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) by Akinbode Akinbiyi in the autumn and two solo exhibitions by promising young photographersIf Covid Was a Colourby Tatenda Chidora and Longing for Belongingby Nayra Aly that open in the winter and spring.

The programme moves between generations and geographies, between the work of a photographer who has spent five decades walking the cities of the African continent and two younger artists whose works reckon with the distances and proximities created by a global pandemic, the longing for an ancestral homeland in Nubian Egypt, and the search for belonging. Each brings a different understanding of what the photographic image can hold.Come for the lecture, and return for the exhibitions that follow.