The Maaretta Jaukkuri Foundation – MJF – invites 4-5 Fellows each year from various fields in the arts, sciences or philosophy, or any field that encourages new paths of thinking. The Fellows are selected by our Board to spend up to 2 months in The Place in Lofoten. MJF also presents public seminars and other events.

Paula Alzugaray is art critic, curator and editor, with a Post-Doctorate in History, Criticism and Theory of Art from the School of Communication and Arts of the University of São Paulo (ECA USP). PhD in Communication and Semiotics from PUC-SP, and Master in Communication Sciences from ECA USP. She is the editorial director of seLecT_ceLesTe magazine and author of the books "Regina Vater: Quatro Ecologias" (Oi Futuro / Phase 3, 2013) and “Sergio Lima: Imagem-acontecimento” (Afluente Editora, 2023). Finalist for the 2022 Jabuti Award in the Non-Fiction – Arts category, with the book “Floresta”. She received the 2022 State Government Award for the Arts, in the Cultural Communication category for producing the magazine seLecT, and the Award from the Brazilian Association of Art Critics (ABCA) for the dissemination of visual arts in the media, in 2018. Her curatorial projects include the exhibitions “Devir Indígena”, with artists Denilson Baniwa and Gustavo Caboco, co-curated by Marcio Doctors (Projeto Respiração, Casa Museu Eva Klabin, Rio de Janeiro, September-November 2022); “The Invention of the Beach” (IED RJ, September 2017; and Paço das Artes SP, April-Jun 2014); “Crossed Circuits – Center Pompidou Meets MAM”, co-curated by Christine Van Assche (MAM SP, Jan-Mar 2013); "Latin America Uncontained" (LOOP Fair Barcelona, May 2012); "Video Brésilienne: un Anti-Portrait" (Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, Oct 2010); “Observatories” (Itaú Cultural, Belo Horizonte and Vitória, 2009). She is the author of the documentaries “Tinta Fresca” (2004), awarded for Best Media Film at the 29th São Paulo International Film Festival; "Shoot Yourself" (2012), Prize in Investigative Poetics, at Cine Move Arte 2012; and “MetaReal – Fact, Farse and Fiction in Art” (2023), for channel Arte1. 

Paula Alzugaray

Luca Forcucci is an artist, composer, and scholar exploring the relationships between the sonic, consciousness, perception, experience, memory, and the body. His research and artworks are regularly presented worldwide and have won numerous national and international awards in well regarded contexts. Forcucci achieved a PhD in Music, Technology and Innovation at De Montfort University in the U.K.; an MA in Sonic Arts from Queens University of Belfast; and diplomas in architecture and civil engineering in Switzerland.

He conducted art research in cognitive science at the Brain Mind Institute in Switzerland, where he explored cognitive neuroscience of out-of-body experiences with a scholarship from the Swiss Federal Office of Culture, and support from Zürich University of the Arts. He also conducted his research at GRM/INA (Groupe de Recherches Musicales / Institut National d’Audiovisuel) in Paris, TU Electronic Music Studio Berlin, and NOTAM (Norwegian Centre for Technology, Art and Music) in Oslo.

He studied electroacoustic music with the Swiss composer Rainer Boesch. His professional background includes architecture, neuroscience, and the curation of many projects worldwide by promoting art and science encounters with his lab www.ubqtlab.org in collaboration with Leonardo / ISATS in California.

Forcucci’s research observes the perceptive properties and the field of possibilities of the first-person experience, which is explored as the artwork. He is interested in perception, subjectivity and consciousness. Since 2009, he collaborates with scientists in the field of cognitive science to explore perception in the arts through installations, performances, sonic arts, video, photography and text.

During research trips in Mozambique, South Africa, and Swatini from 2015 to 2018, I have been investigated ancestral technology of precolonial musical instrument blending with computer and digital forms, including video and sonic arts, in Southern Africa and in Ghana in 2022, with artists and musicians and Indigenous leaders. Transcultural aspects of sonic arts in Southern and Western Africa are investigated by observing the field of possibilities of the term “technology” in order to create a bridge between ancestral and contemporary knowledge. The project explores processes in practice-led research and fieldwork, which inform the first-person experience, as inner experience, through autoethnography.

