Jonny Bix Bongers: Hi, Marita. Hi, Ivor. Thanks for being here. Maybe as a short starting point for those who may not yet be familiar with your work, could you briefly describe what you do and what Artists at Risk (AR) is?

Ivor: So, I think we can start by mentioning that the umbrella organization which runs Artists at Risk (AR) is called Perpetuum Mobile.

Perpetuum Mobile (PM) is a non-profit organisation registered in Helsinki, Finland, which runs many long-term thematic platforms. The most well-known of these is Artists at Risk (AR), but there have been several such long-term platforms which we’ve carried out. We started with something called the Perestroika Project, which was a big museum show at Kiasma, the Finnish National Museum, with a conference and events at the National Library and National Film Archive. We went on to create several other platforms.

We developed the Perpetual Romani Pavilion, for example, which is focused on Roma art. It started as an emergency ‘pavilion’ at the Venice Biennial in 2009, when the 2nd ‘official’ Roma Pavilion was cancelled at the last minute. The Perpetual Romani Pavilion had many subsequent iterations, including at the Moderna Museet in Malmö and the Hungaricum in Berlin, where it became the Venice Pavilion in our reckoning, because once again the official Roma Pavilion in Venice was not taking place. The great (late) Damian Le Bas, Sr. simply painted the name on the large-scale project called Safe European Home which he and his wife Delaine Le Bas were working on with PM. It was emblematic of the forced displacement faced by Roma people.

The Arts Assembly is another long-standing and ongoing platform, which acts as a reflexive model for cooperation in the creative field. It functions as a self-organising platform of artists and thinkers that creates context-specific charters and public evaluations through participatory, peer-to-peer dialogue and critical reflection. With the goal of fostering collective agency, it has shaped curatorial and evaluative frameworks at major events like Manifesta 8.

The Artists at Risk (AR) Pavilion at the Venice Biennial 2024 – under the tile ARTISTS. RISKS. HUMANS. RIGHTS – was a celebration of cultural professionals who risk their lives on the frontlines of artistic freedom and human rights.

Marita: They are often intertwined, as Ivor says. Artists at Risk (AR) started in 2013, but it grew out of the Re-Aligned platform that was focused on the “movements of the squares”, the wave of revolutions across northern Africa and well beyond. In 2012 Egypt, artists who had joined the Tahrir Square movement were at high risk. The new president, General Al-Sisi came from the same group as President Mubarak who had been deposed two years earlier and represented the army which had tortured and jailed artists and activists who had been key proponents of the revolution.

At that time, we worked at an artist-in-residency centre in Helsinki, so it was very natural for us to use these facilities to invite and host these peers for a residency, to have a breather in a safe space, to rest and think about their next steps. Should they go back? Where should they go? What can they do?

Our work with politically and socially engaged art led directly to the creation of AR.

Ivor: We are very much a hands-on organisation. Since then, over more than 10 years, we have relocated over 1,100 artists at risk from all over the world in cooperation with over 330 hosting institutions.

Artists at Risk (AR) stands at the intersection of arts and human rights. We have an ongoing ‘Public call’”, as we call it, and artists who are at risk, or persecuted artists, can apply for a residency, which may last from three months to up to two years.

We have residency-hosts around the world, and aside from providing a ’safe haven’ for physical safety, these artist-in-residences provide the artists with an artistic context. This is crucial. They say that there can be two ’deaths’ for an artist. One is the concrete, physical death, and the other is their death artistically. Being able to actively practice their art is particularly important for artists who have been silenced by their persecutors. Once in safety, they are finally able to create freely. Indeed, they are often highly prolific!

Artists at Risk (AR) is a peer movement. The hosting institutions vary from traditional artists-in-residences to opera houses. The key thing is to provide a matching artistic context for each artist which considers their personal profile, including that of any dependents such as their family, their artistic discipline and other needs.

Jonny: That’s impressive. You write that you understand your work as a ‘curatorial vehicle’ and also describe your practice mainly in assisting artists in a certain way. Maybe you can also elaborate a bit on your role as curators?

Ivor: Yes of course.

But, first of all, especially when working with people from outside of Europe, we try to avoid using the language of ’helping’ people. We try to avoid the ’saviour complex’, so to speak. We work with artists as artists. We work with them as peers. We curate shows with them. We do conferences with them. We’re not here to pat ourselves on the back for ’saving’ artists. I know that wasn’t suggested or implied. But, in our opinion, that kind of thinking is the legacy of the colonial-era’s ’white man’s burden’.

