Art Realm

Join us in building the Art Realm where art has the power! 

Hämeenlinna Art Museum and Tampere Art Museum have joined forces with the Lahti Museum of Visual Arts Malva to launch Art Realm, a brand-new series of biennial exhibitions, which will rotate between venues in Kanta-Häme, Pirkanmaa and Päijät-Häme.

We are now delighted to extend an invitation to artists with links to these three regions to get involved in creating the Art Realm. The inaugural biennial will be held at Hämeenlinna Art Museum and in the Kanta-Häme region in late summer 2024. The call for entries for this exhibition will launch on 31 March 2023 with a deadline for submissions on 31 May 2023. 

The Art Realm is envisaged as a continually evolving exploratory process grounded in a two-yearly exhibition cycle. Each biennial event will constitute its own experimental laboratory that will drive the ongoing development of new collaborative models and structures. We want to make space for new possibilities, for learning and for incompleteness. It is intended that each biennial will generate new forward momentum for the Art Realm as it strives to create greater equality and inclusion within the Finnish art scene. 

The Art Realm forms part of the regional activities undertaken by Hämeenlinna Art Museum (Kanta-Häme), Lahti Museum of Visual Arts Malva (Päijät-Häme) and Tampere Art Museum (Pirkanmaa). 

The Art Realm gives power to art. What happens when art leads and society follows? 

Within the Art Realm, artistic freedom makes anything possible. Art is not confined to a vacuum, however, but always exists in a dynamic relationship with its surroundings, meaningfully connected to wider society. That is why the Art Realm will be seeking to establish close collaborative relationships with experts from other fields. 

With Art Realm, we want to issue a wake-up call, to invite everyone, ourselves included, to see the inherent power structures and blind spots that characterise our sector. We want to interrogate power and the way it is wielded in the art world. In doing so, we seek to challenge ourselves and to redefine power and the structures that sustain it in collaboration with artists, scholars, other experts and our partners. 

The Art Realm is an exploratory process grounded in a biennial exhibition programm

Under the traditional biennale model, artists are invited to apply and selected to exhibit by curators. With the Art Realm, we want to democratize the power that is currently vested in art museums and in the hands of curators by creating an entirely new kind of learning and research process that will see artists, art museums, subject specialists, our “fellow travellers” and our partners engaging with the biennale through a series of workshops held between the exhibitions.

The workshops will be an opportunity to share different viewpoints, including diametrically opposed ones, and are designed to facilitate genuine engagement and dialogue between participants. Their purpose will be to create a space where participants can talk and listen, ask questions and be inspired and influenced by others. Above all, the Art Realm is about imagining our new possible futures with freedom and boldness.