Contributors
FEMINIST CULTURE HOUSE
We are an intersectional feminist curatorial and editorial collective based in Helsinki. We produce exhibitions, publications, and tools for change to try and create fairer working conditions, better representation, and more inclusive institutional structures within the art field.https://feministculturehouse.org/
MARJA VIITAHUHTA
Marja Viitahuhta is a visual artist and filmmaker, whose works have been short films, animations, video installations, performances, collage pieces and installations. She has a background in performance and music and has graduated from the performing arts department of Turku Arts Academy with an experimental film as her graduation work in 2003. She also holds an MFA degree from the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts. Since 2019 she has collaborated with musicians Ánnámáret, Ilkka Heinonen and Turkka Inkilä, creating moving image counterparts to their music, mixing them live in concerts as well as screening them at film festivals and exhibiting them at gallery and museum exhibitions. Alongside her artistic practice Viitahuhta has worked as an art teacher, including at the Aalto University and Art School Maa.KATYA (KATEKULER)
Katya (katekuler), they/she, is an audiovisual artist and activist. Their main interest lies in the intersection of non-linear narratives, memory, experimental animation, visual design, autoethnographic research, and activist archives. They want to find out how fluid, simultaneous, non-linear, rhizomatic nature of human memory could be reenacted through artistic practice without compromising the value of the artistic process itself. As an immigrant from Russia who lived in Slovenia, Belgium and Portugal before coming to Finland, she is searching for the ways of preserving immigrant identity and memories of home while being in a loop of constant forgetting-remembering, and to keep changing while preserving her own story as opposed to current dominant fascist narratives.*They love learning languages, music of a million genres and origins, film photography, and cats.
https://www.instagram.com/katekuler/
IRIA ARENAS
Iria is a multidisciplinary artist with a background in performance, choreography, dance, and stage lighting design. Their practice is driven by a strong belief in the potential of art to activate critical thinking and inspire social change. They are the initiator behind A4CT (Artivism for Critical Thinking), a volunteer-based platform operating outside institutional and state funding structures. Through A4CT, Iria facilitates spaces for artistic activism, collective inquiry, and intercultural exchange, supporting practices that challenge dominant narratives and explore alternative, non-hierarchical ways of being together.https://iriaarenas.com/
MREETHMANDIR
Mreethmandir (he/them) is an animator and visual artist who grew up in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Their practice is based on an ever-active investigation of their surroundings and the feelings evoked by such spaces. They uses their drawing practice as a coping mechanism- documenting their observations and their emotional response to it. Their techniques span experimental animation and video projection to activate and communicate their drawings.In parallel, Mreethmandir is also a professional animator working on commercials, films, and music videos. They enjoys teaching animation, contributing to collaborative projects, and curating collective exhibitions.
https://mreethmandir.art/
RAPHAËL / L’APHARÉ
Raphaël/L’Apharé (they/them) is a white, gender-fluid, able-bodied performance artist and live drawing model. They were born in the south of France and are currently based in Helsinki. Over the past five years, they have developed two practices: a performance practice called 'Here for a moment' and a method of facilitating collective thinking through movement called 'Play and act from what is here – Open practice'. They strive to create learning contexts in which participants take turns sharing their knowledge and experiences. They hold a BA and have ten years' experience in community work in the south of France. They have developed a fifteen-year-long performance practice and hold a MA in Dance Performance from Uniarts Helsinki.
MUSTAPISTE
Launched in August 2025, Mustapiste is an online journal providing content about experimental art events and practices happening in Helsinki. It aims to reflect the spectatorship and subjectivity of art-making for makers, observers, researchers and lovers of art. https://mustapiste.fi/Mark Reid Bulatović
Mark Reid Bulatović is a guitarist and composer from Slovenia and Scotland. His artistic interests are placed at the intersection of ecology, intimacy and ritual. A recent graduate of the Sibelius Academy, he has participated in international festivals in Shanghai (R.A.W.), UK (Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, Edinburgh Fringe) and Helsinki (Sipoon Äänet,
Musica Nova) with a variety of groups and as a soloist. In 2023 he was the recipient of the Pro Musica Säätiö grant for promising young musicians. Aside from classical and contemporary music, Mark also enjoys exploring folk-music with his
band, Fiddlers on the Ramp, who garnered five-star reviews and a completely sold-out run at the 2019 Edinburgh fringe festival. Performances with the band have ranged from busking on the streets of Edinburgh to performing in some of the most prestigious concert halls in Scotland.
