Nordic Art Education's Hope Labor: Reframing Neoliberal Logics
Author
Term
4. semester
Publication year
2025
Submitted on
2025-12-19
Pages
134
Abstract
The topic of interest for this thesis, Nordic Art Education’s Hope Labor: Reframing Neoliberal Logics, are art-based community practices against unpaid labor in a Nordic art and cultural context. The thesis topic was founded in participatory observations taken by the author during low and unpaid working positions in the Nordic region (Finland and Denmark) in cultural organizations. These roles were in organizations that communicated art education as a fundamental part of the working role. A primary observation was the lack of material and immaterial benefits from the organization to reward the worker. This initiated a visual intervention encouraging reflection from fellow workers on their experience in a working position that they identify as hope labor. The project was framed by design-based research (DBR), expands on the practices of diverse economies, and participatory action research (PAR), for designing a reflexive curatorial practice. The visual intervention’s title became Working Precariously. It included an A3 printed zine exhibited and distributed in Copenhagen, Denmark and Imatra & Helsinki, Finland. It included 5 excerpts from 5 creatives based in Finland as well as a 6th collaborator that assisted in the layout. The zine was presented and distributed in an exhibition format in Imatra as a part of a group exhibition called Välillä Väärässä. As a second iteration of Working Precariously, the project included a workshop with a dozen participants resulting in two additional zines titled Hope Zines. Then, as a method of presentation and reflection a zine library was implemented at Helsinki Central Library Oodi, titled We’re Working Here!. Coalescing into a curated library, the zine library exhibited 22 zines (with 65+ persons involved in their creation). The library created a commons where community members could contribute to the topic of working precariously. Altogether, the curated library format was a learning platform for fellow artists, creatives, as well as the general public on working conditions in the Nordic art and cultural industry. To answer my research question, the findings of this thesis concluded that multiple forms of design inquiry can be developed for reclamation of and reflexive learning on hope labor in Nordic art and culture.
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