In our calendar, you will find all our current, upcoming and past events. Let’s make a date!
Current and Upcoming Events: October 2026
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Join us for this year’s edition of UPNEXT 2026: an annual programme platforming young Afro-Nordic artists. We are proud to present Hugo Mugerwa Klockar’s exhibition Surfacing at the gallery.
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The Other Side of the Mountain, the headline exhibition of Southnord Artfest 2026, opens at Amos Rex in Helsinki this October. The exhibition centres black perspectives on distances and proximities featuring large scale works from 11 remarkable artists.
Place: Amos Rex, Mannerheimintie 22-24, 00100 Helsinki, Finland
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The next edition of Southnord Artfest lands in Helsinki in 2026. While the full programme is still under development, plans are already underway for a headline exhibition and a dynamic series of events in collaboration with one of the city’s leading art institutions.
Image: Moko is Future (2020). Video still (cropped) courtesy of Jeannette Ehlers. Cinematography by Christian Brems and Mads Hoppe.
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Roots En Route is a multi-sensory installation by four artists who will create a multi-sensory installation in dialogue with this special site — examining rootedness and displacement; asking what grows where it was planted and what survives the crossing. The African plants that fill these glasshouses carry their own histories of movement and adaptation.
Opening Night: 17 October 2026
Time: 18:30-20:30Place: Kaisaniemi Botanic Garden
Kaisaniemenranta 2, 00170 Helsinki
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The C& Center of Unfinished Business is a reading room that offers an extraordinary, sometimes disconcerting selection of books connected to the topic of colonialism in various ways – from German colonization to Congolese fashion to twenty-first-century capital markets, it stretches into many different areas affected. This pop-up contains books from C&'s collection curated by Ethel-Ruth Tawe. For this Helsinki edition, Southnord will be contributing our collection of art reference books to the pop-up library.
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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.
Time: 17:00-19:30
Place: Museum of Impossible Forms, Aallonhalkoja 9 L1, 00540 Helsinki, Finland
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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 body_hacker, bringing together two distinct practices in conversation: thought and movement, proposition and gesture.
Time: 18:00-20:30
Place: Museum of Impossible Forms, Aallonhalkoja 9 L1, 00540 Helsinki, Finland
November - December 2026
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A weekend celebration of Afrodiasporic voices in literature, bringing together poets, authors and researchers from across the Nordic countries for readings, dialogues and exchanges with the Helsinki public.
Date: 7 November 2026
Time: 14:00-16:30Place: Helsinki Central Library Oodi
Saarikoski Rug, 3rd Floor
Töölönlahdenkatu 4
00100 Helsinki
Date: 8 November 2026
Time: 13:30-18:00Place: Helsinki Central Library Oodi
Maijansali, 1st Floor
Töölönlahdenkatu 4
00100 Helsinki
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Migratory Notes is a participatory artwork and dinner event by Emeka Ogboh, exploring migration and diversity in contemporary urban life through food, drink and sound. Limited spaces, booking details to follow.
Time: 18:00 – 21:00
Place: Amos Rex, Mannerheimintie 22-24, 00100 Helsinki, Finland
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Who decides what stories from the Black Nordic experience are worth preserving? Who has the authority to collect, interpret and narrate Black Nordic history? This panel brings together Black archivists, scholars and community organisers from Sweden and Norway who are actively constructing new infrastructures for Black Nordic memory.
Date: 12 November 2026
Time: 17:00-20:00Place: Helsinki Central Library Oodi
Maijansali, 1st Floor
Töölönlahdenkatu 4
00100 Helsinki
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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.
Time: 18:00-20:30
Place: Museum of Impossible Forms, Aallonhalkoja 9 L1, 00540 Helsinki, Finland
More details to follow.
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Join us for a screening of Ballroom – Danser pour exister (2025), Amandine Gay’s documentary series on the ballroom scene in France, followed by a conversation between Gay and fashion designer and Professor of Practice Ervin Latimer.
Time: 18:00
Place: Tekstin talo, Permantosali, Helsinki
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Tatenda Chidora's solo exhibition If Covid was a Colour reimagines the pandemic not as a symbol of dread but as a canvas for renewal, using vivid colour and striking portraiture to transform lockdown-era objects like surgical masks and latex gloves into fashionable icons.
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Hit Different is a listening session by Suinner, Trabelsi and Kofu that treats sound as something made together rather than received. It holds two things at once, the feeling of collectivity and the private experience of listening and asks what happens when a room is invited to contribute to the sound it is sitting inside.
Time: 17:30-19:30
Place: Studio Rex, Amos Rex, Mannerheimintie 22-24, 00100 Helsinki, Finland
January - March 2027
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Money Cowry is a social play developed by Angel Mugisha around the notions of value, with a political and colonial charge. It invites the public to come together, as an audience, as thinkers and as doers, to use cowrie shells as a medium of exchange much like coin money, and in doing so to restore an understanding of precolonial African currencies before gold and paper created systems of exploitation.
