Transfiguring for Rehearsing Hospitalities: Evolution of the Visual Identity
Frame’s public programme Rehearsing Hospitalities ‘connects artists, curators and other practitioners in the field of contemporary art and beyond to mediate new practices and understandings with diverse hospitalities’. From 2019 to 2023 the programme has included commissions, exhibitions, discussions and bi-annual gatherings. The communication materials for the programme are tied together by the visual identity developed for Rehearsing Hospitalities. The following text explicates the process and purpose behind annual evolutions in the programme’s visual identity.
Commissioned in 2019, the original visual identity for Rehearsing Hospitalities was designed by Elina Holley, a designer and creative strategist based in Helsinki. An excerpt from Elina’s original concept note states, “The letters H in the logo form a ladder. They refer to enabling, crossing and connecting boundaries. The ladder also forms a visual pattern with a grid at the base. The parts of the pattern may seem separate, but they are connected to each other.”
I joined Frame in August 2021 in the role of Communications Officer, thinking this to be a good opportunity for the Rehearsing Hospitalities identity to evolve in tandem with the curatorial path. Every year since its inception the curators have sought to expand the conversation, for example, by questioning epistemic hospitalities and looking into access to knowledge and its production, and by examining entanglements in hospitality, care, safety and security. It further explored ways of redistribution of power and resources, finally ending up at the critical position of re-turning to and diffracting from the questions previously raised.
Traditionally, the ‘brand identity’ of any entity revolves around consistency, recognizability and sameness. It provides a consistent set of visuals, colours, fonts and other guidelines to maintain an organisation’s image and reflect its values. Notwithstanding the gruesome history of visual branding–which emerged from the action of ‘marking with a molten branding iron’ to establish ownership of livestock and slaves–in recent decades, the need for extreme visual sameness has been brought into question under certain contexts.
Rehearsing Hospitalities is one such context.
Looking at the needs and usage of the identity, one could see a potential for dynamism, and possible transfiguration. Not only does the evolving curatorial approach warrant this transfiguration, but the audiences are also able to follow the changing identity without the event losing out on any value or memorability. The primary channels for communication are Frame’s social media pages, the Frame website and occasional direct mailers to subscribers. While some posts on social media use paid promotional tools to target the right audiences, the communication materials at large are not approached as marketing or advertising, but function more as announcements. Considering the channels and audiences, we are almost always talking to people who already follow us, and are already interested in our events. Rather than being coercive, the identity becomes more of a message carrier.
Having said that, contemporary art, whether site/time-specific or not, has to reckon with its commodification to a certain extent. It is caught within the demands of the attention economy and is unable to disengage itself from visibility competition on digital platforms. Removing ourselves entirely from this competitiveness would result in less visibility, less proliferation, and eventually a near-complete disappearance. A big part of the public in ‘public programme’ exists on said platforms and disconnecting from them would reinforce the bubble within which Western contemporary art already resides.
This contradiction brought me to the transfiguration – trying to balance dynamism and change (to counter traditional concepts of ownership and branding) with familiarity and recognizability (on visually competitive platforms). With this context in mind, certain aspects of the Rehearsing Hospitalities identity were transfigured, while other elements were unchanged.
2019 - 2020
Rehearsing Hospitalities 2019 responded to sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santo’s concept of ‘ecologies of knowledges’, asking how contemporary art might become more hospitable towards diverse and interconnected knowledges. Continuing with ‘ecologies of knowledges’ and applying it also to questions of access, the 2020 programme addressed art and institutional potential to facilitate plural and decentralised forms of knowing and accessibility.
In Elina’s original concept, the main visual in the identity established connectedness, variation, change and development. The concept note states “...the parts of the pattern may seem separate, but they are connected to each other. When the parts move and connect to each other, they form new wholes. Variations symbolize change and development. Abstract shapes give room for interpretation.” Fortunately, this concept already made room for change and variation, which worked very well for the transfiguration of the identity.
2021
My intention was to initiate the evolution process with small changes that adapted the identity to the curatorial concept. In 2021, Rehearsing Hospitalities bridged hospitality and access with matters of security and safety, stating that “[...] Hospitality, care, safety and security are matters intrinsically entangled [...] these are foundational aspects of the work of curating.”
The curatorial intent of the programme was reflected mostly through typographical changes from the point of view of accessibility. The spaces between letters, words and lines were expanded, giving more breathing room and improving legibility. A change in background colours, from the original stark white to a soft peach in spring and a barely-grey in autumn, softened the contrasts which furthered the sense of comfort and thus safety and security.
