PRAKSIS, Index, PUBLICS, Simian and the Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art (LCCA) join forces to trial a distributed institutional structure.
Small and mid-sized arts organisations often face similar pressures: tight budgets, stretched teams, short-term funding cycles and high expectations for production. Yet most institutional models assume that organisations should work, and potentially grow, individually.
Institutional Reimagining’s five partners intend to challenge that assumption. From autumn 2026 for a year, they will engage in an experiment in collective programming, and discover what becomes possible when independent organisations in different countries and different parts of the arts ecosystem align their activities.
Working Themes
During this pilot phase, the partners will be establishing how to work together well and exploring topics including:
Collectivisation and capacity-building: sharing planning and pooling resources to ease pressure on small teams.
Institutional learning: partners will share information and working methods, enabling the organisations to reuse or adapt each others’ discoveries.
Decentralised authorship: not simply distributing activity geographically, but shifting power structures away from institutional centrality and towards collaborative, participatory governance across sites and publics.
Accessible practice: developing methods that can be easily communicated and freely adapted across the collective.
Youth agency: keeping the project's framing relevant beyond the professional art field by involving young people.
Evaluation beyond visitor numbers: finding out how this way of working might be analysed, evaluated and reported.
Each organisation will continue to host activity locally while collaborating on shared artistic commissions, residencies, public programmes and a jointly developed exhibition. Institutional Reimagining complements some major regional public events, including LCCA’s Survival Kit international art festival in Riga and PUBLIC’s curatorial symposium POSITIONING in Helsinki.
Youth engagement
Pre-existing youth programmes at IR’s collaborating organisations will be invited into the collective, allowing young voices to help shape its priorities, accessibility and public presence.
Access
Access to culture goes beyond attendance figures: it involves enfranchising participants in the shaping of cultural production. Institutional Reimagining will consider access needs across its entire programme, factoring in the physical, linguistic, digital, economic and other factors that impact accessibility. IR’s participant organisations include access information in their publicity and are committed to providing access as far as each is practically able, so if you have specific access requirements for an event or activity, please contact the hosting partner directly.
Supported by
Institutional Reimagining is supported by Nordic Culture Fund.
Individual strands of the project may receive additional support, credited locally. PRAKSIS’s Living Arrangements residency is supported by Nordic Culture Point.
Follow
Institutional Reimagining is shared across each partner's own channels — follow PRAKSIS, Index, PUBLICS, Simian and LCCA directly, or look out for #InstitutionalReimagining.
Co-developed Projects
Living Arrangements
Residency (Oslo): Agnė Jokšė and Kristiina Mäenpää
Images: Agnė Jokšė – Jules Lacave-Fontourcy. Kristiina Mäenpää – Courtesy of the artist
Institutional Reimagining welcome Agnė Jokšė (LT) and Kristiina Mäenpää (FI) as its first residents hosted at PRAKSIS. They will be at work in Oslo from late summer until 15 September 2026.
As part of this, the residency offers a supportive space for research and development in relation to early directions for Survival Kit Festival 2027, including questions of housing, cohabitation and the domestic. Survival Kit is organised by LCCA and in 2027 is curated by Paul O’Neill with PUBLICS, Helsinki.
Click here for more information
Partners
Index – Foundation for Contemporary Art (Stockholm, Sweden)
Index is a non-profit arts foundation known for experimental, discursive and inclusive curatorial models. Working with emerging and established artists, it emphasises dialogue and co-authorship, alongside learning formats and youth advisory structures that connect critical practice to wider communities. indexfoundation.se
Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art (LCCA) (Riga, Latvia) Since 2000, LCCA has worked nomadically across Latvia, the Baltics and the wider post-socialist region. It realises exhibitions and research and education projects in sites such as museums, schools, libraries and urban spaces, with an emphasis on accessibility, inclusion and engagement with underrepresented audiences. lcca.lv
PRAKSIS (Oslo, Norway)
PRAKSIS is a transnational platform for art, research and learning that foregrounds development through shared experience: collaboration, peer exchange and public programming. Its thematic residencies, public events, youth programming and publishing projects connect artistic practice to wider cultural, social and environmental issues. praksisoslo.org
PUBLICS (Helsinki, Finland)
PUBLICS is a curatorial and contemporary art commissioning agency with a library, exhibition and event space in Vallila, Helsinki. Working across strands including PUBLICS Library, Talks, Youth and Parahosting, it explores a shared "working together" institutional model rooted in dialogue, plural publics and civic engagement. publics.fi
Simian (Copenhagen, Denmark) Founded and run by artists as a non-profit organisation, Simian is an independent art centre that supports experimental exhibitions by artists at all career stages and aims to generate critical artistic and social discourse. Simian's artist-run structure enables its four directors to take a hands-on, participatory approach to the development and realisation of its projects. ssiimmiiaann.org
