Southnord Artfest 2026 Full Programme
The Other Side of the Mountain, the headline exhibition of Southnord Artfest 2026, opens this October at Amos Rex in Helsinki. The title also names the Artfest as a whole, a shared frame for a season of work about distance and proximity, and the routes between them. The exhibition gathers eleven artists: Adji Dieye, Akinbode Akinbiyi, Emeka Ogboh, Ibrahim Mahama, Igshaan Adams, Jeannette Ehlers, Karl Ohiri, Liisa-Irmelen Liwata, Loulou Cherinet, Lungiswa Gqunta and Sandra Mujinga.
The group brings together artists from the African continent and its Nordic diasporas at various career stages, with work meeting around the festival's themes of maps and routes; landscapes; language; state and city; traces and memory.
The Artfest unfolds across the city in seven partner locations including Amos Rex over five months. Helsinki Central Library Oodi anchors the public programme as the festival's central hub, with workshops, screenings, panels and a weekend Afro-Nordic literary festival. Amos Rex will be home to various artist talks around the exhibition and family-oriented programming at their Studio Rex. From there the Artfest reaches further into the city with a season-long exhibition at the Kaisaniemi Botanic Garden, two solo exhibitions at the Finnish Museum of Photography, a day dedicated to the artist Howard Smith at the Espoo Museum of Modern Art, and communal cooking and deep listening at the Museum of Impossible Forms. The Artfest closes in March 2027 with a curatorial symposium, Legacy, Agency and the Sustainable African Institutions Built by Women, jointly held by Oodi and PUBLICS.
The full programme, with all dates and venues, will be available to download here.
"This Artfest is about moving between places, and working with partners throughout Helsinki lets the themes travel with us, into a library, a botanic garden, a museum. Holding questions of movement, land and memory in many venues at once lets us build that idea into the structure of the festival itself,” says Marcia Harvey Isaksson, founder of Southnord.
The festival's public life began over the summer with Emeka Ogboh's danfo bus travelling from Berlin to Helsinki as part of his installation Transmissions. It was welcomed by block parties in Copenhagen and Stockholm.
The Other Side of the Mountain is co-curated by Marcia Harvey Isaksson (Southnord) and Katariina Timonen (Amos Rex), and produced and funded by Amos Rex. The wider Artfest programme is co-curated by Marcia Harvey Isaksson and Ulrika Flink. Southnord Artfest 2026 is generously supported by Nordic Culture Point, Nordisk Kulturfond, Amos Andersons fond and Kulturbryggan.
For further information, high-resolution images and interview requests, please contact:
Rosel Jackson Stern
Communications Manager and Project Coordinator
rosel@southnord.com /
Georgètte Dwomoh-Appiah
Communications Coordinator, Artfest 2026
georgette@southnord.com
+46 72 833 94 33