Images: Wey Dey Move by Dele Adayemo at Museum of Impossible Forms. Photographed by Matilda Järvi

Southnord Artfest 2026: Museum of Impossible Forms

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. This is the festival’s most intimate strand, and dreaming is the work we do here — not as escape, but as soft resistance and repair. The programme gathers artists of the African diaspora in the Nordics around a tender, radical question: what could we dream if we dreamed it together?

So come and dream with us — through performance and dance, music and song, poetry, shared meals and deep-listening sessions. Let rest become a politics. Move, write the body, braid ancestral knowledge into futures. On the other side of the mountain, polycentral futures are being dreamed. Come and dream them with us.

Dates: 28 October 2026 - 27 February 2027
Opening hours: See details below

Venue:
Museum of Impossible Forms
Aallonhalkoja 9 L1
00540 Helsinki, Finland


Wednesday 28 October

  • A specially curated deep listening session that brings together mezzosoprano Isabella Shaw who will explore the visceral effects of sound on the body and psyche. 

    Isabella’s practice is focused on decolonization, mythology, physical and metaphysical ecosystems, and music by BIPOC and marginalized composers.

Sunday 1 November

  • We Should All Be Dreaming  is an ongoing collaborative art and activism project by choreographer Sonya Lindfors and writer Maryan Abdulkarim that focuses on the radical potential of dreams to be both restorative and subversive. They have a simple suggestion: we should all dream in a fundamental, utopian way about a shared future. 

Thursday 5 November

  • What does it mean to hold a political position — not just intellectually, but in the body? How do political ideas take shape in and through the body? Conviction, resistance, and belonging are not only theorised but felt, carried, and performed in everyday life. We invite you to an evening exploring embodied politics together with Marie-Louise Richards and Sall Lam Toro, bringing together two distinct practices in conversation: thought and movement, proposition and gesture. 

Friday 13 November

  • Maran is a performance by Amina Seid Tahir, staged for a reclined audience. In a dark, misty room, she moves to the rhythm of bells braided into her hair, then sits before her krar, an Eritrean lyre, and plays. Its strings carry songs of resistance alongside soft, lulling melodies. The sounds call the room to rest and to dreams, to water seeds for new worlds to grow. The performance asks how the Nordic mythological figure of the Mare and the instrument krar might function as carriers of dreams, rest and resilience for the queer Afro-Nordic community. 

Friday 5 February 2027

  • An evening of poetry and performance with Sandy Harry Ceesay, whose work centres on the body and its many facets. Across writing, performance, painting and sculpture, Ceesay draws subject matter from the sensorial universe of the body, borrowing systems and frameworks from linguistics, philosophy, somatic practices and physics. The work sits in conversation between three ramifications of the body: the thinking, the emotional and the physical. 

Sunday 14 February 2027

  • Issa Vibe is a meditative vibrational offering led by Marea Lazzára Vigesaa, a performance artist and curator who recently completed a master’s degree in Art and Public Space at the Art Academy of Oslo. 

    The work began as a one-to-one experience and grew into a collective rest event, inspired by Tricia Hersey's Nap Ministry, Audre Lorde, and Fugitivity for the Black soul. Marea’s practice explores sound as a healer at the intersection of science and spirituality, with Black speculative fiction as a catalyst for world building. They are interested in what the body knows beyond spoken language, and in whether vibration can serve as a tool of repair. 

Saturday 27 February 2027

  • Koh Jai Deng is grounded in a simple intention: to create spaces where afro descendant communities can come together, in person, and reconnect through shared presence. In a time where many interactions are shaped by distance, speed, and constant digital mediation, we believe in the necessity of slowing down and returning to face-to-face encounters. Being in the same room, sharing a table. Listening and speaking without interruption creates a quality of connection that cannot be reproduced otherwise.