Residencies: selected artists and open call

In May, Art & Media Culture Agency M-Cult opened its residency apartment in Helsinki, Finland and presented three new international residency collaborations.  We are pleased to announce the selected artists for the residencies during Autumn 2026 as well as call for application for Nordic-Baltic artists during spring 2027.

Helsinki/Hsinchu: Ciwas Tahos and Sophia Mitiku for in Between: Wetland and Park Forest
M-Cult’s collaboration with Accton Art Foundation and Art Site of Railway Warehouse and Zone Sound Creative invites one artist from Finland and one from Taiwan to immerse and work within local urban nature areas of the residencies. During their research residency period, artists are exploring local urban environments in their residency city, Central Park in Helsinki and Siangshan Wetland in Hsinchu.

Ciwas Tahos
Ciwas Tahos, Anchi Lin uses her body-centred practice to weave together performance, moving image, cyberspace, ceramic sound sculptures, and kinetic installation in ways which queer, question, retell and reimagine desired futures.

Her ongoing project, Finding Pathways to Temahahoi, is a multifaceted, enduring series that reimagines and seeks out the potential spaces of Temahahoi; an oral Atayal story about a group of women and gender diverse people who live deep in the mountains of Taiwan, communicating with bees, sustaining themselves with steam, and conceiving through gusts of wind while sunbathing. Through this work, Ciwas activates the cultural and geographic dimensions of queer belonging, extending beyond, around and through heteronormative confines to activate futures that reclaim, resist and bring together community.

Ciwas Tahos is a DAAD Visual Arts Fellow for 2026–27 and her visit in Helsinki is field research for this fellowship. She will be in Finland in October 2026.

Sophia Mitiku
Sophia Mitiku is a Korean-Ethiopian singer, composer, and sound artist whose practice explores the intersections of land-based epistemologies, memory, and migration. Working across expanded sonic forms and electroacoustic composition, she creates immersive landscapes that move through porous borders of materiality, liminal space, and temporal multiplicity. Through the interplay of tradition and modernity, her work draws on folklore, terrestrial and metaphysical cosmologies, and processes of repair to examine the tensions and continuities between nostalgia and futurisms. Centering the voice as an embodied and transformative instrument, Sophia experiments with field recordings, found material, and intervention as evolving compositional tools. Sophia Mitiku will be in Taiwan in September 2026.

Helsinki/London: Gabriella Presnal and Chipo Mapondera for Recording Realities
This residency programme supports artistic practice as reimagining more equitable worlds where humans have agency over technology and outwardly connect with and care for their environments. It is organised in a collaboration with arebyte Digital Art Centre (London) and the Finnish Cultural Institute in the UK and Ireland (London).

Gabriella Presnal
Gabriella Presnal is a Finnish-American multidisciplinary artist having previously lived in Sweden, Canada, Denmark, and the US. Conceptually, they draw upon philosophies surrounding spatiality and cultural memory. Their approach to media works have been influenced by nomad art described by Deleuze and Guattari’s where they apply the characteristics of spatiality to textile methods. Gabriella combines 360 video, photogrammetry, and hand drawn animation to warp flat representations to then become multidimensional planes where storytelling and memories can permeate. Previously, they have produced multiple community-based projects surrounding queer multicultural youth, sustainability, precarity, and utopias. Gabriella Presnal will be in the UK in October 2026.

Chipo Mapondera
Chipo Mapondera is a Zimbabwean artist and creative technologist whose practice reimagines AI and immersive technologies through Indigenous knowledge, ritual and ceremony. Working across immersive installation, film, sound and interactive media, Chipo creates embodied experiences that explore water, climate, cultural memory and alternative technological futures rooted in care, reciprocity and ancestral ways of knowing.

In Helsinki, Mapondera will continue developing KUCHEMA, a multi-country artistic research project exploring Indigenous water knowledge and alternative AI design. The residency will provide an opportunity to learn from Sámi culture and consider how Indigenous knowledge systems can inform more relational climate and technological futures. Chipo Mapondera will be in Finland in November 2026.  

Nordic-Baltic open call—apply now: Residing Non-linear Technologies and Sonic Worldings
Are you a Nordic-Baltic-based artist ready to spend February–March 2027 between Helsinki and Turku? This residency offers two months of research, mentoring and dialogue with the Finnish media art and sonic art scene, hosted by M-Cult and Arte artists’ association/Titanik gallery.

We invite artists working in sound, media and digital arts to explore vernacular and non-linear technological and sonic environments, shifting focus away from "progress" narratives of big tech and toward local, indigenous and community-oriented perspectives.⁠

What we offer:
–Two months accommodation, split between Helsinki and Turku + travel costs⁠
–Studio access at Titanik + desk space at M-Cult⁠
–3,500 EUR artist fee and 2,000 EURproduction budget⁠
–Mentoring, networking and two public presentations⁠

Apply by August 30.

Contact:

Jussi Koitela
Director, M-Cult
jussi.koitela@m-cult.org

Laura Jurmu
Communications & Production Manager, M-Cult
laura.jurmu@m-cult.org