized exhibitions in Brazil and Finland. She received her BA Graphic Arts at UTFPR in 2008, in Curitiba, Brazil, BFA in Fine Art at Slade School of Fine Art in 2013, in London and MA in Visual Culture and Contemporary art, at Aalto University, Finland, in 2018. At the moment, she is based in Chapada Diamantina, Brazil.
Paola Jalili (b. 1991, Mexico City) is a publisher, visual artist, and cultural worker currently based in Helsinki. She works with a variety of visual media to reflect on the intersections between labor, gender, and the contemporary workplace. In 2017, she co-founded the independent publishing project quince ediciones together with Daniel Bolívar. In her self-publishing practice, Paola experiments with do-it-yourself production methods and aims to reach criticality through small, quiet, and humorous minutiae.
Issue 1 / To Follow a Ball of Yarn: A Conversation With Shubhangi Singh
Parsa Kamehkhosh is a Helsinki based designer, visual and performance artist, born in Tehran in 1985. His interest in objects and everyday aesthetics led him to study industrial design at Tehran University of Fine Arts, from there to Stockholm to pursue Aesthetics and Meaning-making at Konstfack College of Arts, Crafts and Design and then to explore Visual Culture, Curating, and Contemporary Arts at Aalto University. Through his practice, he explores the notion of aesthetic aura that appears from the proximity, juxtaposition and joints of materials and shapes. After he moved to Finland in 2015, he got more engaged in the interactive aspects of objects and materials in the context of performance art and, since then Performance art has turned to the most prominent means of self-expression, and self-study in his practice. His performances manoeuvre on the borders of three disciplines of Contemporary Art, Crafts, and Design. His works have been mostly exhibited in Europe, the Middle East and Southeast Asia.
Pietari Kylmälä keeps a garden. He works at Finnish National Broadcasting Company YLE as a journalist, specialising in literary reviews. Their upcoming podcast series Lukupiiri Tulusto & Kylmälä will discuss new books.
Issue 5 / Our Efforts to Show Solidarity for Palestine Are Tested at Kiasma
Princess Jimenez (b.1987, Dominican Republic) educator, writer, spoken word performer, and podcaster. She has a bachelor’s degree in Special Education from Utah State University. Currently living in Sweden. She is one of the founders of La Dekoloniala!, an educational, artistic, and cultural organization whose main goal is to bring forward decolonial knowledge. Princess Jimenez is the creator of Mango Podcast — an educational and opinion-driven platform where content is created from an intersectional feminist and decolonial perspective.
Raine Aiava is a Ph.D candidate in the Doctoral Programme in Political, Societal and Regional Changes within the Department of Geosciences and Geography at the University of Helsinki. Working in the field of human geography, he is part of the cross-disciplinary research group, Geographies and Affective Politics of Education, where his research explores the politics of difference in eventual encounters and emphasizes non-representational and more-than-human perspectives. Aiava’s previous training was in the philosophy of Aesthetics which continues to influence his work. He has Masters in Fine Arts from the Rhode Island School of Design, and is a co-founder and board member of the Museum of Impossible Forms in Kontula, Helsinki, a cultural center funded by the Kone Foundation.
Riikka Kuoppala is a maker and enabler, artist and legal practitioner, crazy cat and plant lady. Riikka’s one-person law firm Vegan & Legal started as a bike café in 2020 and has since developed into a radical legal practice where sustainability, non-discrimination, and kindness are the driving forces. Her alter ego, the Tax Potato, gives tax advice to artists on Vegan & Legal’s social media channels. One of Riikka’s objectives is to develop alternative strategies for working with legal issues, such as creating feminist agreement and contract writing practices, queer approaches to family and inheritance law, and taxation emancipation for the precariat.
Riina Rastas is a Finnish journalist and a student of Intercultural Encounters in the University of Helsinki. Rastas has worked in six different media outlets and is currently doing an internship in a magazine. Last summer Rastas was living in Tanzania and has also lived in South Korea, the United States and Australia. Through these experiences she has learned to understand that people are more similar to each other than they think. Rastas is passionate about human rights and global development and hopes to advance them in the future.
Riku Lehtoranta (b.1990) is a freelancer writer, with a key interest in music and all kinds of culture as well as social and academic phenomena. He has been studying musicology in the University of Jyväskylä and has been working with music in general. Recently, he has been particularly interested in music as an audiovisual, performative and social phenomenon.
