The annual IHME Helsinki Commission is open to everyone and free of charge. A work tailored to a public space is created from a dialogue between art and researched knowledge. IHME works are often situational or place-related, and over the years they have been marveled at in the tram, at the health center, in Vantaa’s Mätäoja neighborhood park, as well as in Yle Areena.
Internationally recognized and awarded artists who share our ethos of ecological sustainability and the power of art in the sustainability transition are chosen as the creators of the commission. You can experience many kinds of emotions with art, and art has the power to change thinking and action. A large number of multidisciplinary partners from home and abroad often participate in the realization of the commissions. The commissions can also be realized in the artist’s home country.
IHME Helsinki works are often participatory, in which case the role of the audience in the work is central. Check out the upcoming work and come along!
Ukrainian artist Zhanna Kadyrova (b. 1981) is to make IHME Helsinki Commission 2025. In her IHME Helsinki Commission, Kadyrova will examine the consequences of Russia’s destruction of the Kahovka dam in the Zaporizhzhya region, and nature’s amazing regenerative ability. In Helsinki Kadyrova is interested in the history and present of Vanhankaupunginkoski rapids.
Cooking Sections – Daniel Fernández Pascual and Alon Schwabe – invited all home bakers, bakeries, restaurants, schools, and communities in Finland to create bread recipes that combine the well-being of land, water and people’s guts. The challenge ran from 15 April until 1 September. The best recipes were tasted and awarded with prizes at the Maaleipä Feast at Kellohalli in Helsinki on 21 September 2024. All the finalist recipes are published at the challenge website.
In IHME Helsinki Commission 2023 Chicago Boys – While We Were Singing, They Were Dreaming a diverse group of people formed an amateur band and practiced together twice a week for six weeks between 17 April and 27 May 2023. The band consisted of musicians and non-musicians who are united by the desire to play music and to think about the connections between the neoliberal economy and environmental changes to everyday life.
The IHME Helsinki Commission 2022 Learning from Doubt by artist, film maker Amar Kanwar was an online, ten-week educational course based on and emerging from Kanwar´s art installation and exhibition The Sovereign Forest. Lessons learned from experiments on ecological sustainability with a unique rice seed bank in the village of Narisho in Odisha, India and the experiences gained during the making and exhibiting of The Sovereign Forest were integrated into the course.
To Burn, Forest, Fire consisted of the scent of the first-ever forest on earth and the scent of the last forest of the age of climate crisis, made into incense and then burned across a variety of sites around the city of Helsinki in 1-30 September and 1 October, 2021.
IHME Helsinki 2020 commission Listening Through the Dead Zones was a site-specific sound installation by the Norwegian artist Jana Winderen, in collaboration with Tony Myatt, at the Rowing Stadium in Helsinki.
From a festival into a contemporary art commissioning agency.