SAAL Biennaal 2025 | Satu Herrala & Marta Keil´s workshop: How about dreaming a loving relationship between artists and institutions?
Friday 29. August at 13:00 - 17:00
Kanuti Guild Hall, Tallinn
Is it possible that it’s not only art workers, but also art institutions, that get deeply exhausted? Allow us to imagine artists and institutions becoming allies in transforming the working conditions into more nourishing and just. What could that allyship entail? What would need to happen for this relationship to be a loving one? How can nurturing it become a daily practice?
We invite art workers, artists, freelancers, and employees of art institutions to join us for a 4-hour workshop of discussing, reading, writing and embodying these questions in an attempt to reimagine together the relations and constellations between artists and institutions. Beginning from the acknowledgement of a depletion as the status quo of the arts field we aim to encounter our shared conditions and see what could be their transformative potential.
Satu Herrala (Helsinki) is a curator and researcher with a background in dance and choreography. She is interested in exploring how attuning to bodily coexistence informs ways of being, knowing and acting, and how collective action emerges from embodiment.
Currently she is working on a doctoral research on embodied curating at Aalto University School of Arts, Design and Architecture. Together with Anna Karhu-Cormier and Maija Mustonen, she founded and co-curated Love Harvest Festival at Frantsila Herb Farm in 2024. Between 2020 and 2024 she co-directed Forest as a Geopolitical Stage, a Finnish-Uruguayan art and research initiative, with Tamara Cubas, Jussi Lehtonen and Julia Asperska.
She is a performer and a member of the working group of Pauliina Feodoroff’s performance piece Matriarchy which premiered at The Sámi Pavilion in the 59th Venice Biennale in 2022.
Together with Hans Rosenström she co-curated a contemporary art programme A I S T I T / coming to our senses consisting of exhibitions, performances, discursive events and public art in 2021, produced by four Finnish Cultural Institutes.
Between 2015 and 2019 she worked as the artistic director and curator of Baltic Circle International Theatre Festival in Helsinki. She is a regular guest lecturer and mentor at the University of the Arts Helsinki.
Marta Keil (Utrecht) is dramaturge, curator and researcher. Her curatorial and research practice focuses on re-enchanting the ways of instituting in the performing arts. As a fellow of BAK in Utrecht she started in 2023 her research on dramaturgies of withdrawal in performing arts, which she continues at AP School of Arts in Antwerp.
Marta works as tutor at DAS Theatre, Academy for Theatre and Dance, Amsterdam University of the Arts, and collaborates as freelance dramaturg, curator, teacher and advisor with various European institutions and artists, e.g. Ira Brand, Ainhoa Hernández Escudero, Samara Hersch, Milla Koistinen, Lina Majdalanie, Rabih Mroué, Jagoda Szelc.
Recently, she curated an artistic research project Breaking the Spell, co-produced by Residenz Schauspiel Leipzig, München Kammerspiele, Performing Arts Institute in Warsaw and Viernulvier in Ghent and collaborated with the New Theatre Institute of Latvia in Riga and Rosendal Teater in Trondheim for The Shake Down project, involving teenagers to curate two internationally renowned festivals. Marta edited several books on curation, choreography and performing arts and holds a PhD in Culture Studies. She is a member of the Performing Arts Institute collective in Warsaw.
Duration: 240´
In English
Kanuti Guild Hall • Pikk tänav 20, 10133 Tallinn, Harju maakond, Estonia
