Conflicting Relations

Conflicting Relations is a day-long program that brings together artists, curators, and institutions whose practices go beyond hospitality and act as correctives to prescribed host and guest hierarchies, on intimate and infrastructural levels.

The event is co-presented as a joint initiative between the Finnish Cultural Institute in New York, the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at New School, and Frame Contemporary Art Finland. The program ties together the FCINY's Together Again project with artist Matti Aikio, Frame's Rehearsing Hospitalities program, and Vera List Center's Correction theme of 2023. As part of the collaboration, Matti Aikio is Vera List Center's 2022-2023 Sámi Fellow, and the gathering is the first iteration of Aikio's work for Together Again.

This two-part event will lift important matters of Indigeneity and hospitality in a US and Canadian context, and presents Sámi artist Matti Aikio’s practice alongside a range of practitioners to exchange resonances and resistances.

Speakers include Matti Aikio, Emily Johnson, Elina Waage Mikalsen, Wanda Nanibush, S.J Norman, Ali Rosa-Salas, Ana Beatriz Sepúlveda, and Karoline Trollvik, among others.  

Registration is required, you can sign up by clicking here!

FULL PROGRAM

11:00 am EST Committed Relationships 

This session reflects on diverse modes of hospitality and its attendant politics. Pairs of artists and host institutions discuss their long-term relationships and how they redefine practices, understandings, and engagements between them.

Choreographer and director Emily Johnson and Ali Rosa-Salas, Vice President of Visual and Performing Arts at Henry Street Settlement, discuss the transformative power of their collaboration and its reverberation throughout the institution.

Artist and writer S.J Norman and Ana Beatriz Sepúlveda, Head of Community Access and Inclusion, at Performance Space, map out the relations powering Knowledge of Wounds, a series of care-oriented programs that originated at Performance Space in 2018 and other partner organizations.

Artist Elina Waage Mikalsen and Karoline Trollvik, Head of Communications and External Relations, Office for Contemporary Art Norway, discuss their experience working for and in Sámi and majority institutions.

Through these and other examples, the panel considers what hospitality looks like when led by Indigenous artists and how institutions self-correct to be in good relations with artists, the land, and local communities.

Introductions and moderated discussion by Yvonne Billimore, Associate Curator, Frame Contemporary Art Finland, and Eriola Pira, Curator and Director of Programs, Vera List Center.

1:30 pm EST Lunch

Hospitality for this program extends to include lunch for all participants.

2:30 pm EST  Matti Aikio in conversation with Wanda Nanibush 

In conversation with Anishinaabe curator, artist, and educator Wanda Nanibush, Curator of Indigenous Art at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Sámi artist Matti Aikio presents his research on the so-called “neo-Lapp movement” in Finland and settler-colonial attempts at claiming Indigenous identity.

Taking into consideration Indigenous sovereignty and self-determination, Aikio looks past individual violations to question the structural and large-scale implications of this movement as a counter-strategy to the political mobilization of the Sámi. Aikio’s practice considers the ongoing conflict between the Sámi culture and the Nordic nation-states’ use of natural resources.

Introductions by Monica Gathuo, Executive Producer of Together Again project, the Finnish Cultural Institute in New York.  

Closing remarks by Jussi Koitela, Head of Programme, Frame Contemporary Art Finland, and Carin Kuoni, Senior Director and Chief Curator, Vera List Center.

We also interviewed Matti, click here if you want to know more about him.

PARTICIPATING ORGANIZATIONS

The Finnish Cultural Institute in New York

The Finnish Cultural Institute in New York is a not-for-profit organization that works across the fields of contemporary art, design, and architecture, creating dialogue between Finnish and American professionals and audiences. The institute, founded in 1990, has grown from a residency program to commissioning large-scale projects and events that foster critical dialogue and work to build support for art professionals.

Together Again is an expansive art project fostering gatherings, workshops, intercultural dialogues and socially engaged art, organised by the Finnish Academic and Cultural Institutes across the world. Together Again presents six community-based works to audiences in Amsterdam, Brussels, Helsinki, London, Madrid, New York, Oslo, Paris, and Porto, as well as online. The project takes place throughout 2023 and culminates in a one-day festival held in Helsinki, Finland on the 8th of September 2023.

Frame Contemporary Art Finland

Frame Contemporary Art Finland is an advocate for Finnish contemporary art. Frame supports international initiatives, facilitates professional partnerships, and encourages critical development of the field through grants, visitor programme and curator residencies, seminars and talks, exhibition collaborations, and network platforms. Frame commissions Finland’s participation in the Venice Biennale.
Rehearsing Hospitalities is Frame Contemporary Art Finland’s public programme, 2019 to 2023. It connects artists, curators, and other practitioners in the field of contemporary art and beyond to build up and mediate new practices, understandings, and engagements with diverse hospitalities. Rehearsing Hospitalities 2023 is part of the EU-funded project Islands of Kinship: A Collective Manual for Sustainable and Inclusive Art Institutions. The Finnish Academic and Cultural Institutes’ commissioning programme Together Again is funded by the Finnish Cultural Foundation and the Wihuri Foundation.

The Vera List Center for Art and Politics

The Vera List Center for Art and Politics is a non-profit research center at The New School in New York. Through its dynamic interdisciplinary programs, conferences, artist fellowships, residencies, exhibitions, and publications, the VLC imagines and supports new forms of politically engaged art, research, public scholarship, and community around the world. The 2022–2024 Vera List Center Focus Theme: Correction* and the programs dedicated to it explore the tension, discomfort, and potential it inspires to pose questions about the metaphorical, political, and social dimensions and implications of correction.The Vera List Center is committed to ensuring that our programs are accessible to and inclusive of all. Please let us know when registering if you need any accommodations.