New international biennale to Finland – the first Fiskars Village Art & Design Biennale to open in summer 2019

Luovi Productions, producer of the Helsinki Design Week festival, will launch a new event in Fiskars Village. Luovi has signed a contract with Fiskars to organize the biennale until 2023.

Fiskars Village carries a long tradition in exhibitions.
The exhibition of Co-op Onoma, consisting of crafts people, designers and artists, opens in May and has become an annual summer-season starter for many, and the Village has developed into a distinctive, high class centre for art and design in the Western Uusimaa region of Finland.

The new Fiskars Village Art & Design Biennale will work in close cooperation with Onoma. The biennial will form a strong content and communication package of old and new to increase awareness of and the number of visitors at the Village.

One of the objectives of the biennial is to take over new indoor and outdoor spaces in Fiskars Village and the nearby areas. The programme will consist of both chargeable and free exhibitions and events. Its international curators will be published later during the spring.

“The communities and entrepreneurs already active in the area will be included in the planning since the very beginning. We encourage them to take part in the programme by organizing their own exhibitions and opening their studios to the visitors. The biennial will be packaged much like Helsinki Design Week: the festival will work as a platform in which the locals are invited to participate,” says Luovi CEO Kari Korkman.

Currently Finland is attracting more visitors than ever before. Fiskars Village received the Culture Eden in Finland award in January 2018. The award is the result of cooperation between Onoma, Fiskars Group and other cultural activists. Luovi is now thinking of ways to develop Fiskars Village’s established high-end cultural activities in view of future tourism.

“We believe that an experienced design producer like Luovi will further enforce Fiskars visibility and bring over an international audience interested in quality design. In 2019, Onoma will organize an exhibition, the theme and working title of which is Factory. The theme is local, yet closely tied with the history of the Village, and also global, questioning today’s work culture and product design. The theme suits the Fiskars Biennale concept well, and we are looking forward to all the opportunities generated by this cooperation,” says Co-op’s Chairman of the Board Tarja Ervasti.

“Fiskars has all the properties needed to become one of the top destinations of cultural tourism, and the biennial will help reach this objective. A high quality art and design biennial will attract international visitors, and Fiskars is optimally located to tempt stop-over passengers from Asia,” notes Korkman.

The Fiskars Summer House exhibition organized in the summer of 2018 will make ground for the biennial. The exhibition stays open from 16 June to 16 September 2018.

Luovi Productions is the producer of both the Summer House exhibition and the Fiskars Village Art and Design Biennale. Luovi Productions is a production agency whose core expertise stems from various projects in the design field. Luovi’s best known project is Helsinki Design Week that annually gathers circa 160,000 visitors to 250 events, making it the largest design festival in the Nordic countries. Next Helsinki Design Week is organized from 6 to 16 September 2018.