The Art² (Art Squared) grant supports high-level art initiatives striving to reach larger audiences. With this grant, the Cultural Foundation aims to bolster art projects that impact and touch not only art experts but also the wider public. Because the importance of proceeds from ticket sales can be expected to grow as a source of funding, the grant also lends support to the expansion of production funding bases.

Five Art2 grants were awarded in the August 2021 round:

• ANTI Contemporary Art Festival Association: EUR 300,000 for developing a coproduction and touring operating model for performing arts festivals.
• Jazz City Turku: EUR 100,000 for developing the Archipelago Sea Jazz festival series.
• Puppa ry: EUR 150,000 for developing the Purkutaide model (where condemned buildings are used as art venues).
• Foundation of the Finnish Cultural Foundation in New York: EUR 250,000 for realising the institute network’s Together Again festival.
• Artists’ Association of Finland: EUR 200,000 for realising the Young Artists 2023 exhibition.

ANTI – Contemporary Art Festival

The ANTI Contemporary Art Festival Association, based in Kuopio, is in the process of producing six new Finnish performances to premiere between 2022 and 2023, in collaboration with the Hangö Teaterträff and Baltic Circle festivals. The performances will be seen at each of the collaborating festivals. The aim of the initiative is to attract new audiences to the festivals, to reinforce the operating conditions for non-institutional artists and the role of festivals within the Finnish art ecosystem, and to lengthen the life cycles of performances.

– Three of Finland’s most prominent performing arts festivals have combined their resources and competences in this initiative. We are convinced that it will lead to an exceptionally impactful result, which will diversely benefit artists, festivals and audiences. In this time of pandemic, climate crisis and polarised public discourse, we are incredibly grateful as festival organisers to be able to join forces and respond to these challenges together, explains ANTI Festival Manager Elisa Itkonen.

Archipelago Sea Jazz

Established in 2019, Archipelago Sea Jazz is a festival concept built around the attractiveness of the Finnish archipelago environment and high-quality jazz music. This extensive collaboration between cultural operators and four municipalities reinforces the appeal of the archipelago as a cultural and tourist destination, also increasing the accessibility and popularity of jazz among the general public.   

– This grant has secured funding for the Turku Sea Jazz Festival, held at the gates to the archipelago, for the Åland Sea Jazz Festival in Mariehamn, and for raising the international profile of the event concept as a whole, rejoices Jazz City Turku Executive Director Jussi Fredriksson.

Puppa ry

The House of Art (“Taiteen kotitalo”), set up in a condemned block of flats in Kerava in the summer of 2020 as a collaboration between more than 100 professional and amateur artists, reached an extensive audience and made the concept of placing art in condemned buildings more widely known. Art and cultural activities have been housed in empty or underutilised properties as part of the Purkutaide concept under graffiti artist Jouni Väänänen’s leadership since 2016. The Puppa ry association was established in 2020 as a support and background organisation for the operations, and it has now received a grant with which it intends to modernise the art field, examine the opportunities of condemned building art, and create new career opportunities for artists. Besides running exhibitions, the association will also produce a handbook on the concept for operators in the field.

The Finnish Cultural Institute in New York

The exceptional circumstances created by the pandemic have generated a strong need for experiencing culture and art, for physical encounters and for community spirit. Meanwhile, however, the arts sector faces ever greater financial hardship. Together Again is a large-scale initiative started by the Finnish Cultural and Academic Institutes network to contribute to reinvigorating the cultural sector after the pandemic. All 17 Finnish cultural and academic institutes in the organisation are involved and their respective networks will be extensively used in reaching local partners and audiences.

– We are pleased to be able to work on a novel hybrid festival, in which artists and communities from various fields can come together both digitally and physically. The Together Alone project was initiated in spring 2020, mid-pandemic, to ease the predicament of many cultural operators. It will continue through 2021 and 2022, culminating in the Together Again Festival in 2023. The festival will tour the world via institutions, starting in Tokyo and ending in New York, via Europe, explains Pauliina Ståhlberg, Director of the Finnish Cultural Institute in Madrid. 