This is a distinction that we really must keep. We are a horizontal network of socially and politically engaged residences, not a UFO coming down from the sky. We come from the artistic field, and these are our colleagues. These are curators, artists, cultural professionals–just like us– in a situation of high risk, right? It could happen to any of us, and indeed has happened to some of our colleagues and families in the past.

Now to come to your question. Once an artist is in safety, and in an artistic context, the curatorial aspect really comes to the fore, an aspect which is already a key part of the so-called ’match-making’ of the artist with the hosting organisation, which the AR-Secretariat oversees. The hosts develop an artistic programme with the artist, providing them with the tools and opportunities to develop their art in that locality. Later, further curatorial aspects come into play.

Marita: AR is all about risk, logistics and coordination, but as Perpetuum Mobile, we put on our curatorial hat. At AR we have certain criteria when artist risk is evaluated, and the first criteria is about risk. When we do curatorial projects, we curate as PM because it involves a selection based almost solely on thematic and artistic quality.

When we curate venues like the Artists at Risk (AR)Pavilion on the occasion of the 2024 Venice Biennale in UNESCO’s Palazzo Zorzi, for example, it is of course to everybody’s advantage that the key criteria for selection is the quality of the art.

We have many excellent hosting organisations doing outstanding work. Take the National Theatre, which have worked with the amazing playwrights AR has placed in residence in Helsinki. Or the Centre National de Danse in Paris, which worked with young Afghan dancers. If there’s an artist at ZKM, then their curatorial work with that artist is exemplary. We have seen many remarkable productions. Over the last few years, we have worked with over 330 different hosting organisations. Each one of them has their strengths. Locally, the productions depend more on the current level, interests and needs of all artists and partners involved.

Jonny: You mentioned the international network that you created with culture institutions and different funding organisations that support your platform. I would be interested to know how do you keep those networks alive? And what kind of challenges do you face while maintaining those networks?

Marita: The AR network has been growing gradually for over a decade. Individual organisations were added one by one; first across Europe, then Africa. In the past few years, however, growth has accelerated rapidly. We were part of the international effort from Berlin to London to Paris and New York, helping Afghans of all backgrounds fleeing the Taliban takeover in 2021. AR coordinated a ’list of lists’ of all artists under threat. Only a few months later, with the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, the number of hosting organisations in Europe exploded.

At this point we began to build national-level networks. Next to the national network in Finland, we started a new model of cooperation in Sweden with a network called Swan, and then developed this model further in Germany with the Goethe Institute, as well as the Mir network in Italy, and our Spanish network based around AR-Barcelona. We also created the first network in Ukraine: the AR Ukraine Internal Residency Network. We are now developing cooperation with a new national network launched in Switzerland; we cooperate with various residency networks in France; and have strong interest in developing such a national network in Taiwan.

Key here is that artists benefit greatly from effectively applying, via one centralised form, to hundreds of residency organisations in the AR network. AR’s regional teams do the risk analysis and background checks, usually in the original language and with expertise in that discipline and country’s artistic field. A match is made between an artist’s profile and needs, and the hosts profile and facilities. If we have someone from theatre, we need a theatre to host them. Or if an artist has family in Sweden, a Swedish host might be considered. And so on. All of this benefits the horizontal network of hosts, who do not have such expertise and wide variety of choices to match the artist with the host.

We must keep these national networks alive. The problem is, as you might imagine, is that governments do not always provide funds. They may allocate funding for Ukraine, but only temporarily. And they do not allocate anything for Sudanese artists, despite this being the biggest displacement crisis in the world with over 12 million displaced, and over 3 million outside of Sudan. Furthermore, it’s very difficult to get visas to certain countries, especially to Europe. So, there are many obstacles to moving artists and finding funding, and hence keeping national networks alive.

Jonny: How did you grow this network out of art practitioners and institutions? I would be eager to know more about this collaboration with international artists that you assist. Did you face conflicts of ideologies and interest while working and managing these diverse artists and institutions?

Marita Mukkonnen and Ivor Stodolsky, co-founders and co-directors of Artists at Risk (AR), welcome guests to the AR-Pavilion in Venice,
at UNESCO's Palazzo Zorzi.

Ivor: There are naturally different positions and different kinds of groups that are at risk. And sometimes they come from opposite sides of a lethal conflict. You can have somebody who’s fleeing the Putin regime, who’s Russian, and you can have somebody who’s fleeing the Putin regime in Eastern Ukraine, who’s Ukrainian. And because of the current situation, many Ukrainians are against having any contact at all with somebody with a Russian passport. And that is understandable. But it would be going against UN conventions, for us to exclude one and take only the other. We follow international conventions. We take both.

