The Southnord Artfest 2026 Is Here
Following the success of the inaugural Southnord Artfest 2023, the second edition will open in Helsinki on October 14, 2026. At its centre lies the headline exhibition The Other Side of the Mountain hosted by Amos Rex.
Southnord is a leading cultural platform dedicated to amplifying the voices and talents of Black artists in the Nordic countries. In 2026, Southnord will be presenting the second edition of the Artfest in Helsinki, Finland.
The Artfest is a nomadic triennial that centers the practices of Black and Afro-Nordic artists. The platform, based in Stockholm, brings together a multiphonic team of curators, artists and creatives from the Nordic region. It collaborates with other institutions and initiatives to realise art and cultural projects that diversify the Nordic art scene.
In 2023, Southnord presented the inaugural Artfest The Threshold is a Prism in Stockholm featuring a groundbreaking exhibition at Kulturhuset that showcased 20 artists of African descent. The main exhibition was lauded by critics as “a razor-sharp manifestation of such – all too rarely experienced – intoxication.” A rich programme, presented in three thematic weekends catering to all ages, accompanied the show.
The Other Side of the Mountain centres Black perspectives on distances and proximities. It features paintings, sculptures, photography, installation, textile and video works by remarkable artists from both the African diaspora in the Nordics and from the African continent. The Artfest will engage multiple venues in Helsinki, offering film screenings, workshops, performances, discursive gatherings, installations and interventions.
Co-curated by Marcia Harvey Isaksson (Southnord) and Katariina Timonen (Amos Rex), the main exhibition focuses on mapping transforming landscapes, urban and otherwise, through other ways of knowing and being. The journey through the exhibition invites us to observe cities as organisms and landscapes as state design, tracing routes that stretch across past, present and future. The artworks can be seen as time travelling vessels, through which parallel chronologies and intertwining realities are made visible.
The themes of the exhibition - maps and routes; landscapes; language; state and city; traces and memory - will permeate all the programming across the city. Southnord is excited to partner up with pillars of the Helsinki arts and culture scene for the Artfest. These partners include Amos Rex, Helsinki Central Library Oodi, Kaisaniemi Botanic Garden, Museum of Impossible Forms, Finnish Museum of Photography, PUBLICS and Espoo Museum of Modern Art. Each partner will host unique offerings connected to the exhibition themes.
“We’re delighted to bring the Southnord Artfest to Helsinki in 2026 and look forward to working on a larger scale across multiple venues. We are especially grateful to be able to bring so many renowned artists together in one space, thanks to our collaboration with Amos Rex. In a hardened political landscape, we want to offer other perspectives than the dominant one. Black storytelling and other ways of viewing the world may offer up new pathways forward in our highly polarised societies.” says Southnord founder Marcia Harvey Isaksson.
This edition of the Southnord Artfest is generously supported by Nordic Culture Point, Nordisk Kulturfond, Amos Andersons fond and Kulturbryggan.
For questions and high-resolution images, please contact:
Rosel Jackson Stern
Communications Manager and Project Coordinator
rosel@southnord.com
+46 70 452 13 18
Georgètte Dwomoh-Appiah
Communications Coordinator for Artfest 2026
georgette@southnord.com
+46 72 833 94 33