The Symposium kicks off the Helsinki Biennial 2023 (HB23) public programme with lectures and panel discussions that orbit around the HB23’s main themes and questions. Helsinki Biennial 2023 is curated by Joasia Krysa and will take place from 12th June to 17th September 2023.

The symposium serves as an overture to next summer’s biennial. It reflects and refracts the biennial’s main conceptual threads of contamination, regeneration, and agency with an extra focus on the following premise: that curatorial activity today is shaped by two major inescapable factors; the persistence of the climate emergency on the one hand and curating’s technical and cultural confluence with twenty-first-century media on the other.

Twenty-first-century media – as Mark B. N. Hansen points out – can be distinguished from previous types of media by considering how technologies have transitioned from a focus on recording the past to an emphasis on the anticipation of the future driven by ubiquitous computing and big data. As the common ground for current cultural practices, these formative conditions can be evidenced in the proliferation of certain notions and metaphors such as the widespread adoption of the concept of ecology, as when we speak of (art) institutional ecologies and computational ecologies, for instance. Moreover, processes such as worldmaking and worldbuilding epitomize both the forward-looking essence of digital infrastructures and the transformative possibilities of alternative narratives.

This symposium is part of the HB23 Art Mediation Forum. The forum conceives mediation as an extended ‘articulation space’ for the concerns, themes, and topics mapped out in the biennial’s curatorial approach and artistic contributions. Other components of the art mediation forum include a workshop with Aalto University MA students, a publication, and a series of bespoke mediation events taking place during the course of the Biennial. The HB23 Art Mediation Forum is a project developed and led by Bassam El Baroni and Patrizia Costantin (Visual Cultures, Curating and
Contemporary Art – ViCCA – at Aalto University) as part of the Helsinki Biennial 2023 programme.