Naturally, we have already been doing precisely this already, for ethical reasons. It’s not just because there are international conventions, but because our ethical vision sees this the same way. In fact, our work has included developing fine-grained protocols for ensuring our ethical probity under often difficult and conflictual conditions. One such protocol we will be presenting more publicly in the coming months is called the “Protocol for Invitations to Platforms in the context of Lethal Conflicts”.

We can’t reveal all the details right now, but it’s quite simple. It’s a step-by-step way of inviting people to a platform, making sure that nobody can sabotage the work of the platform because they are unhappy about the outcomes. You’ve seen many conflicts—actually not at programs run by us, but at many major and minor institutions.

Sometimes people fight for identity-politics, others for ideological reasons. Other times it is really about power, and we see people exploiting ideological positions related to various identities merely for their personal profit, which is certainly problematic.

But let’s talk about another point of view: the positive side. What is surprising in the work of AR, is that we have somehow managed to work with, and sometimes put on a common stage, artists from a very wide variety of identity-backgrounds. Perhaps it is because those at risk are often the most courageous artists from their countries or regions of origin, and they see beyond purely identity-related issues. These are people who were willing to put their own life and freedom on the line for their art or cause. And so, they truly value others that do the same. They have a lot of understanding for other people’s positions. Because, in the end, even if in a completely different context, they are fighting for the same thing.

And so, when it comes down to it, when it’s about humanity and basic rights, they agree on many things. As a result, we have a highly international, highly diverse exhibition practice.

Jonny: That’s remarkable. Also, that you’re trying to maintain a positive view and want to create different spaces aside from the conflict spaces. These days, the cultural landscape is very tense and polarised, from politics to artists and institutions. Especially in the recent weeks and months, voices have grown louder, calling for clearer positioning on sides in these conflicts. I would also be interested in your understanding of art itself and how art can be a ’third space’ in these turbulent times.

Ivor: We could talk about the ’third space’ and that freedom to take this kind of position is something we would advocate for. But first, let us just mention that as Artists at Risk (AR) we can’t and do not make political statements. As individuals, we do. As curators, we can. As PM, which is a curatorial vehicle we have. But not as Artists at Risk (AR). Because AR is an NGO which focuses on risk and making sure that people are safe when they’re at high risk.

Of course, people say, what is your position? Why didn’t you make a big statement about this or that? We have to explain to them that this is not our mission. Our job at AR is to physically get people out of danger. If we spent our time making statements, we would never get anything done.

Even advocacy specifically for artists at risk is not our primary focus. Everyone else in the field is doing that. There are statements made, and petitions signed day and night, but we are not so sure how much this achieves. If there is something we can do that physically helps someone at high risk, we do it. And these very material things take a lot of work, time, effort and resources.

I think the way you phrased it is correct: to “create different spaces aside from the conflict spaces”. We create an environment in which people are not identified according to their national or other identity markers, but according to their basic principles, their art, their courage and standing up for others and human rights.

These are spaces, where it is possible for solidarity to flourish. It is when they say, wait a minute, actually we are on the same side after all. What I see, at least, is that there is growing authoritarianism, rising across continents. If you are sucked into the kind of position of being for this and against that identity, you’re actually playing into their hands, giving them more power.

By creating a space, which says we’re against all those forms of authoritarianism one can create a kind of ’mondial’ solidarity. We use the term ’mondial’ rather than ’international’ because the word international is still about nations. So, we’re talking about a mondial kind of solidarity, beyond nations. Also, as we work with ecology—notably in our Ecologists at Risk (ER) programme—we have a common goal, rather than just an enemy, right?

Jonny: I think that’s especially interesting for art makers and for curators to define those spaces where art and activism come together.

I have two more questions. Firstly, you already mentioned that you realised your own exhibition on the occasion of the Venice Biennale. Would you see the Artists at Risk (AR) Pavilion that you created also as a counter-project to the traditional framework of the Biennale?

Marita: We have worked at the Venice Biennale over many years, in many ways. This time we did a larger-scale exhibition at the Palazzo Zorzi, the headquarters of UNESCO in the city, which of course gave the project a certain official framing. The previous Biennale, we curated an intervention in front of the Russian Pavilion by the Ukrainian artist, Alexey Yudnikov. The performance was based on Gogol’s Nose, and caused a lot of hilarious and not-so-amusing reactions, including from the Italian police. It garnered plenty of media attention.

So, we work in very different ways in biennials. Ivor also mentioned earlier that we work with Roma artists. We organised an emergency Perpetual Romani Pavilion dedicated to and with Roma artists at the Venice Biennial, which took place at many national pavilions. It involved asking visitors to commit their finger-prints to a special “postcard from Venice” which enumerated the crimes being committed against Romani people by the Berlusconi government. It was an activist pavilion. Not long before the opening of the Venice Biennale following the first Roma pavilion, we received information that the second Roma Pavilion was being cancelled. These were the times of Berlusconi’s fascist antiziganism, when he gave orders to fingerprint Roma, throwing them in camps and separating children from their parents.

