Programme

The Finnish Cultural and Academic Institutes network responds to the challenges of the COVID-19 epidemic by announcing an open call for art projects.

In these strange and challenging times, our thoughts go out to all those who have been affected; all artists, freelancers, cultural organisations and small businesses, caretakers and doctors. There is no telling what the coming days, weeks and even months will hold, so let’s just stay in and stay safe.

New dates! ‘Call to the Wild’ will open on June 20th, running until November 29th. The expo at Maison Louis Carré can be visited by appointment on Saturdays and Sundays from 2 to 6pm. 'Call to the Wild' gathers three Finnish contemporary artists, presenting a refined combination of contemporary sculptural works by the glass artist Laura Laine, the textile artist Kustaa Saksi, and the sculptor Kim Simonsson in the wonderful house designed by Alvar Aalto.

Welcome to a talk about contemporary Finnish design at this year's edition of Collectible! The talk will focus on Finnish contemporary design with perspectives from the Swedish speaking Finnish designers Jonas Lutz and Rasmus Palmgren, along with galleries and the founder of Lokal, Katja Hagelstam.

The Nordic diplomatic representations and cultural institutes are delighted to invite you to the annual International Women’s Day Event, at the Danish Embassy on Friday the 6th of March.

Finnish design gallery Lokal and The Finnish Cultural Institute will be present during Collectible, a contemporary design fair in Brussels.

In the first week of March – the week before International Women’s Day – the fourth edition of WoWmen! is coming to Brussels. This 'festival that hopes to be superfluous soon' - because the future will be feminist - offers a programme of performances, talks, debates, films and workshops that critically analyses the state of gender, art and society. Image: Rebecca Simons.

Mensch Maschine touches on elements of machine learnings fundaments: the feed, the successes, and failures. The exhibition opens on January 15th at Botanique, Brussels, and is part of the CPDP conference.

The TelepART Mobility Support Platform supports emerging and semi-established artists in showcasing their work internationally. At the core of this project is a new style of rapid-access funding. This funding is designed to support travel costs for performances between Finland and the Benelux countries. The TelepART Mobility Support Platform is complemented by an international visiting arts professionals programme.

A I S T I T - coming to our senses explores sensations and their physical, social, political and technological aspects in 2020’s Europe. Four Finnish Institutes (Benelux, France, Germany and London) join forces for this art project, which has been granted a 180 000 euros Taide² grant by the Finnish Cultural Foundation.

With its Go-commission project, The Finnish Cultural Institute for the Benelux aims to be an even stronger supporter of the creation of new works and the rise of creative arts in Finland and Central Europe. Built side by side with the rapid and flexible TelepART Mobility Support Platform, the Go-commission project focuses on international co-commissions.

On a blindingly white dance floor Iduozee unfolds with fluid elegance. Reconstruction the conventions of contemporary movement and breakdance, Iduozee´s debut work was also a contemplation on his personal body history. The choreographic arrangement is based on a set of repetitive gestures, that interplay with video, light and sound.

A panel discussion on masculinity from a critical, cross-cultural and intersectional perspective. We talk with speakers from a sociocultural and artistic background on normativity and redefining masculinity. With, amongst others, word artist and nudger Kevin Groen, Koen Dedoncker (Men Engage Flanders), songwriter Kriticos Pandelis Mwansa and Oscar Lehtinen (youth crisis worker at HelsinkiMissio). Free event.

DIASPORA MIXTAPES is a series of digital portraits, that celebrate the diversity of black cultural identity in the contemporary African Diaspora. Activists, artists, poets and musicians share and explore ideas around black life, futurity, fugitivity, (de)colonialism and kinship.

In their new performance titled, Score (2019), Artor Jesus Inkerö examines how language, gestures, and other ways of signaling and communicating between people may deny or allow access to specific groups, and how these physical patterns affect western culture as a whole.

Screening of the documentary Manning Up (Finland 2019). Manning Up follows the story of a comedian becoming the teenage boy he always knew he could be.

Voice Male gives performers, stand-up artists and slam poets 10 minutes on stage to share their vision of masculinity in the form of their choice.

Looped screening of Aurora Reinhard's Boygirl. In Boygirl three young people speak of their experiences of gender at a time when the whole word was by and large defined through a binary view.

Looped screening of Artor Jesus Inkerö's Swole. Swole documents Inkerö's dedication to health and fitness, in terms of nutrition and diet, as well as communities surrounding the health and fitness sphere.

‘Spaces of Peace – Architecture as Diplomacy’ conference approaches architecture as a tool for peace-building from spaces of peace mediation and reconstruction of post-conflict cities to building peacetime cities that prevent polarisation and conflict. The talks open up perspectives to how architecture and design can contribute to literally building peace now and in the future.

Join us for an evening of discussion on "The Embodiment of Masculinity" at the Goethe-Institut Niederlande in Amsterdam on Wednesday the 13.11.2019, where we will hear from prominent voices in the academic field and the art sectors.

The Finnish Cultural Institute for the Benelux welcomes you to a Double Feature movie night at Korjaamo Kino Töölö! The Double Feature presents two documentaries: Manning Up (FI, 2019)  and Man Made (NL, 2019).

An evening of discussion on masculinity in the Swedish speaking regions in Finland, with a focus on two collections of testimonies.

The Youth / Masculinities panel discussion takes place at the National Museum of Finland at 18:00 on Wednesday 6.11., and centres around the impacts and perceptions of masculinities among young people today.

Re/defining Masculinities is a project by the Finnish Cultural Institute for the Benelux that aims to present and discuss the subject of masculinities from new and cross-disciplinary perspectives, through a series of cultural events and academic discussions realised in Belgium, the Netherlands and Finland.