Luca Forcucci


Aadita Chaudhury is a researcher, writer and arts practitioner inhabiting the intersection of the arts, science, ecology, and spirituality. Her work is situated within the interdisciplinary and anti-disciplinary spaces facilitated by environmental arts, humanities, science and technology studies, but also lives outside of academic containers, and is shaped by ethnographic approaches, poetic inquiry, embodied methodologies, sonic practices, photography, and encounters with mythology, folklore and ritual, guided by ethics of slow, non-extractive decolonial research. She is especially interested in perspectives from the Global South in relation to technoscientific imaginaries, decolonial, feminist and working-class social movements, and political self-determination. Aadita has conducted research in the US, Canada, the UK, Italy, India and Mexico, attending to multiple intersections of ecology, culture, technology and the arts. Her academic and public facing work has appeared in various publications, including International Relations, Conservation Letters and Al Jazeera. She has worked at the University of Toronto, York University (Canada), and Goldsmiths, University of London in various interdisciplinary and transnational projects, and has been a visiting researcher at University of California, Irvine and Edinburgh College of Art, University of Edinburgh.

Aadita’s interest in the arts-science-ecology nexus is informed by her upbringing and sustained roots in Santiniketan, India, a rural university town in the crossroads of ideas about teleological technocratic “development”, place-based community arts practice, and Indigenous lifeways and sovereignty movements. She is particularly compelled by the ways that more-than-human worlds and land-based lifeways continue resisting neoliberal and authoritarian formations in the region, leading to a potential contemporary model for ecologically conscious socially-embedded community arts practice and peasant futurisms.

Aadita Chaudhury

Laura Raicovich is a New York City-based writer and curator. Her recent book, Culture Strike: Art and Museums in an Age of Protest, was published in 2021 by Verso Books. She is also editor and curator of Protodispatch, a digital publication featuring artists’ takes on the local and global conditions that make their work necessary; she initiated the forum with Mari Spirito and Protocinema in 2022. With a collective of artists, musicians, and culture workers, Raicovich opened The Francis Kite Club, a bar/cultural/activist social club in NYC’s East Village in 2023. Prior to these projects, Raicovich served as Director of the Queens Museum and Interim Director of the Leslie Lohman Museum of Art; she was a Rockefeller Foundation Fellow at the Bellagio Center, and the Tremaine Curatorial Fellow for Journalism at Hyperallergic.

Laura Raicovich

Rikke Lundgreen is an artist and curator. Lundgreen works with a range of techniques such as sound, film, drawing and installation. A performative event is often a starting point for the installations. She also administers Mika Vainio's studio, archive, and collections of records and books, remaining in Oslo, where he lived with Lundgreen.

The Museum of Sound is nomadic and in flux and is rooted in the essence of sound and listening. Tommi Grönlund and Rikke Lundgreen created the initiative while preparing the exhibition "Mika Vainio 50Hz" at the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma in Helsinki, Autumn 2020.

Photo credits: Chris Erlbeck

Rikke Lundgreen

Tellervo Yli-Hallila has worked as an art librarian and information specialist. She has an MA degree and studied Information Science at the University of Tampere and Art History at the University of Helsinki. She began her library career in the 1980s at the University of Art and Design,and ended it in the late 2010s at the same library, which had become the campus library of the Aalto University’s School of Arts, Design and Architecture. In between she worked at the library of Finnish National Gallery for nineteen years, eleven of them at the Kiasma research library.