In short, we have done very different types of activist interventions. Often, they are done in emergency situations, and put together at high speed, in order to draw international attention to a burning issue.

Last year, in 2024, we worked in cooperation with UNESCO, which was quite different. We had been working with the UNESCO international headquarters in Paris over several years to support artists, and so we were able to secure their magnificent Palazzo Zorzi, which lies centrally between San Marco and the Arsenale. We filled it with artworks (we think very strong ones!) by artists connected to AR. One comment by a German gallerist tells a lot about this Artists at Risk (AR) Pavilion in Venice. He said that in the exhibitions of the Venice Biennale proper, there were plenty of works and pavilions touching on issues related to human rights and other typical NGO topics. But the art was not always very strong. However, when he came to Artists at Risk (AR) Pavilion, he was relieved to see genuinely strong artworks. Strong in their artistic language. It was not ’NGO art’, a term he used to talk about art made to merely illustrate certain political events or actions.

In the kind of work we do, artists often double as human rights defenders. If their art is good, however, their experience is translated into work—from paintings to sound installations to cinema—that bring with them a different level of intensity and authenticity, because of their lived experience.

The Artists at Risk (AR) Pavilion we curated this time reflected this. We also had several incredible performances during the opening days, one of them by a Palestinian artist Aws Zubaïdy, the other one by a Kurdish artist, Barış Seyitvan.

Ivor: We also had a performance by the Ukrainian-Ethiopian-Jewish hip-hop trio from Kharkiv, Ukraine. It was beautiful to have both Palestinian and Jewish artists in the same programme.

Marita: Unlike previous events we have done in Venice, this time we didn’t engage in activism, like with the Perpetual Romani Pavilion or the intervention of the Ukrainian artist in front of the Russian pavilion. This time, artworks, performances, and an extensive programme of speeches by dignitaries including ministers and leaders of arts councils, talks and panel discussions featured. This is what we felt was needed. It depends on the political moment.

Jonny: I would like to finish this interview with one last question. Maybe it is a broad one, but it is also quite personal. Many crises are intensifying, and there will be much to do in the upcoming years. I would be interested in knowing what keeps you hopeful amidst all these challenges.

Ivor: That’s a difficult question, for sure. Optimism, I think, comes from the fact that when we work with great artists, and when we get them out of danger, they can flourish and we see their work developing… and when we put that work on show, we get a sort of cross-boundary appreciation of each other’s work. There’s a whole level of humanity and art, beyond identity and conflicts.

This is something that has reached a crescendo in the last decade or so. Even though we’re dealing with the most harrowing problems of our time, in our work it is humanity that comes to the fore and we hope that will always supersede the terror induced by these conflicts. We all need shelter from the rain, after all. And, we all need love and we all need art to survive. And so, although it sounds a little bit corny, this all comes back around full circle. It shows that there are universals after all, that bring everyone together.

One of the most beautiful works at the Artists at Risk (AR) Pavilion in Venice was visually captivating. It is an enormous, oversized life-ring covered in the most dazzling mosaics, made by Said Ahmed Alhassan from Sudan. But what is taking place in Sudan is truly horrendous. Over 11 million people displaced, hundreds of thousands of civilians (not combatants) killed and injured. Sexual violence on a mass scale. This is the second genocide in Darfur in a decade of Massalit people and other non-Arab communities by the Arab-funded belligerents. This is the biggest humanitarian crisis of our time according to the UN, yet it hardly registers in the mass media or on our screens. Despite all of this, you have a very beautiful work of art, overcoming all the horror. The author won a prize for it at Ars Electronica and is doing well in France. It’s hard work, good work, and that gives you hope.

Marita: To add a little bit, it gives hope to see how some of these artists—artists who we believe are often human rights defenders—also go back. Like Issa Touma from Aleppo, who first was our resident in 2013. After three months, he went back to continue his work. He had to leave again during the height of the Syrian civil war, but now he’s been back in Aleppo for several years. He restarted his gallery, physically rebuilding it. In Aleppo, he especially works with young people, as he did throughout the war. As he is a Christian Syrian, he now came out for a brief residency, as the uncertainty and danger is great under the new regime. Nevertheless, he returned, again, and just today, he sent a WhatsApp message—continuing his work as a human rights defender—commenting on the situation following the underreported killings of the Druze and Allawites, and the attack on the Christian Church in Damascus. 

