The Other Side of the Mountain

Southnord Artfest 2026 full programme: The Other Side of the Mountain, the headline exhibition of Southnord Artfest 2026, opens October 13 at Amos Rex in Helsinki. The title also names the Artfest as a whole, a shared frame for a season of work about distances and proximities, and the routes between them. The exhibition gathers eleven artists: Adji Dieye, Akinbode Akinbiyi, Emeka Ogboh, Ibrahim Mahama, Igshaan Adams, Jeannette Ehlers, Karl Ohiri, Liisa-Irmelen Liwata, Loulou Cherinet, Lungiswa Gqunta and Sandra Mujinga.

The group brings together artists from the African continent and its Nordic diasporas at various career stages, with work meeting around the Artfest’s themes of maps and routes; landscapes; language; state and city; traces and memory.

The Artfest unfolds across the city in seven partner locations including Amos Rex over five months. Helsinki Central Library Oodi anchors the public programme as the Artfest's central hub, with workshops, screenings, panels and an Afro-Nordic literary weekend. Amos Rex will be home to various artist talks around the exhibition and rich and varied programming in their Bio Rex and Studio Rex. From there the Artfest reaches further into the city with a season-long exhibition at the Kaisaniemi Botanic Garden, two solo exhibitions at the Finnish Museum of Photography, a day dedicated to the African American artist Howard Smith at the Espoo Museum of Modern Art, somatic offerings including communal cooking and deep listening at the Museum of Impossible Forms, as well as a curatorial symposium centring the African art institutions built by women held jointly at PUBLICS and Oodi. The Artfest closes in March 2027 with Let’s Play, an outdoor family day by Good Hair Day at Amos Rex. For the full detailed programme, visit our Artfest page here.

“This Artfest is about moving between places, and working with partners throughout Helsinki and Espoo lets the themes travel with us, into a library, a botanic garden and museums. Holding questions of movement, land and memory in many venues at once helps us reinforce the central ideas into the very structure of the Artfest itself,” says Marcia Harvey Isaksson, founder of Southnord.

The Artfest's public life began over the summer with Emeka Ogboh's Danfo bus travelling from Berlin to Helsinki as part of his installation Transmissions. It was welcomed by block parties in Copenhagen, Stockholm and Helsinki, where stories from the African diaspora were gathered.

The Other Side of the Mountain and the programme at Amos Rex is co-curated by Marcia Harvey Isaksson (Southnord) and Katariina Timonen (Amos Rex), and produced and funded by Amos Rex. The wider Artfest programme is co-curated by Marcia Harvey Isaksson and Ulrika Flink. Some specific programme points have been co-curated together with Sonya Lindfors, Nontobeko Ntombela and Neicia Marsh. Southnord Artfest 2026 is generously funded by Nordic Culture Point, Nordisk Kulturfond, Amos Andersons fond and Kulturbryggan, and supported by our partners Hotel Helka and Tallink Silja Line.

For questions and high-resolution images, please contact: Georgètte Dwomoh-Appiah, Communications Coordinator for Artfest 2026 georgette@southnord.com or hello@southnord.com.