Erkki Anttonen is an art historian specializing in prints and art graphics. His doctoral thesis (2006) on Finnish art graphics in the 1930s, was the first and only doctoral thesis on art graphics in Finland. He has written dozens of articles and books on art graphics, and has done extensive research on the visual arts of the interwar period, as well as artists up to the present day. From the mid-1980s Anttonen worked as an assistant in the Department of Art History at the University of Helsinki, and for periods as a substitute assistant professor and professor. He has also taught at the Academy of Fine Arts and other art schools until recently. In 1996 Anttonen moved to the Finnish National Gallery. First he worked as a special researcher at the Central Art Archives, and from 2008 at the Ateneum Art Museum in the Department of Prints and Drawings. Since 2014 he was the keeper of the prints and drawings collection. After his retirement, Anttonen has continued to write scholarly articles, curated an exhibition on Torsten Wasastjerna at Villa Gyllenberg (2022) and written a monograph on the artist. Most recently, he has written a major article on the drawings and prints of Jan Kenneth Weckman, which will be published at the end of 2023.

Tellervo Yli-Hallila & Erkki Anttonen


Monica Giron was born in a small village in Patagonia in 1959. She was raised in beautiful pristine nature, and developed an acute sensitivity to the natural world, its transformations, and the human relationship to it. Through drawing, painting, watercolors, site-specific installations, sculptures, research, and analysis, she explores the tension between knowledge and intuition. Her work has been exhibited internationally at Frieze New York, MALBA, Museo de Arte Moderno Buenos Aires, the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art and Design, Centro Cultural Recoleta and more. She currently lives and works in Buenos Aires. Text Credits:  Barro NY, 2023.

Antonio José Panno, was born in 1959 in Buenos Aires, Argentina. He has a degree as an electrotechnician from Otto Krause Technical School, Buenos Aires.In 1977 he entered the National registration for electro mechanics. He is specialized in the electrical field working with startups´ for industries and housing. 

Monica Giron & Antonio Panno

Francesca Bertolotti-Bailey is a producer, curator and editor with a background in economics, management and cultural policy. Until 2022 she was the CEO of Cove Park, an artists' residency in rural Scotland. Previously, she worked at Kettle’s Yard, the modern and contemporary art gallery of the University of Cambridge; Liverpool Biennial, where she co-curated the 2016 and 2018 editions; Artissima, the contemporary art fair in Turin; and Fondazione Pirelli Hangar Bicocca in Milan. Between 2016–18 she was Associate at Large of Council, a Paris-based organisation focused on the integration of artistic, scientific and civic ways of knowing. Since 2016 she has been Co-Director of nomadic publishing platform The Serving Library. 


Stuart Bertolotti-Bailey is a graphic designer, writer, editor and educator currently based in Italy. He co-founded the arts journal Dot Dot Dot in 2000, has been one half of the design duo Dexter Sinister since 2006, and a quarter of the publishing platform The Serving Library since 2011. In 2015 he completed a practice-based PhD in the Fine Art Department at the University of Reading titled ‘Work in Progress: Form as a Way of Thinking’. From 2017–22 he was Head of Design at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, and continues to design printed and digital media for a wide range of individuals and institutions. He has been a member of Art and Design faculties in Amsterdam, New York, Los Angeles, Geneva, and currently Urbino in Italy, as well as a guest teacher, speaker and external examiner at many more schools and organisations worldwide.

Francesca Bertolotti Bailey & Stuart Bertolotti Bailey

Jacob Moginot is a scientist and sound artist working with soundscapes and acoustic ecologies. His interests lay in the often-overlooked biophonic landscape which we are all subjected to and a part of. He focuses on how sound is influenced, communicated, expressed, and how sounds relate and contribute to the overall sonic landscape. Jacob formally studied biology and biochemistry, prior to spending the last 12 years researching therapeutic applications for oncology and genetic diseases. Alongside this research, his audio work has integrated sound and method for a wide range of projects including; an audio-visual installation for the Venice Architecture Biennale 2016 for the Canadian Pavilion; an audiovisual exhibition at XX Bienal de Arquitectura y Urbanismo in Valparaiso Chile 2017; and ongoing collaborative research capturing soundscapes and identifying biophonic impacts of infrastructure development at the edge of the amazon rainforest in Colombia. Jacob believes that sound can illuminate our surroundings beyond the seen, finding fascinating interactions within natural sonic symphonies heard within changing ecologies. Optical mediums have constructed imaginaries of space while leaving out the embodied experience of place, and affix spatial identity to predictable visual relics. Soundscapes attune us to the rhythms of our changing world in new and exciting ways.