2022
In 2022, the programme focused on practices that deal with the redistribution of power, wealth, and resources within the art field and society at large. The dynamics of power between hosts and guests were brought into question to a certain extent. To mirror this in the identity, I tried to quite literally break apart and ‘redistribute’ the graphic elements which formed the larger pattern. Breaking the pattern into smaller units represented a ‘breaking of hegemonies’. The fragmented elements were then distributed around the visual space in an equal-ish way. They were made to look skeletal and transparent, to highlight the structural-ness being examined through the curatorial approach. The typography changed to all-caps in an attempt to draw attention to the urgency inherent in the topics and artworks presented.
2023
The final year of the programme has seen a realignment of roles, with Frame becoming more of a collaborator and sharing/redistributing its hosting responsibilities among various partners. This year, the programme is split across three cities, London, New York and Oslo. The visual identity needed the capacity to merge with more diverse styles of visuals, emerging from collaborators and contributors. Acting upon the problematicness of hosting, it had the possibility to take a larger step away from its original look and feel, to reflect the new partnerships and a critical re-examination of Frame’s own position in the contemporary art context. The three-way programme split gave rise to the need for three sub-identities, that are connected but distinct, reminiscent of the previous editions but also showcasing a significant change, especially taking into account the new partnerships.
As the programme curators Yvonne Billimore and Jussi Koitela say, “The 2023 programme revisits some of the central threads explored in the past years including ways of knowing, questions of access and security, and the hostility of hospitality. It presents practices that correspond with these matters, turning in new directions”
Taking a lead from the curatorial intent, the visual transformation is based on the concept of ‘re-turning’ and ‘diffracting’ which are explained by Karen Barad–“not [by] returning as in reflecting on or going back to a past that was, but re-turning as in turning it over and over again – iteratively intra-acting, re-diffracting, diffracting anew [...] Diffraction is not a set pattern, but rather an iterative (re)configuring of patterns of differentiating-entangling.”
The fragmented, skeletal elements of the identity, were partly transfigured in terms of dimensionality (2D to 3D), their forms became more diffracted, twisted, turned and re-turned. The colours were used to assign some distinctiveness to each of the sub-identities while maintaining connectedness through the diffracted forms. The sub-identities were each individually transformed further by merging with each partnership's unique context.
Visual merger with Editorial tables: Reciprocal Hospitalities in London
The first collaboration (January 2023) between Frame Finland, The Showroom (London) and the Finnish Institute in the UK and Ireland, Editorial Tables: Reciprocal Hospitalities “celebrates the production and dissemination of knowledge through the act of experimental and artist-led publishing, with a focus on intersecting feminist and decolonial perspectives.”
I was commissioned separately by The Showroom in London to design a poster and a visual language that was significantly new and representative of the exhibition's thematics while establishing a connection with the previous editions of the Rehearsing Hospitalities programme. The poster needed to also take into consideration the locality, the physical space and the surrounding visual landscape. Thinking with the idea of a ‘public announcement’, a scroll was selected as an icon that symbolised the ‘publicness’ of publishing, an idea which emerged from the notion of “publishing as in making something public.”, put forth by the curators.
Merger with the visual style of Vera List Center for Conflicting Relations in New York
The second collaboration (March 2023) was convened by Frame and co-presented with the Vera List Center for Art and Politics and the Finnish Cultural Institute in New York as part of artist Matti Aikio’s 2022–2023 Sámi Fellowship. Conflicting Relations was a day-long program that brought together artists, curators, and institutions whose practices go beyond hospitality and act as correctives to prescribed host and guest hierarchies, on intimate and infrastructural levels. Indigenous perspectives on matters of hospitality—and acknowledging the various forms of social, cultural, and political inhospitality that Sámi people experience—are critical to the program and the dialogues it fosters.
The design approach here was pretty straightforward–to modify the 2023 version of the Rehearsing Hospitalities visual identity using the colours from Vera List Center’s visual identity. The larger goal was similar to before, to create a connection to the previous editions of the programme as well as to uniquely present the current partnership with VLC.
Looking back at the purpose of Rehearsing Hospitalities, to mediate new practices and understandings with diverse hospitalities and Elina Holley’s design intent of enabling, crossing and connecting boundaries, the transfiguration journey of the visual identity has hopefully contributed to the evolution of the curatorial discourse while embodying and corresponding to the complications it, and we, are entangled in.
