Minna Tarkka Lectures 2026

What kind of experience of time is place-based, relational and multi-layered? Which technologies could take us there?

In the third edition of the Minna Tarkka Lectures by M-Cult, Media Culture and Art Agency, we invite you to join us in speculating, questioning and dreaming with a multiplicity of temporalities and their possibilities.

The term polytemporality invites us to explore and experience time as place-based, relational and multi-layered. From this perspective, time is no longer a straight line running from past to future, but a landscape where ancestral knowledges, everyday life and imagined futures co-exist.

This year, the Minna Tarkka Lectures present three lectures and two workshop contributions, together with film screenings and a shared meal, to explore polytemporal technologies, where different timelines, periods, ages and temporal planes exist simultaneously. The programme challenges the boundaries between past and future, ancestors and algorithms, rituals and codes, bodies and machines, breaking the causal chains set by capitalist extraction and by the monocultural, monotemporal and fast-paced world that Big Tech is pushing us towards.

Where the past lies ahead: about the programme
Among the Aymara, an Indigenous People of the Andean highlands of Bolivia, Peru and Chile, the past lies ahead, in view, while the future is behind us, unseen. Artist and researcher Paola Torres Núñez del Prado introduces this notion, qhipa nayra, in her lecture and workshop, which invite audiences to think and build together around the question of what it means to see technology as a practice rather than a tool, and time not as a straight line but as layers that co-exist. 

Photographer and filmmaker Marja Helander introduces the Sámi understanding of time as cyclical, shaped by the annual cycle of reindeer herding and a traditional calendar of eight seasons rather than four. Her lecture shows how photography and film can bring different eras and generations into the same frame.

Artist and creative technologist Chipo Mapondera guides our thinking by asking what technology might become when it is shaped by ancestral knowledge, ecological relationships and collective future imaginaries. Her artistic research project KUCHEMA has connected with communities in Zimbabwe and Tunisia, and now in Finland, exploring how Indigenous knowledge, cultural practices and community imagination might inform alternative approaches to AI development.

The lectures open into conversations with invited respondents, among them curator Taru Elfving and senior researcher Matti Pohjonen.

To further investigate technology as an open practice entangling our social, material and bodily spaces, we celebrate the preparing and sharing of food as a vital medium that builds temporal infrastructures for community. When did you last consider your needs around food? Doğa Çal’s Kitchen Testimonies, in dialogue with curator Dahlia El Broul, asks audiences to examine the tools, habits and interdependencies that shape how we arrive at the table.

In his essay film AI: African Intelligence, writer and filmmaker Manthia Diawara brings possession rituals in Senegalese fishing villages into the same frame as the emerging technology known as artificial intelligence. The short film Máilmmittkus by artists Arttu Nieminen and Hans Pieski takes you on a surreal journey into the complex relationship between Indigenous peoples and the unstoppable force of technological progress.

About the Minna Tarkka Lectures Series
Minna Tarkka Lectures is an experimental public forum and learning initiative that amplifies critical practices in the arts and media and opens debate on the artistic, social and technological currents of our time. Since 2024, the annual programme has created space for dialogue on the role of art and media as active contributors to civil society, at a time when democratic life faces serious challenges.

Minna Tarkka Lectures 2026 is produced by Media Culture and Art Agency M-Cult, in collaboration with AV-arkki, Centre for Finnish Media Art, and Aalto Media Lab, supported by the Finnish Arts and Culture Agency. 

Read more and register for the programme, or follow the livestream of the lectures on December 2, 12–4 pm (UTC+2), here.

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

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