Jacob Moginot

Aamu Song & Johan Olin are designers based in Helsinki and the founders of the COMPANY design practice. They are professionally active as artists, designers and producers. COMPANY has received the Finnish State Design Prize in 2010 and TARKISTA / EN LÖYDÄ: Internationalisation Prize of the Helsinki Design Awards of 2018. Song and Olin are fascinated by the traditional processes of making products in different countries, the teachings of which they apply in their own projects. COMPANY has travelled to the factories and studios of small manufacturers in Finland and abroad. The journeys and trips have opened up new perspectives on traditional products and uses of materials. The design work of COMPANY is based on the narratives and activities of factories and products. It is their secret. 

Aamu Song & Johan Olin

Alessandra Cianchetta is an Italian architect, urban planner and author. Based in London and Paris, she is the founder and sole director of AWP London. She formerly co-founded AWP France of which she is currently co-owner and shareholder. Her achievements include a masterplan for developing an area of 161 hectares (400 acres) in Paris's La Défense business district. Chianchetta was a participant in LIAF 22 and researched and developed her work for LIAF during her stay at MJF.

Alessandra Cianchetta

Ruth Maclennan is an artist. Her work includes films, multi-channel moving image installations, photographs, performances, writing and interdisciplinary research and curatorial projects. Maclennan’s films and photographs explore how the climate emergency has irrevocably transformed ways of seeing and understanding landscape and place – both for their inhabitants, and as representation. Informed by ecological thinking, cross-disciplinary research and fieldwork, her works examine places through the relationships, cultures, geographical conditions, and stories that form them.

Ruth Maclennan’s most recent film project Treeline is made up of hundreds of clips and sound recordings of forests and trees contributed from around the world in response to an open call. A commission for Film and Video Umbrella and Forestry England, Treeline is being exhibited online to coincide with COP26, and in forthcoming presentations at Hunterian Gallery, Glasgow and John Hansard Gallery, Southampton. Maclennan is currently working on a film-workshop project Approaching Zero with FVU and the Arctic Art Institute, supported by the British Council, Moscow.



"Treeline", HD video, 17 minutes, 2021, video still
"Treeline", HD video, 17 minutes, 2021, video still
Maclennan is a member of the artists’ collective The Crown Letter, a weekly online publication initiated by the artist Natacha Nisic in response to the Coronavirus pandemic. Exhibitions include The Crown Letter at Centro Cultural Cordoba, Argentina, and at MAPI Museum of Pre-Columbian and Indigenous Art in Montevideo, Uruguay, curated by Bienal Sur, The International Biennial of Contemporary Art of the South; and The Crown Letter at Fondation Fiminco, curated by PhotoDays, Paris.

Maclennan’s films, Cloudberries (2019), Hero City (2016) and Call of North (2014), shot in the Russian Arctic, premiered at the London Film Festival and her solo exhibition Icebreaker Dreaming was at Pushkin House (2019-20). Her film Theodosia was shot in Crimea a year before its annexation by Russia. It was screened at ICA, London, and in the solo exhibition, The Faces They Have Vanished. Anarcadia, made in the steppes of Kazakhstan (FVU and John Hansard Gallery) toured the UK and international film festivals. Other exhibitions and projects include Somewhere Becoming Sea, (FVU, Hull City of Culture) Terrapolis, (French School Athens, curated by Whitechapel Gallery), Interspecies (Arts Catalyst, Cornerhouse), State of Mind an exhibition and debates with artists, scientists and social scientists on contemporary understandings of the brain at London School of Economics, Archway Polytechnic, and The Archives Project Leverhulme Artist’s Residency at LSE. Her films are held in public and private collections, including Wellcome Collection and Centre Pasqu’Art, Biel. She teaches artists’ moving image at Central Saint Martins and Open College of the Arts. She has a PhD in Fine Art from the Royal College of Art and a Masters of Fine Art from Goldsmiths, and in Modern Languages from Cambridge University. Maclennan is a Research Associate at Scott Polar Research Institute, Cambridge University. LUX Artists’ Moving Image distributes her films.



