Nella Aarne on Navigating Circumstances

Nella Aarne is a Finnish curator living and working in England. She convenes the Of Animacy Reading Group and co-directs Obsidian Coast, an independent curatorial platform committed to artist moving image and feminist, environmentally sustainable practices. Her work considers ethical encounters, collaborative learning and redefined notions of productivity. She is invested in critical thought that calls for heightened sensitivity to our own socio-political and material entanglements with boundless subject positions, histories, living beings, molecular compositions, technological apparatuses and infrastructures.

Aarne has contributed to programs at Somerset House, London; ICA, London; Abandon Normal Devices; Spike Island, Bristol; Arnolfini, Bristol; Glasgow International; UmArts, Umeå University; and Kim? Contemporary Art Center, Riga. She has also worked as an Associate Lecturer on the MA Curating programme at the University of the West of England. Aarne earned her MFA in Curating from Goldsmiths (University of London) in 2015, and was the recipient of the Curatorial Junior Fellowship at Goldsmiths in 2015–16.

Aarne was FCINY’s first curator-in-residence in partnership with Residency Unlimited. The institute’s Kia Standertskjöld-Nordenstam sat down for a virtual discussion with the curator in order to learn more about her experience in New York during March-April 2022. 

“It’s been two months since the end of your residency. What are your reflections on your time in New York and the event you held here? Have these shifted from your initial expectations?”

I hadn’t realised how enlivening it would feel to simply move through and be surrounded by a city after over two years in the English countryside — where I had continued to work from home throughout the pandemic with limited IRL access to a professional community and cultural life. The shift from a regional art scene in the UK to an international crowd of artists and curators in New York also reminded me of how necessary it is to be constantly surrounded by new ideas, rigorous discourse and curatorial projects in multiple registers to feel energised by one’s own work.

As the residency conditions opened a newly felt capacity for unexpected encounters and conversations, I soon realised that my primary concern was, in fact, not the development of a preconceived project on organisational codes of practice, but the circumstances of my own practice in general (or rather, what I felt had been missing from the everyday context of my work for some time), and how I could establish stable grounds for sustained professional development beyond the residency period. Instead of simply facilitating the development of predetermined ideas, the residency, then, became a fruitful context for wholly reassessing my professional priorities, revisiting my curatorial interests, identifying new avenues for taking my work forward and, most delightfully, rediscovering the pleasure of a research practice that is principled on freedom, spontaneity and joy.

“What is the biggest distinction as well as the most surprising similarities within the curatorial field in the US and the UK?”

I was surprised by the extent to which the scene in New York was dominated by commercial galleries and large-scale institutions alone, while artist-led and independent non-profits seemed more like a rarity. I couldn’t help thinking that this must affect what kinds of projects it might be motivating or possible to produce and exhibit. In the UK, non-profit project spaces and small-scale curatorial platforms are a visible and significant part of the art ecology. Despite their ongoing struggles to access the resources needed for sustaining regular programming in the long-term, they continue to provide career-shifting opportunities and an irreplaceable testing ground for experimental practices — without the pressure to generate sales or facilitate high audience numbers.

I also felt the intensity and pace at which artists and curators alike might be keen to jump on and produce new projects. As an avid supporter of unhurried practices with many like-minded comrades, this accelerated energy wasn’t something I am used to encountering in my circuit of peers in the UK. It was curious to observe how, regardless of the structural differences between the UK and US sectors (e.g. the availability of public funding and standards of employment), the narratives of underpaid labour and feeling constantly stretched sounded similar. However, in the US surviving the conditions seemed to be primarily a case of pride whereas in the UK, I would argue, these realities are collectively recognised as a systemic dysfunction which should be structurally overcome.

“What are some of your core values and how are they visible in the way you curate and choose projects? What themes are surfacing at the moment, and what do you see happening in the next few years?” 

The most important core value of my work is to be as life-affirming as possible, and this aspiration can manifest in many different ways. It can mean insisting on doing things slowly; resisting narratives of accelerated production and growth; minimising hierarchical and competitive social dynamics; respecting the limits of collaborators’ capacities; or establishing transparent processes through which collaborators can communicate their needs. At the same time, life-affirming can also mean the necessity to remain open to conflict, discomfort and unruliness so creative processes don’t become suffocated in strained demands for inexhaustible tenderness. These approaches can be applied to any project – what matters is that these values and aspirations can be generatively used and collectively developed amongst everyone involved.

During the residency, I had the opportunity to refine ideas of what feels to me like politically sound practice into a new, more focused body of research. The outcome of this will be an extended public programme enquiring into different modes of collectivity, and how militancy and conflict could coexist with care in the context of political and revolutionary action. 

“During your stay in New York you also attended the Chicago Expo. How was that as an experience and how did it enhance your understanding of the curatorial scene in the US?” 

I primarily spent my time in Chicago getting to know the other European curators on the curatorial exchange programme organised by the Expo team. It was excellent to meet the curators and hear about how organisations and institutions across Europe had handled the unusual programming conditions of the last couple of years.

In terms of the art fair itself, the most memorable experience was visiting the independent (miniature) shadow fair, Barely Fair, which was taking place in conjunction with the Expo. It brought to the foreground some of the more alternative and grassroots arts community in the city, whilst also, in delightful ways, revealing some of the tensions that always surface when questions about inclusivity surface at moments of heightened investment.

“What is inspiring you right now? How has your time in NYC and the US scene affected this?”

After the residency, I carried several kilos of books back to the UK and, upon unpacking, I left them all out as a stack, which has been continuously in the way of daily activities and moved about the living room since my return. There’s something delightful about this towering nuisance – it has repeatedly invited me to dip in and out of poetry, philosophy and political theory as I please, helping me discover the pleasures of an impulsive and disorderly reading habit that owes no one a thing. The more you read, the more receptive to unfamiliar ideas you become, and this always compels you to develop new thoughts of your own.