The RE/defining Masculinities week opens at 17:00 on Tuesday 5.11. in Maijansali at the Central Library Oodi with a free film screening of Gods of Molenbeek.

Poikien Talo’s RE/defining Masculinities workshop will ask participants to stop and examine masculinity and gender roles. Participants will be challenged to discuss how masculinity appears in different contexts and how it affects the well-being of us all.

Season XII – The Finnish Season / Keep Your Garden Alive is a group exhibition with eighteen Finnish renowned and emerging artists and designers who are currently reshaping the contemporary Finnish art and design scene. The exhibition is curated by Lise Coirier, Co-Founder of Spazio Nobile Gallery, and Kati Laakso, Director of the Finnish Cultural Institute for the Benelux.

The Finnish Cultural Institute for the Benelux participates in this year's Comics Festival in Brussels, as part of a EUNIC collaboration for the comics arts.

RE/Defining Finnish Contemporary Art & Design stretches across the entire year and aims to highlight Finnish designers in central Europe. Finland has a strong tradition and reputation in the field of design and our talented artists and designers should be more widely known among international collectors, gallerists and professionals in other fields. The project foregrounds both young designers as well as designers who already have extensive careers.

Together with Brussels based Spazio Nobile gallery we will be participating in several prominent design fairs as well as organise a number of exhibitions, all the while striving to redefine the wide range of skills and expertise in design and art that can be found in Finland.

Do girls and boys have equal opportunities in education and self-expression? Join the Nordic diplomatic representations and cultural institutes in Brussels for a breakfast debate on International Women’s Day.

The RE/defining Masculinities video series is a social media campaign which presents different people and their perspectives on the concept of masculinity in personal monologues. The videos include voices from different people in Belgium, the Netherlands and Finland.

What is the future of the European continent 100 years from now? BOZAR and Archa Theatre (Prague) invite you to Myths and Demons, the closing participative debate of the year-long project 1918 European Dreams of Modernity.

Building on EUNIC Brussels previous initiatives “European Angst” and “Sweating for Europe”, the project, made of 4 panel discussions, has the ambition to rethink a social contract which would take into account the peculiarities of our world today. The panel discussions aim to look to the future of Europe, using concepts of “protection” and “care” as a basis.

We Should All Be Dreaming focuses on the radical potential of dreams as both a healing and a subversive practice. Finnish choreographer and director Sonya Lindfors has a simple suggestion: we should all have to dream in a fundamental, utopian way about a communal future.

The Finnish Cultural Institute for the Benelux, together with the Finnish baroque orchestra Ensemble Nylandia, CAV & MA (Centre d’Art Vocal et de Musique Ancienne) and the festival umbrella organisation, Festivals de Wallonie, is supporting a concert series called Baltic Tour.

18 April 2018 The Musiq’3 Festival is presenting a wide range of Finnish musicians this summer as part of this year’s Nordic Vibes theme. The three-day festival, which takes place at the end of June and the beginning of July, will feature music by leading Finnish artists as well as Finnish musicians who are in the early stages of their international career.

This summer, BOZAR centre for fine arts opens an exhibition together with artist-run galleries from across Europe. Jaakko Pallasvuo & Viktor Timofeev are represented by the Brussels-based Komplot gallery.

The Institute is inviting researchers, journalists and musicians from different parts of Europe to reflect on the conflicts of 100 years ago and how they are remembered. 

Kaarina Kaikkonen is creating a new work called If I had Wings – Social Elevator in the Marolles neighbourhood of Brussels. Faithful to her practice, Kaikkonen is once again constructing the installation using second-hand clothes.

Sonja Jokiniemi‘s new performance Blab is built around the concept of blabbing: the associative, potentially senseless, sometimes spontaneous, clumpy, not-knowing form of speech. With this new work, Jokiniemi continues to explore the chaotic experience of the world and how meaning is established.

Do you ever feel like society isn’t exactly what it could be? Do certain aspects of society tire you or piss you off? Do you just feel like cursing and smashing the patriarchy?

The video component of Nathaniel Mellors and Erkka Nissinen’s fascinating work The Aalto Natives, which Finland presented at the Venice Biennale in its centenary year, will be presented at Arts Centre Beursschouwburg in the heart of Brussels. The video installation tells the story of Finland’s history and cultural origins by way of absurdist satire while reflecting on prevailing power structures and questions of morality.

Roze Filmdagen is an annual LGBTQ Film Festival in Amsterdam that paints the town a bright shade of pink for about one week in March. The festival programme includes a broad spectrum of films on LGBTQ themes that are not always distributed widely.

The House of European History and the Bozar Centre for Fine Arts are bringing together scholars and artists from Central and Eastern Europe to present original views on the events of 1918 and their impact on the present.

Remembering 1918 – European Dreams of Modernity is a project of the Brussels-based Bozar Centre for Fine Arts, which is organised in partnership with European cultural and academic institutes. The aim of the project is to cast a critical and unbiased eye on the events of 1918 and their impact on the next one hundred years.

Sweating for Europe is a series of discussions on the most burning topics, bringing MEPs and citizens together in a unique context in front of the European Parliament building. The three-day event series takes place around an old fire truck that has been transformed into a movable wood burning sauna.

The Mobile Home project will address the home as a physical, mental and symbolic space as well as a socio-cultural concept. It is intended to mark the centenary of Finnish independence and forms part of the official Finland 100 centenary celebrations programme.

The ‘Our society’ programme speaks to practitioners within the arts and the role of culture both in our target countries as well as in broader Europe.