"Cloudberries", from The Northern Sea Route series Photograph, C type print, archival paper, 2019, 800 mm x 560 mm
"Cloudberries", from The Northern Sea Route series Photograph, C type print, archival paper, 2019, 800 mm x 560 mm
"Black Carbon Polar Projection", Charcoal drawing, 150 x 150cm
"Black Carbon Polar Projection", Charcoal drawing, 150 x 150cm
"Encounter", Polar Museum from The Polar Museum series Photograph, C type print, archival paper, 2019
"Encounter", Polar Museum from The Polar Museum series Photograph, C type print, archival paper, 2019

Ruth Maclennan

In recent years, Lindman has explored artistic research and practice working with performance art, healing-as-art, installation, microbes, architecture, painting, and sculpture. In “Nose, Ears, Eyes“ (Sao Paulo Biennale, 2016) Lindman gave treatments to members of the audience and made paintings based on the visions she saw during these treatments. As Professor of Environmental Art at Aalto University from 2013 to 2018, Lindman initiated the art/science network Chill Survive focusing on the Arctic, summoned the interdisciplinary think tank The Trouble Group, and organized the first global Radical Relevances Conference (2018). Since 2017, Lindman is doctoral candidate at the program of Nordic Cultures and Environmental Politics at Lapland University researching her concept of the subsensorial. A result of many years of investigation into the body and its place within the cultural space, Lindman's work now moves beyond the human body proper to multiple realms of organic and inorganic life.

Pia Lindman

Gunnhilde Høyer is an artist working primarily with painting, printing, sculpture, and installation. Recent works and exhibitions include the projects Environmental Residue and Tracing Sea, the group exhibition Sørlandsutstillingen 50year anniversary show (2019) and the solo exhibitions: Chiaroscuro at Arendal Kunstforening (2018) and Klimatiske Beretninger at gallery LNM in Oslo (2015). Gunnhilde studied at Oslo National Academy of the Arts (KHIO) and University of Art and Design Helsinki and received her master from KHIO in 2010.



Jonas Major is an architect and artist working with the built environment, drawing, painting, sculpture, installations, practice-based research, academic research, writing and publications. Recent work and exhibitions include, OSV. a collaborative project together with Jan Freuchen and Sigurd Tenningen for the osloBIENNALE first edition, Follies 1-4 for the Game of life IV exhibition at Kristiansand Kunsthall and Traversatorie at Bomuldsfabriken Kunsthall. Jonas recieved his Master of Architecture form the Oslo School of Architecture (AHO) in 2009 after undertaking architectural studies at AHO and the Bartlett School of the Built Environment, UCL. Jonas has professional architectural experience from working at MMW architects, Ghilardi + Hellsten architects and Nordic Office of Architecture and through his own firm studio Major . Jonas also works in academia and has taught, lectured, hosted lecture series and supervised diplomas at AHO since 2009. Since 2015 Jonas is also lecturer at the University of Agder, lecturing on architecture and urban planning as well as supervising students at bachelor, master and Ph.D levels.

Gunnhilde Høyer & Jonas Major

Maritea Dæhlin (1986) alternates between living and working in Norway and Mexico. She is interested in human behaviors, emotions, rituals and encounters. Her work spans between devised theater, video performance, performance art and text. Her art comes off as playful, minimal, non-linear and sometimes absurd. She also organizes and curates meeting points involving other artists, as residencies, talks and workshops.

Dæhlin's studies include a BA in Devised Theatre w/Digital Arts at Dartington College of Arts in England (2007-2010) and a 2-year acting course at Nordic Black Express in Oslo (2005-2007). Her work has been shown at venues such as Black Box teater (Oslo), Kunstbanken - Hedmark Kunstsenter (Hamar), Center for Performance Research (New York), Centro Cultural España (Mexico City), RAS-Regional Arena for Samtidsdans (Sandnes), No Nation Gallery (Chicago), Central School of Speech and Drama (London), Defibrillator Gallery (Chicago), and San Agustin Arts Centre (Oaxaca). Maritea is currently a recipient of arbeidsstipend for young artists by Norsk Kulturråd (2019 and 2020).



