Art For All Festival - Success & Glory

The 2025 edition of the festival took over the shopping center Easton Hansakäytävä in Itäkeskus, filling the empty commercial spaces with art. The festival was organized in collaboration with City of Helsinki, shopping center Easton, Cool Head Brew, Aalto University School of Arts, Design and Architecture and the Aalto University Students of Arts, Design and Architecture.

The festival’s theme Success & Glory reflects on money, consumerism, and what success means in contemporary society. Through the theme the festival explores narratives and ideals in a society that pushes individualism, competition, and constant self-development. Evolve or perish! Be the best version of yourself! Behind success narratives are people who are stories of people who are messy, complicated, and exhausted. What about when your efforts do not succeed? Does contemporary society allow failure?

The artworks ranged from watercolor paintings and photographs to site specific audio installations and video art. The festival program featured multiple performances: a wrestling performance where two people struggle to put on office clothes on each other, acoustic guitar performance, live mixing of field recordings, and a durational performance where the artist gave up her clothes in a weekend-long Instagram livestream.

I worked as the producer of the festival overseeing the practicalities, resources, funding, logistics, tech and leading the cross-disciplinary festival team. The role of the production is highlighted in the festival process as the event is transported every year to a new location that is not typical for exhibiting art. The festival production includes a great amount of negotiation, planning and building trust and good working relation ships with the partners providing the venue. This process makes the festival what it is and challenges the festival team to reinvent the event and find new ways of producing and exhibiting art.