Time: 17:30-19:30
Place: Studio Rex and across the museum, Amos Rex, Mannerheimintie 22-24, 00100 Helsinki, Finland
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What does Black feminism mean and do in the Nordics? Koko Hubara, Oda-Kange Midtvåge Diallo and Jasmine Kelekay come together in a conversation moderated by researcher Maïmouna Matikainen-Soreau about what Black feminist life actually looks like in these countries, in all its difficulty, creativity and force.
Time: 16:00-18:00
Place: Helsinki Central Library Oodi
Maijansali, 1st Floor
Töölönlahdenkatu 4
00100 HelsinkiMore details to follow.
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Longing for Belonging is a deeply personal memoir that traces a journey across continents, generations, and identities in search of home. Blending storytelling, photography, and design, Nayra Aly explores displacement, family, racism, healing, and the universal desire to belong.
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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.
Time: 18:00-20:30
Place: Museum of Impossible Forms, Aallonhalkoja 9 L1, 00540 Helsinki, Finland
More details to follow.
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Southnord partners with EMMA to activate Howard Smith’s legacy during the retrospective exhibition of his works. Artist Sasha Huber, designer Ervin Latimer and musician Grande Mahogany will fill the day with reflections, talks and performance. There will also be an ongoing collage workshop for children.
Time: 11:00-16:00
Place: EMMA, Ahertajantie 5, 02070 Espoo, Finland
More details to follow.
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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.
Time: 15:00-17:30
Place: Museum of Impossible Forms, Aallonhalkoja 9 L1, 00540 Helsinki, Finland
More details to follow.
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A provocative multimedia exploration by South African artist Lebohang Tlali. Blending photography, film, archival research, and music, Lebohang excavates the elusive legacy of Rosa Emilia Clay while interrogating themes of racism, identity, and representation across time and place.
Time: 17:00-20:00
Place: Helsinki Central Library Oodi
Kino Regina
Töölönlahdenkatu 4
00100 HelsinkiMore details to follow.
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This evening of short film screenings opens with a keynote presentation by filmmaker and TV director Ima Iduozee who discusses filmmaking from a diasporic perspective, as well as on how his background as a dancer and choreographer has influenced his work as a director. This is followed by a panel discussion with filmmakers Karl Ohiri and Theresa Traore Dahlberg.
Time: 17:00-20:30
Place: Bio Rex, Amos Rex, Mannerheimintie 22-24, 00100 Helsinki, Finland
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Pan African Pics is built on a single curatorial principle: every film in the program has won a major prize at a leading African film festival. This programme is a window into the finest work being made across the continent, as chosen by the juries of Africa's leading film festivals.
Date: 20 February 2027
Time: 15:00-22:10Date: 21 February 2027
Time: 14:00-20:30Place: Helsinki Central Library Oodi
Kino Regina
Töölönlahdenkatu 4
00100 HelsinkiMore details to follow.
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A diasporic dinner as part of the project Koh Jai Deng. It is grounded in a simple intention: to create spaces where afro descendant communities can come together, in person, and reconnect through shared presence.
Time: 17:00-20:00
Place: Museum of Impossible Forms, Aallonhalkoja 9 L1, 00540 Helsinki, Finland
More details to follow.
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Join us for a screening of five works by filmmaker Ali Quraishi, who has documented performances for Southnord since the beginning. This will also be the premier of When We See Us in Stockholm, a collection of reflections from Black Stockholmers. Audiences will hear Ali speak about his body of work at Kino Regina, Oodi.
Time: 17:00-19:00
Place: Helsinki Central Library Oodi
Kino Regina
Töölönlahdenkatu 4
00100 HelsinkiMore details to follow.
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This two-day symposium explores the architectural and intellectual legacies of African Women curators and cultural producers. The symposium gathers generations of institutional builders from across Africa—Uganda, Ghana, Cameroon, Zambia, Ethiopia and Egypt—who are not merely holding space but creating radical blueprints for cultural sustainability and economic resilience. Dedicated to the vital connections between the African continent and its global diasporas, this gathering focuses specifically on the formidable wave of institutional building led by women across Africa—leaders who have translated vision into brick, mortar, and sustainable community practice.
Date: 17 March 2027
Time: 9:00-12:30
Place: Helsinki Central Library Oodi, Maijansali, 1st Floor, Töölönlahdenkatu 4, 00100 Helsinki
Time: 14:30-19:00
Place: PUBLICS, Sturenkatu 37-41, 00550 HelsinkiDate: 18 March 2027
Time: 10:00-12:30
Place: Helsinki Central Library Oodi, Maijansali, 1st Floor, Töölönlahdenkatu 4, 00100 Helsinki
Time: 14:30-18:00
Place: PUBLICS, Sturenkatu 37-41, 00550 Helsinki
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Let's Play is a free outdoor family event in the Amos Rex backyard, hosted by Good Hair Day. Families are invited to make memory maps, artworks that connect to childhood games played across the diaspora and in Finland, and to play those games together in the yard. An AfroBlooming station offers hair decorating for anyone who wants it. The event is open to all.
Time: 13:00-16:00
Place: Lasipalatsi Square and Studio Rex, Amos Rex, Mannerheimintie 22-24, 00100 Helsinki, Finland