Museum of Impossible Forms, Aallonhalkoja 9, Helsinki (2026)

MIF was founded in 2017 and has been shaped as an antiracist and queer-feminist project, a heterogeneous space developing experimental and migrant forms of expression, as a platform for experiences and a laboratory for critical thought. It is an expanding archive – real, imagined and embodied – in constant flux. MIF has hosted numerous events and significant interventions through cinema, performan

ce, music, spoken word, discourse, visual arts, and activism-based practice, discourse, and pedagogy. Due to its commitment to decolonial work, the Museum of Impossible Forms was awarded the Tutkijaliitto Award in 2019 and the State Art Prize 2020 in the field of multi-disciplinary art by The National Arts Council and the Arts Promotion Centre Finland (Taike).

29/08/2026

Panos Balomenos: Go East – Go West
On view: 4 September – 11 October 2026
Thu–Fri 14–18
Sat–Sun 12–16
Or by appointment

Warmly welcome to the opening of Panos Balomenos’ exhibition Go East – Go West on Thursday, 3rd September 2026 from 17:00 to 20:00 at Museum of Impossible Forms.

Go East – Go West (2020–2023) is a seven-part series of watercolour paintings by Panos Balomenos developed in response to Russia’s war against Ukraine. Bringing together images encountered through news media with personal memories, architectural details, symbolic elements, and imagined scenarios, the series considers how geopolitical events become entangled with lived experience. The works reflect on the possibilities and limits of approaching war from a distance: how images travel across geographies, how political violence enters personal consciousness, and how foreign wars can produce recognition, empathy, implication, and mobilisation. As the war against Ukraine continues alongside other sites of occupation, displacement, destruction, and genocide, Go East – Go West asks what painting can do in relation to violence whose scale exceeds individual experience, and how the distance between elsewhere and here is continually unsettled.

Panos Balomenos is a visual artist from Athens, Greece, who has lived and worked in Helsinki since 2003. Working primarily with watercolour painting and performance, Balomenos brings together personal narratives, historical events, and fiction to examine power relations, politics, and environmental questions. His watercolour works often unfold through extended series, with individual paintings accumulating multiple narrative, symbolic, and historical layers. Against the increasing digitisation of contemporary life, he approaches painting as a medium through which social criticism, reflection, and sustained forms of looking can continue to take place.

Read more about the exhibition on the link in bio!

28/08/2026

Never Three Yet: Revisiting Experimental Institutionalism.
Talk by Charles Esche
17:00–20:00

Born in the very different world of the late 1990s, new or experimental institutionalism seems to offer a way for artists and curators to develop a different politics and contribute to positive social change. The talk will look at the legacy of these attempts, interpreted by someone who was directly involved. Using examples of his own practice as a curator, Charles Esche will sketch out the hopes and failures of experimental institutionalism and where its legacies might be useful in the very different circumstances of 2026.

Charles Esche is a writer and curator based in Amsterdam and is developing the Three Ashes Foundation in collaboration with members of transit.ro on land near Bucharest. For a number of years, through writing and exhibitions, he has proposed the concept of demodernising as a way for western Europeans to approach the challenge of decolonial thinking. He is a professor of contemporary art and curating at University of the Arts, London; adviser at Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht and a PhD candidate at the University of Amsterdam. From 2004-24 he directed the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven and from 2000-2004 the Rooseum in Malmö.

Images:
The Experimental Station for Research into Art and Life and The Three Ashes, neighbours in Silistea Snagnovului, Romania.

22/05/2026

Last two weeks on view!! | Diego Bruno: Productive Unit

Developed through research with Argentina’s MTD – Movimiento de Trabajadores Desocupados (Unemployed Workers Movement), the exhibition brings together experimental film, installation, and archival materials to reflect on collective organisation, political subjectivity, and the conditions through which histories are represented and encountered.

📍 On view until 31 May 2026
Thu–Fri 14–18
Sat–Sun 12–16
Or by appointment
Warmly welcome!

09/05/2026

Building power from below.
Lecture and artist talk
Mariano Pacheco & Diego Bruno
Thursday, 14 May, 2026
16:00–18:00

As part of the exhibition Productive Unit at the Museum of Impossible Forms, writer and militant Mariano Pacheco will deliver a lecture followed by a conversation with the artist Diego Bruno.

Departing from the question of what a people can do when they move from victimhood towards struggle and self-organisation, the lecture traces the transformations of popular movements in Argentina over the past fifty years against the backdrop of neoliberal restructuring and the contemporary rise of the far right and authoritarian politics. Moving from the 1976 military coup and its project of state terror and economic liberalisation, the talk reflects on how the destruction of industrial labour and organised working-class life gave rise to new territorial and community-based forms of political organisation, from the Madres de Plaza de Mayo to the piquetero movement, feminist struggles, and the popular economy. Through these experiences, the presentation examines how collective infrastructures of care, self-management, and social reproduction emerged as forms of resistance to capitalist precarity and social fragmentation, while simultaneously shaping new political subjectivities and forms of militancy. It foregrounds the importance of studying and translating these experiences in order to imagine new political strategies and forms of solidarity across different contexts.

Mariano Pacheco is a writer, journalist, and militant whose work spans cultural criticism, political education, and social movement organising. His work moves between philosophy, literature, psychoanalysis, and the history of Argentine social and political struggles, which he develops through research, publishing, and pedagogical initiatives. Over the years, he has contributed to political formation processes across Latin America. This marks his first visit outside Latin America.

10/04/2026

Diego Bruno: Productive Unit
On view: 18 April – 31 May 2026
Thu–Fri 14–18
Sat–Sun 12–16
Or by appointment

Warmly welcome to the opening of Diego Bruno’s exhibition Productive Unit on Friday, 17 April 2026 from 17:00 to 20:00 at Museum of Impossible Forms.

Productive Unit is a 57-minute experimental film and installation by Diego Bruno, developed through a research process in collaboration with militants from the MTD – Movimiento de Trabajadores Desocupados (Unemployed Workers Movement) in Argentina. Emerging in the late 1990s, the MTD developed forms of social organisation grounded in self-management, autonomy, and communal production. Over time, it has contributed to worker-run cooperatives, recuperated factories, and grassroots structures sustaining alternative economic and political models.
The work brings together archival documents and newly produced footage to reflect on the political capacity of the movement, while interrogating the forms through which such histories are communicated. It asks to what extent experimental moving-image practices can offer compelling modes for representing radical political processes. By insisting on the materiality of language, image, and spatial arrangement, Bruno situates the exhibition as an active site where aesthetic propositions are not only shown but tested in their capacity to circulate, to sediment, and to re-emerge within the social and political fabric of their reception.
Diego Bruno lives and works in Helsinki. His multidisciplinary practice spans moving image, writing, drawing, and photography, emphasising the friction between artistic forms and political awareness within their respective narratives, and engaging with the epistemological, artistic, and political disputes of the present.

Read more about the exhibition on the link in bio!

The film has been produced and edited with support from AVEK, Koneen Säätiö, Linnamon Säätiö and Carbon Copy ky.

Osoite

Aallonhalkoja 9
Helsinki
00540

Nettisivu

http://www.impossibleforms.org/

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