Ki Nurmenniemi

Punos co-founder and co-director Ki Nurmenniemi (they/them) is a contemporary art curator educated in Curating, Managing, and Mediating Art (Aalto University, 2013) and Sociology (Tampere University, 2010). Working in Finland and internationally since 2010, Ki has curated numerous transdisciplinary projects around contemporary art and its varied approaches to ecological issues and their root causes and ramifications in society.

Ki’s curatorial practice has always been embedded in multidisciplinary collectives such as artist residency organisations. From 2012 through 2018, they worked as a curator at HIAP – Helsinki International Artist Programme. One of their responsibilities there was to lead the 5-year project Frontiers in Retreat – Multidisciplinary Approaches to Ecology in Contemporary Art. In 2018–2019, Ki continued as the Associate Curator of HIAP and Mustarinda Association’s Post-Fossil Transition Project.

Ki has curated exhibitions, performative events, and public programs in Finland (such as Fiskars Village Art and Design Biennale 2019, Helsinki Festival 2019), South Korea (Fictional Frictions as part of the 12th Gwangju Biennale 2018, Edge Effects, 2017, Art Sonje Center, Seoul), The United States (Deep Time Séance 2015, Residency Unlimited, New York), as well as online (Care Practice, co-curated with Ceci Moss of Gas Gallery, Los Angeles, 2020). In 2020, Ki co-founded, with Anna-Kaisa Koski, the art commissioning and research platform Punos Art & Research.

Ki is currently conducting doctoral research (DENVI, the University of Helsinki) on how arts organisations, namely artist residencies, develop and disseminate social practices in response to various types of sustainability issues. Furthermore, Ki’s research project looks at how these organisations, that are an integral part of globally connected contemporary art ecosystems, while being embedded in various kinds of local communities, are playing a part in advancing sustainability transformations of varying scale and scope.

In their art writing, Ki is especially interested in the topic of ecological interconnectedness, and they frequently delve into questions posed by critical posthumanities and feminist new materialisms. In recent years, Ki has also been writing about the fossil-fuel dependency of the contemporary art field as well as inter-species care and co-dependencies.

Ki is passionate about sparking change through breaking binaries and nurturing transdisciplinary collaborations. They embrace gentleness and slowness as artistic and curatorial strategies.

kinurmenniemi.net
frontiersinretreat.org
myriagon.world