Soh Tokunaga (1985) spent most of his childhood in Japan and his adult life in Southern Mexico. He has always been passionate about creating things with his hands and has since many years ago worked making heandstitched leather shoes. Apart from making shoes he creates leather accessories, Waraji: traditional Japanese sandals made with natural materials, objects in wood and costumes made of recycled materials. He has also made houses with an ecological focus and has a 15 year old practice in Capoeira Angola. His own brand is called QQ.

I usually dont say I am a designer, as it is not the core of how I identify myself. I have an idea that there are many designers that don't know how to produce themselves and for me the design is the surface, every product I make comes from a function, comfort and from its technical needs. Whiles I follow this search of function, simplicity and comfort, I feel that it is from there that beauty will come. So I don´t believe that I have to start with beauty, because I follow my own road which will then lead me to beauty. I like to call myself a shoemaker as thats where I come from professionally and I have a huge passion for keeping alive the shoemaker tradition and leather work created with handstitching.

Maritea Dæhlin & Soh Tokunaga

Marina Valle Noronha (Brazil / Finland) is an independent curator and doctoral candidate at Aalto University, Finland where she investigates curatorial theory and ethics of care within museum collections development. In her work, Marina puts forward different ways to look at art that leads to new forms of engagement with objects. Through extensive curatorial research and collaborations with collecting institutions, Marina explores the relationships between permanent collections and temporary exhibitions, including display methods that experiment with environmental features. She has recently co-launched (with Kim Modig) Art Off The Air, a research-report and audio piece on the emotions and motions produced by our bodies when traveling for and because of art. Marina has an MA in curatorial studies from CCS Bard, USA and a BA (Hons) in architecture from UFMG, Brazil.

Marina Valle Noronha

Elise Hunchuck is a Berlin-based landscape researcher and editor trained in landscape architecture (MLA, Daniels, Toronto, CA), philosophy and geography (University of Toronto, CA). Her research in Canada, Japan, northern Europe and Ukraine uses cartographic, photographic and text-based practices to document, explore, and archive the entangled relationships between the materials, resources, infrastructures, natural processes, human and other-than-human existences of landscapes. By considering landscapes as political ecologies, her work develops an understanding of landscapes and environmental design as ongoing projects in the immediate present. She has taught at the University of Toronto and was one of the 2019-20 Azrieli Visiting Critics at the Azrieli School of Architecture & Urbanism at Carleton University (Ottawa, CA). She is a member of the editorial board of Scapegoat Journal, a Senior Research and Teaching Fellow at The Bartlett School of Architecture (UCL, London, UK), and a Visiting Studio Tutor at the Royal College of Art (London, UK).

Elise Hunchuck

Irit Rogoff is one of the initiators of the transdisciplinary field of Visual Culture and founder of the department at Goldsmiths. Her initiatives to establish this new field are led by a belief that we must work beyond bodies of inherited disciplinary knowledge and find motivation for knowledge production in the current conditions we are living out.

Her 1997 essay “Studying Visual Culture” (The Visual Culture Reader, ed. N. Mirzoeff, 1998, 2nd ed. 2002) articulated some of the substantive and methodological strands of this new field as a meeting ground between the philosophical, the political and contemporary creative practices.

In a series of ensuing texts Rogoff further expanded concerns in the field into participatory practices (“Looking Away – Participations in Visual Culture” in Art After Criticism, 2004 ) and the emergence of the curatorial as events of knowledge in the so called “Educational Turn” (‘Turning” e-flux Journal 2008 and ‘Education Actualised’ special issue of e-flux journal no.14, 2010, “Smuggling – An Embodied Criticality” 2008 , 2013 and “The Expanding Field” in The Curatorial, 2013).