YASMIN IBRAHIM
Yasmin Ibrahim is a curator and producer based in Helsinki, Finland. At the center of her practice are the perspectives and lived experience of Queer BIPOC artists, specifically from the Global South. Ibrahim has collaborated with art institutions in Finland and Denmark including but not limited to: Amos Rex museum, the Hotel and Restaurant museum, IHME Helsinki, The Finnish Museum of Photography, and Center for Nordic Otherwise.SHOHREH SHAKOORY
Shohreh Shakoory is a researcher, curator, and artist based in Helsinki and Berlin. She holds a BA in Art History from University of Rome, an MFA in Media Art from Bauhaus University Weimar. She is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Fine Arts Hamburg (HfBK). Shakoory has worked as a curator, producer, and researcher with institutions including Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), Savvy Contemporary, Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien, and Sinema Transtopia in Berlin. She is currently the curatorial fellow at EMMA – Espoo Museum of Modern Art, in collaboration with the Saastamoinen Foundation.Rooted in critical theory and post-colonial discourse and interdisciplinary and hybrid in approach, her practice uses different formats and languages to explore world-making processes, speculative futurism, and the relationship between cosmology and technology through artistic research and curatorial practice.AMAN ASKARIZAD
Aman Askarizad (b.1986 Iran) is a multidisciplinary artist, curator, and producer based in Vantaa. As a multidisciplinary artist, he is interested in using different mediums to create works, situations, and conversations that unravel power dynamics and highlight the ethics of encountering others. His research focuses on the politics of representation in art and music. He's driven to promote inclusivity and tackle challenges posed by power structures and hierarchies through open dialogue and collective problem-solving.BILGE HASDEMIR
Bilge Hasdemir (she/her) is a researcher and curator working and thinking through the ways in which engaged practices and collective instituting processes actualize their critical and social potentialities. She currently coordinates the PUBLICS Youth Advisory Board at PUBLICS in Helsinki. As part of an Innovative Training Network on socially engaged art and the future of European independent art spaces, she was a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Early Stage Researcher at the University of Iceland, where she is now completing her PhD. Previously, she served as Curator at Aalto University (2019-2021). Her curatorial praxis also engages with labor and migration struggles in the cultural sector, as well as critical policy analysis. She is member of advocacy group Artists in Iceland Visa Action Group (Aivag).STATION OF COMMONS
Station of Commons (SoC) is a collaborative platform initiated in 2020, and organized by Grégoire Rousseau (Helsinki), Juan Fortun (Geneva), Minerva Juolahti, Alain Ryckelynck, Eddie Choo Wen Yi and Mathilde Palenius. SoC researches into the possibilities of reappropriating technology within public space. SoC advocates radical, alternative strategies to the neoliberal system in terms of digital and independent means of production, communication, and distribution. Station of Commons operates as a research platform to produce a space for thinking around digital commoning. Since its inception, it has collaborated with manifesta13, documenta fifteen, lumbung radio, Miss Read the Berlin art book fair, Afrikadaa Dakar Biennial 2024, M.E.P Paris, Pixelache, and SWAB Barcelona independent art fair, among others. In 2024, Station of Commons co-published “Radio as Collective Imagination” with MissRead and “Radio as Radical Education” in collaboration with HfBK Hamburg and Aalto University.https://www.stationofcommons.org/
ECONOMIC MEDIA LAB
The Economic Media Lab promotes the actualisation of postcapital network economies.
We are a community endeavour curating, developing and producing activities that promote other economic literacy at a popular level, support creative experimentation and technical development, and inform policy. Additionally, the Lab consults in economic design work. We maintain the EML Library, and endeavour to provision infrastructure components that support the forming of a commons of other-economic knowledge and practice. We work to base all our operations based on a privacy-respecting, preferably FLOSS software stack.
https://economicmedialab.xyz