Issue 7 / The Nowhere Inn: a shrewd and comical meta-documentary
Risako Yamanoi is a visual artist based in Helsinki. She has completed her master’s degree at the Academy of Fine Arts, University of the Arts Helsinki. Her work explores personal feelings and memories which remain unseen and marginal in everyday life.
Ristena Biret Kirstte Nilla Pinja aka Pinja Pieski is a sámi indigenous artist, feminist and activist from Deanu river, from the Finnish side of Sápmi. They are currently living in Helsinki, studying and doing performing arts.
Roxana Sadvokassova (b. 1992, Kazakhstan), in her maverick approach, seeks to organically articulate and explore storytelling through different mediums, with respectful disregard to the labelling nature of the art field. Her current primary focus is film and comedy.
Saara Kahra is a Helsinki-based writer. She is mostly a poet, by heart and skill, but is venturing into prose. She is a member of the Helsinki Writer’s Group.
Saara Mahbouba (b. 1993, San Jose CA) is a visual artist, artistic researcher, and writer currently based in Helsinki. Her research interests are primarily in the intersection of identity and labor. She draws on a mix of critical theory and pop culture, using the forms of popular media to make her research interests more widely accessible. She works with cultural programming and organizing in multiple forms, both independently and as a part of varying arts and community organizations. Saara holds a B.A. from NYU and an M.A. from Aalto University.
Issue 2 / A Long Line of Characters: Getting to Know the Life and Work of Kirsti Tuokko
Sakari Tervo is a university teacher at Aalto ARTS and prior to that he was a lecturer of exhibition studies at the Academy of Fine Arts, Uniarts. Tervo has done independent curatorial work with a series of online publications and has been an active member of the artist-run spaces Sorbus in Helsinki and Titanik in Turku. “For me, art is a social weave where other possible worlds exist.”
Issue 5 / On “The Feeling of Being on Display and Under Pressure” — a Conversation With Man Yau
Sam Boateng was born and raised in Italy by Ghanaian parents, and is deeply connected to both African and Italian roots. Sam moved to Finland in 2016 to start a new chapter in his life and to challenge himself in a new way. He has two major passions: sharing love and happiness through food and through pictures and videos as a Photographer/ Videographer.
Sam Hultin (b. 1982) is an artist based in Stockholm, Sweden. Their work is based on their interest in queer history, identity and community and explores connections between personal experiences and larger political and social structures. Sam’s work is represented in the collections of Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Gothenburg Museum of Art and Malmö Art Museum.
Issue 8 / Eva-Lisa’s Monument: Caring for the Archive of a Trans Pioneer
Born in the 80s, educated in the 10s, living in the now. Sami Juhani Rekola tries to recalcitrantly keep bios and himself undefined by using fancy umbrella terms like a post-medium thinker, hands-on explorer and precarity art worker.
He believes in action, love, compassionate behaviour and the fun of getting himself into trouble by doing things he doesn’t quite understand yet.
While slowly striving for a sustainable artist career he seeks loose calendar views, a sense of freedom and healthy ways of using passion to achieve flow states.
Sanna Ritvanen (b. 1989 in Sotkamo) is an artist, producer, cook, baker and creative mind working widely in the field of arts and culture. They are interested in collaborative and caring working methods in multidisciplinary groups and projects, trying to embrace the not knowing and failure with constant curiosity towards, well basically almost everything, from sourdough baking to urban planning.
Ritvanen is an active member of Mustarinda association, Porin kulttuurisäätö and one of the founding members of Asematila collective.
Issue 4 / Mixing Everything With Everything in Everything — an Interview With Hertta Kiiski
Savu E. Korteniemi (b. 1986) is visual artist and independent writer, living and working in Lapland. Savu in their artistic practice uses mostly sculpture and drawing. During their artistic process, Savu puts also a strong attention on writing and notation practice as a tool to reflect and discuss questions that arise during their research. Communicating and collaborating with others is also a key part of their work. Savu E. Korteniemi holds a master degree from the University of Arts Helsinki, Academy of Fine Arts. Even when drawing, Savu feels that they are above all a sculptor. They are particularly interested in objects and how one can give shape to things out of reach. The making of concrete pieces is analogous to language construction; in that sense thinking is also three-dimensional. Like objects, thinking is silent. Networks of language form a self-enclosed world; language can’t pass these borders.
