Helsinki’s foremost contemporary art museum, Amos Rex is the producer and co-curator of the main exhibition The Other Side of the Mountain. It is known for presenting new, experimental and immersive contemporary art. Its underground galleries with high-vaulted undulating ceilings, lit from above through skylights that rise through Lasipalatsi plaza, are among the most distinctive exhibition spaces in the Nordic region. This is the festival’s centre of gravity — the place where the main themes of the Artfest live within the works and radiate out into greater Helsinki

One of the most visited public buildings in Finland, Helsinki Central Library Oodi is a vast civic space built around access, community and the free exchange of ideas. Located in the heart of the city, it is a place where publics of all kinds already gather — and for Artfest 2026, it becomes the triennial’s literary and intellectual centre.

An oasis in the centre of Helsinki, Kaisaniemi Botanic Garden houses plants from every climate zone on the African continent. Within its glasshous-es the city falls away, the air thickens, and the distance between Helsinki and the equator quietly closes.For Artfest 2026, Kaisaniemi hosts a group exhibition, Roots En Route, featuring four artists who will create a multi-sensory installation in dialogue with this special site.

A cultural centre and brainchild of art and cultural workers building anticolonial, anti-patriarchal and non-fascist futures, the Museum of Impossible Forms (MIF) was founded in Helsinki in 2016 by an independent transdisciplinary group of artists, researchers, philosophers and peda-gogues — united by the urgency of creating space for critical artistic practice and pedagogy for BIPOC artists in the city. For Artfest 2026, MIF hosts a series of events for all the senses under the theme Dreaming Together, co-curated with Ulrika Flink and Sonya Lindfors.

Finland’s national museum of photography, the Finnish Museum of Photography holds a long-standing commitment to the photographic image as a site of documentary, artistic and historical inquiry. It is a space that takes seriously what photographs do — what they record, what they construct, and what they make possible to see.For Artfest 2026, the museum is our venue for photography across the full triennial season. hosting a public lecture and workshop (in collaboration with Cultural Centre Stoa) in the autumn, and two solo exhibitions by promising young photographers that open in the winter and spring.

A curatorial and contemporary art commissioning agency in northern Helsinki, PUBLICS holds a dedicated library, exhibition space and reading room built around close, sustained engagement with contemporary art and the ideas that shape it. It is a small institution with an ambitious charter and seriousness of purpose. PUBLICS is the natural host for our curatorial symposium,The House She Built: Legacy, Agency and the Sustainable African Institutions Built by Women, co-curated with Nontobeko Ntombela. The symposium honours the foundational legacies of late curators Koyo Kouoh and Bisi Silva, whose work shifted the centre of gravity for African contemporary art.

A contemporary art museum in Espoo committed to ambitious visual and spatial experiences, EMMA is home to a major retrospective of the work of Howard Smith — the African American artist who arrived in Helsinki in 1962 to participate in a cultural festival, felt at home in a way he never had in America, and stayed. Howard worked across painting, sculpture, textiles and ceramics until his death in 2021 at the age of 92, and is regarded as one of Finland’s most distinctive cultural figures. For Artfest 2026, Southnord partners with EMMA to activate Howard’s legacy during the retrospective in February 2027.