Since 2021, Giovanna Esposito Yussif is the artistic director of the Museum of Impossible Forms. MIF is a cultural center and the coming together of communities of art and cultural workers working to build anti colonial, anti patriarchal, and non-fascist commitments and futures.
It is located in East Helsinki.
MIF was founded in 2016 by an independent transdisciplinary group of art and cultural workers, researchers, philosophers, and pedagogues united by the common urgency of enabling a platform that would fill gaps in the critical artistic practice and pedagogy for BIPOC artists in Helsinki. Opening its doors in 2017 in Kontula’s shopping center, MIF has unfolded as a dynamically open space that practices decolonial, queer and intersectional feminist values; as a heterogeneous platform to engage with experimental, marginal, and migrant forms of expression; and as a laboratory for experiences, critical thought, and radical imagination.
In the past five years, MIF have developed numerous events and significant interventions in cinema, performance, music, spoken word, theory, visual arts, socially engaged and activism-based practices, and pedagogy. MIF has become an indispensable resource for migrant knowing and a stronghold for contemporary artistic practices and alternate pedagogies in East Helsinki. As a collective project that builds communities, the Museum of Impossible Forms seek to defy prejudices of otherness and structural inequality, working for a society based on dignity, diversity, equity, allyship and solidarity, and towards developing and strengthening pluralist art practices in Finland and elsewhere.
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).
(1) Museum of Impossible Forms / Citizens' centers project participant, 2022, Videostill
(2) Museum of Impossible Forms, 2026