Issue 5 / On Soft Alphabets and the Hues of an Inside: An Interview With Corinna Helenelund
Sepideh Rahaa (b.1981, Amol) is a multidisciplinary artist, researcher and educator based in Helsinki. Through her practice, she actively investigates and questions prevailing power structures, social norms and conventions while focusing on womanhood, storytelling and everyday resistance. Currently she is pursuing her doctoral studies in Contemporary Art at Aalto University. Her practice and research interests are representations in contemporary art, silenced histories, decolonisation, Intersectional feminist politics and post-migration matters.
Shahi Derky (b. 1997) is a filmmaker and a linguistics student, working on connecting images, languages, and collective memory.
Sharron L. Todd is a writer, filmmaker and creative professional. She has lived in Helsinki for ten years via Brooklyn, New York and other parts of the world. During her time as a co-owner/operator of Finland-based Brooklyn Café and Brooklyn Baking Co, she has published articles on social topics and both edited and wrote for an award-winning grassroots book No Justice, No Peace. She wrote and directed her first short film, Dear Elijah, released in 2020. Prior to her life in Finland, Sharron wrote screenplays, poetry and essays for over 20 years.
Shia Conlon is a writer and artist whose work has been centered around marginalized voices and growing up in the landscape of working-class Catholic Ireland. His research is focused on non-linear time, queer representation, archives, language, and memory.
Shubhangi Singh’s practice as a visual artist and filmmaker responds to contemporary politics and the interconnectedness of production and reproduction of popular and everyday material. She often draws upon the empirical as well as existing recorded knowledge to address movement, identity and queries related to the cultural and social reality of the feminine and its negotiations with the public sphere. Singh is the co-founder of New City Limits, an initiative to facilitate creative viewing and practice in Navi Mumbai, India and she currently lives and practices in Helsinki.
Tania Nathan is a writer, poet and journalist who lives and works in the capital region of Finland. In her free time, she likes to smash the patriarchy and upset the status quo. She also likes Olympic weightlifting, foraging for wild foods and camping whenever time and weather permits. She also works as an educator and youth worker, produces poetry events and artists all over the greater Helsinki region, and one day when Corona is over, the world.
Thomas Moose is a performer, a model, and a scientific researcher. During their performances, they explore the hotness and sexiness of their trans nonbinary body. They have a double Master of Science degree in International Nature Conservation from the University of Göttingen, Germany, and Lincoln University, New Zealand. Thomas is from Italy but is now based in Helsinki, Finland. They’re pursuing a PhD position and creating a life filled with science, different art forms and community.
Issue 6 / Continuance between Art, Art-Space and Audience: conversation with Kihwa-Endale
Dr. Timo S. Tuhkanen (they/them) is an Omani born artist-composer and academic working at the intersection between contemporary music, art, and research on the historical and cultural aspects of touch. Currently based in Helsinki Timo is the founder of experimental publishing house Pteron Press, the director of Myymälä2 gallery, and Affiliated Researcher at the Department of Music, University of Turku. Timo’s writings have been published in online magazines such as Arachne.cc, The Kitchen Poet, and Red May Seattle, as well as in artists catalogues published by Al-Mamal Foundation, and books on artistic and curatorial research published by die Angewandt Editions | De Gruyter.
Issue 7 / A I S T I T – Coming to Our Senses: A Review in Three Paths
Toshiya Kamei is a fiction writer working in English and Spanish. Their short fiction has appeared in venues such as New World Writing, Revista Korad, and SmokeLong en Español.
Tuomo Tuovinen is an artist (Who isn’t?) who has been involved in running art spaces Sorbus and Outo Olo in a small retail space in Helsinki. He is also a member of Sorbus artist collective and Mustarinda association.
Ubuntu Film Club is a collective from Helsinki that organises monthly film screenings and panel discussions.
Vera Kavaleuskaya is a curator and editor born in Minsk and based in Helsinki. She is the co-founder and commissioning editor of the platform statusproject.net, launched in the frame of the collective research project STATUS: The Role of the Artist in the Changing of Society. The project brings together artists and cultural workers with a common goal to analyze the conditions of artistic practice and give visibility to the people who conduct it in today’s world.