Another strand of Rogoff’s work concerns geography, counter cartography and questions of Globalization. In publications such as “Terra Infirma – Geography’s Visual Culture” 2000, “Engendering Terror” (Geography and the Politics of Mobility 2002) , ‘The Where of Now’ (Time Zones, Tate Modern 2004), ‘GeoCultures – Circuits of Art and Globalization” (Open, no 16 , 2009) ‘Oblique Points of Entry” (Contemporary Art from the Middle East 2015) – Rogoff has explored how critical perspectives and emergent subjectivities form the basis for alternative understandings of the relations between subjects, places and spaces.

Rogoff works between academic teaching, theoretical writing, curatorial projects and organizing public study. Together with colleagues she formed the freethought collective in 2011 and they co-curated The Bergen Assembly in 2016.

Irit Rogoff

Isabel Carvalho currently lives between Porto and Berlin. Over the past few years her artistic work has brought together visual arts and writing. There is a strong research component in Isabel’s practice – crossing scientific and speculative approaches as a methodology. Her main interest is to establish meaningful relationships between contemporary art practice, economy, politics and sexuality.

Isabel Carvalho

Miina Hujala is an artist and a curator who has received an MA degree (Fine Art) from Aalto University at 2011 (including a period of exchange studies at Hong-ik University on Seoul, South-Korea) and she has also done MFA at Praxis-programme of exhibition studies in the Arts University Helsinki / The Academy of Fine Arts in 2015 (including an internship at The Vera List Center, NYC, NY at 2013.) Hujala has worked mainly with issues relating to the constantly re-formulating concepts of ’knowledge’, ’truth’ and validation, both in her independent artistic practice as well as in terms of questions relating on exhibiting art as a part of her curatorial work.



Arttu Merimaa is an artist and curator working in Helsinki, Finland. He graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts at 2013 (Department of Time and Space). In his curatorial work Merimaa focuses on collegial art practices and public space. Merimaa’s works have been shown in Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Pori Art Museum, Helsinki Photography Museum’s project space, as well as in gallery Sinne, SIC space, and Kluuvi gallery of the Helsinki City Art Museum.

Hujala & Merimaa have been curators of a gallery/art space called Alkovi in Helsinki from 2008 onwards. During that period Alkovi has changed from a place that provides a low threshold for artists wanting to experiment and present their works in the context of this display window art space – that opens up directly to the street level – to a space working on invitation-only aiming to find new ways of presenting art in its embedded connectedness to the multiple levels of societal entanglement. Which is of course quite fluid as well as somewhat ambitious task.

Miina Hujala & Arttu Merimaa

Kaija Kaitavuori is an art historian interested in contemporary art, people and combinations thereof. She has previously held senior roles at the Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art and the Finnish National Gallery, working in museum education and institutional development. At present, she is a visiting lecturer at the University of Helsinki and the Aalto University. She received her PhD in 2015 from the Courtauld Institute of Art in London. The theses investigated participation in art and is published as "The Participator in Contemporary Art. Art and Social Relationships" (2018) by I.B.Tauris. The scope of her postdoctoral research spans contemporary art and cultural policy.

Kaija Kaitavuori

Robert Templer is the Founder and Director of the Higher Education Alliance for Refugees, an organisation aimed at developing new ways to provide education and training for the forcibly displaced around the world. Until recently, he was also a Professor of Practice at the School of Public Policy at Central European University focusing on conflict and violent extremism.

Prior to that, he was the Director of the Asia Program at the International Crisis Group between 2001 and 2012, establishing more than a dozen research programs across the region. He led a Crisis Group team that investigated war crimes in Sri Lanka and headed the organisation's research on Myanmar. He has worked in more than twenty countries in Asia producing nearly 400 reports covering issues as diverse as nuclear proliferation and emerging religious movements. He has focused on post-conflict policing, corruption and constitutional development.

Robert was the Indochina correspondent for Agence France-Presse from 2003-2007 before spending four years as a visiting scholar and Freedom Forum Fellow at the University of California at Berkeley. He is the author of Shadows and Wind: A View of Modern Vietnam (Abacus, 1999) and has written extensively for publications around the world including the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Telegraph, The Guardian, The New Republic and The Far Eastern Economic Review.