– This grant awarded to the Together Again initiative allows for long-term development of our artist-centred operating model. The initiative is built around community spirit and support for communities. We are delighted that the institute network can be involved in coming up with novel, ecologically and ethically sustainable models and frameworks, says Jaakko Nousiainen, Director of the Finnish Institute in the UK and Ireland.

The Artists’ Association of Finland

The Artists’ Association of Finland is a nationwide umbrella organisation for the arts, which represents three thousand professional visual artists working in Finland. The Young Artists exhibition is one of Finland’s major platforms for displaying the work of young artists, as well as one of the country’s oldest exhibition institutions.

The Young Artists 2023 exhibition project will overhaul some of the production and exhibition practices for contemporary art and present a new generation of artists. At the same time, the initiative, run through a collaboration between ten exhibition and expert organisations, will pilot novel, fair working practices for the arts: some of the new works curated for the exhibition will be created as commissions through separate production grants, or under employment contracts.

– Our aim is to bring about permanent changes in the operating models of the arts sector, responding to the great challenges of meagre artist incomes and the lack of employment structures, explains the Artists’ Association’s Executive Director Annukka Vähäsöyrinki.

The Finnish Cultural Foundation’s Art² grant is aimed at facilitating the provision of high-quality art productions to the public. The grant is intended specifically for exploring methods by which productions of a high artistic level can reach broader audiences. This can be done by creating new models for collaboration between the non-subsidised art field and existing institutions, by improving upon existing productions or, for example, by organising tours that reach a wider audience. The grant is meant for artistic institutions and registered associations.

These five projects were awarded the Art² grants in the August 2019 round:

• Arts Management Helsinki
• European theatre collective association
• Poetry Society Nihilit Interit
• Finnish Cultural Institute for the Benelux
• Uusinta Ensemble

Collaborative theatre between immigrants and locals

With the Art² grant the international European Theatre Collective is initiating a three-year performing arts project that will give voices and faces to the fast-growing immigrant population of Helsinki and Finland as a whole.  The objective is to achieve a permanent performance space called New Theatre Helsinki (NTH), which will offer multiform intercultural art.

“The operating plan is adaptable in that the space could be established entirely independently, or in conjunction with an existing performing arts space,” explains the project’s leader, actor and director David Kozma.

The project’s aims include gathering all of the necessary resources, including the artists themselves as well as support personnel who will look after audience interaction, communications, marketing, finances and technology. Kozma also has his sights set on the Ministry of Education and Culture, which decides on government subsidies to theatres.

“Many of them live in an interim state. They are not in direct contact with their own culture but are not immediately admitted into the new culture, either.”

The Helsinki Metropolitan Area is home to more than 200,000 people with a mother tongue other than Finnish or Swedish. They represent more than 200 languages and a huge range of cultural backgrounds. The number of citizens of foreign origin is forecast to double in the area, making up a quarter of the population by 2035.    

“Many of them live in an interim state. They are not in direct contact with their own culture but are not immediately admitted into the new culture, either. In this way what they draw from their own and the new homeland’s traditions forms a third culture: Finland’s own culture,” Kozma says.

David Kozma is himself familiar with the interim state: the Romanian-Hungarian came to Finland for the Tampere Theatre Festival with the Andrei Mureşanu Theatre in 2005, and stayed.

The great population change has not been evident in the theatre business. “It would seem natural for the perspectives of the new arrivals and new artists to be visible in the Helsinki City Theatre. That has happened for example in Berlin’s Gorki Theatre,” Kozma says.

Even without its own New Theatre Helsinki space, the European Theatre Collective is currently producing a series of performances entitled Invisible Finland. It draws attention to professional groups with large proportions of international workers.

The construction industry, for example, has many people who are employed by subcontractors and shift from one building site to another. Many speak no Finnish at all. The performance “The Builders” was based on interviews conducted by Kozma, the Swedish-speaking Finn Nina-Maria Häggblom and the Estonian Piret Jaaksi.  “We hope to carry on with similar collaborations between people from diverse backgrounds,” Kozma explains.

The next instalment will be “Drivers”, in December. It is a monologue based on stories told to a group of writers by tram and bus drivers, as well as food delivery riders.