Issue 4 / All I Want to Do Is to Hold Your Hand and Cry the Tears of Joy
Vidha Saumya (b. 1984, Patna) is a Helsinki-based artist-poet whose body of works – drawings, murals, books, poems, sculptures, embroidered textiles, videos, and digital artefacts – are wry and warm in their politics and kaleidoscopic in their aesthetics. The concept of Heimat / (Home)land is at the core of her praxis. She is the co-founder and co-editor of NO NIIN – an online monthly magazine in Finland, and a founding member of the Museum of Impossible Forms – an award-winning cultural para-institution in Kontula, Finland. She has recently published a collection of seven books of poems, Monumentless Moments: the Utopia of Figureless Plinths. She holds a MA in Visual Culture, Curating & Contemporary Art from the Aalto University; a BFA in Painting from the Sir J. J. School of Art, and a Diploma in Visual Communication Design from Srishti Institute of Art, Design and Technology.
Issue 8 / Editorial / December 2021
Issue 6 / Editorial / October 2021
Issue 5 / Editorial / September 2021
Issue 4 / Editorial / June 2021
Issue 3 / Editorial / May 2021
Ville Vuorenmaa (b.1980 Lapua, Finland) is a visual artist, songwriter and musician. Currently, Vuorenmaa is living with his family in Oulu, Finland. Vuorenmaa has been focusing on watercolour painting for several years now. Subject matter in his paintings is often personal. Vuorenmaa likes to combine images with texts. At the moment Vuorenmaa is working on a series of paintings that deal with the strange world of record collecting and fascination with old vinyl records. He is currently preparing for his solo shows at Mältinranta Studio (Tampere, October 2021) and Galleria 5 (Oulu, December 2021).
Vilu Puttonen is a student of social and economic history and is interested in care, feminist economics and queer pasts. They are doing art things and tattoos and always searching for traces and friendships.
Issue 7 / Magic, Intergenerational Trauma & Snail Shells: Conversation With KaffeochBulla
Vishnu Vardhani RAJAN is a Body-Philosopher. A hyphenated identity, multidisciplinary practices, building connections between art, science, witchcraft, history and cultures define their practice. Vishnu explores shame, through dance, acting and stand-up comedy. Oscillating between cultures, methodologies and sexual identities, each different from the other are instrumental in their visual Language. Twerking and Napping in public spaces and community building are Vishnu’s whatchamacallits for everyday-activism. Vishnu’s research interests are Sleep, conflict, nutrition, with recurring themes of Night politics, conflict and food. Vishnu’s persona Vamp Master Brown is the first Indian Drag King in Helsinki. Vishnu aims to blend their love of Cinema, passion for film making with the ongoing practices, to achieve a new language in storytelling.
Visual artist, teacher, and illustrator Warda Ahmed is an artist that lives and works in the Helsinki metropolitan area. Ahmed is currently working on a project funded by the Kone Foundation. Ahmed makes comics about her family’s migration stories. Ahmed writes and draws the stories that she thinks need to be recorded: stories about migration, parallel realities, Afro-European identity, the stories that are her heritage. In 2019, the comic anthology Sisaret1918, to which Ahmed also contributed, won the Comic Finlandia award.
Xuan Le is an illustrator based in Saigon, Vietnam. She holds a BA in Fashion Design from IUH and BFA in Graphic Design from HCMC University of Fine Arts. Besides drawing, she enjoys experimenting with surrounding materials and making abstract models.
Yilin Ma is a free writer focusing on queer Asian diaspora experiences through film, visual culture and literacy. Currently they are getting an MA in Art History at the University of Helsinki.
Issue 8 / Lan Yu: Attraction of Opposites; Between Symbolism in Beijing Comrades
Yvonne Billimore is an artist-curator moving between Helsinki and Scotland. Yvonne is associate curator of Rehearsing Hospitalities, Frame Contemporary Art Finland’s public programme for 2019 to 2023. Previously, she was the Programme Manager at Scottish Sculpture Workshop in rural Aberdeenshire, where she developed and produced a programme of international residencies and projects, alongside workshops and public events. Her work facilities situations for collective learning, exchange and experiences with particular attention given to feminist and ecological matters. She is currently exploring Feminist Collective Research Practices, with research performed through a range of approaches including archival research, workshops, reading groups, listening practices, correspondence, writing and an open call for responses: fcrp.cargo.site
Zacharias Holmberg is a 36-year-old mixed-media illustrator and designer, born on the west coast of Finland but now residing and working in Helsinki. A fine-artist by education who also delves into writing, bookbinding, graphic design and drama, unwilling to settle for one particular style or theme. Motifs range from science fantasy and horror to shibari-inspired art and minimalist landscapes.