He is not the only one. Nkoshilathi Moyo, from Zimbabwe, is a great activist and a poet. He keeps coming out of the country for what we call a ’breather’, and then he goes back and continues his work. These are human rights defenders, and you see how they continue their work in their countries or outside of their countries. And that gives you hope.

Another thing that gave us a lot of hope was the immense wave of solidarity of art institutions and colleagues who wanted to join Artists at Risk (AR) and work with artists when the Russian invasion started in Ukraine. As Peter Weibel, the late director of ZKM said, every art institution needs a Department of Artists at Risk. If everyone would take care of just one person, we would have a mass movement. This gives us hope. It happened with Ukraine, so why can’t it happen with other countries, and for ecological defenders, and so on? These kinds of peer-movements give us hope.We are witnessing all kinds of right-wing extremists, fundamentalisms on all sides. But we can get beyond our differences. We can really build a movement which can make a difference.

Ivor: Oh, that brings back to mind one last story. Not many years ago, a renowned HRD and poet from Uganda was left for dead in a ditch by the government thugs who ambushed him. We managed to get him to safety, and he became an AR-resident, and recovered. Amazingly, he was more active than ever. Later, he actually joined our team and has brought a whole new set of residencies to join our growing network in Africa. Such stories are infectious. One good thing leads to another. Like Marita said, it becomes a kind of movement.

The AR-Virtual Pavilion by Artists at Risk (AR) – the global non-profit working at the intersection of art and human rights – offers visitors a first-person-view walkthrough of the AR-Pavilion at UNESCO’s Palazzo Zorzi at the 2024 Venice Biennale. Curated by AR co-directors Ivor Stodolsky and Marita Muukkonen, the AR-Virtual Pavilion offers immersive access to galleries, performances, concerts and interviews with artists and curators, as well as digital rooms documenting four conferences (Helsinki, CCCB, ZKM, ArtVeda) of AR-ENSH: Artists at Risk (AR) – A European Network of Safe Havens.

Screenshot virtual.artistsatrisk.org

Artists: Said Ahmed Mohamed Alhassan (sculpture/mosaic), Kholod Hawash (textile), Saddam Jumaily (painting), Nikita Kravtsov (textile, digital print), Suva (sculpture/sound), Fo Sho (hip-hop), Damien Le Bas (painting, sculpture), Delaine le Bas (installation/video), Nkoshilathi Moyo (costume intervention), Mirwais Rekab (film), Barış Seyitvan (performance), Issa Touma (photography), Aws Zubaïdy (performance). The AR-VP is furthermore launching new works, starting this autumn with Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara (from prison).

The AR Pavilion Venice ARTISTS.RISKS.HUMANS.RIGHTS supported by UNESCO was co-funded by the Swedish Arts Council, Creative Europe, Saastamoinen Foundation and others. AR has worked with 330+ hosting organisations in 40+ countries to enable the relocation and support over 1,100 artists fleeing persecution, oppression, terror or war since its founding in 2013.

Explore the pavilion and support artists at risk.
Launch at UNESCO’s MONDIACULT 26 September, 2025:
virtual.artistsatrisk.org

Ivor Stodolsky and Marita Muukkonen are co-founders of Perpetuum Mobile (PM). Their exhibition practice began with an experimental-historical inquiry into dissident and non-conformist art in the late-Soviet period, and how to re-open the archive to re-write canned history: The Raw, the Cooked and the Packed. This led to the Re-Aligned Project, which predicted and advocated for a political turn. Real-world curatorial ‘interventions’ in (frontline) political space followed: The Arts Assembly (Manifesta), The Perpetuum Romani Pavilion (Venice), Back to Square 1, To the Square 2... Creating a nomadic institutional form for this type of engaged curating - closely related to their work at AR—the The Artists at Risk (AR) Pavilions have intervened at biennials from Athens to Venice. With Ecologists at Risk (ER), they strive to defend the frontline defenders in the biggest crisis yet to come.

Jonny-Bix Bongers is a Berlin-based curator working at the intersection of digital art, performance, and futures thinking. With a background in theatre and cultural studies, he develops exhibitions and formats that explore how technology shapes artistic practice and collective imagination. He has curated programs for institutions such as HEK Basel, the Goethe-Institut, and the Münchner Kammerspiele, and currently teaches storytelling and transformation at the Berlin School of Economics and Law. Jonny also runs Realtime Affairs, a series focused on digital-performative arts, and curated the online exhibition Attention Is All I Need with OnCurating Academy. His current work explores digital art as a way of assembling perspectives – curating the space between authorship, collaboration, and shared infrastructures.