PortRe - Portfolio residency program for emerging visual artists

PortRe - Portfolio residency program for emerging visual artists in collaboration with The Stina Krook Foundation

PortRe is the Finnish Cultural Institute in Denmark´s new, 1-week, residency program in Copenhagen with focus on the artist’s portfolio. It is operated in collaboration with The Stina Krook Foundation (FIN) and will launch in 2019. The purpose of PortRe is to create an opportunity for emerging Finnish, or Finland-based, visual artists to come to Copenhagen and present their portfolios to a number of established actors on the Danish cultural field. For example, for gallerists, art critics, curators, collectors or other art professionals and commence on a constructive conversation around the artist´s portfolio. The portfolio is an important and necessary tool for visual artists, yet artists rarely have the possibility to discuss them with the people evaluating them. The aim with the program is to provide this possibility for emerging artists, in an early stage of their career, as a unique opportunity for development and rewarding dialogue between artists and art professionals.  

PortRe is a residency program by invitation only and welcomes 2 artists a year for a duration of 1 week each. The artists are selected by The Stina Krook Foundation´s board from candidates suggested by the foundation´s art experts: Kai Kartio and Leena Kuumola. 

The first two artists selected to the program in 2019 are Maisa Majakka and Sixten Sandra Österberg. Their residency periods will take place during autumn 2019. 

Maisa Majakka received her BFA in sculpture from the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts in 2018. Previously she graduated from the Hyria Art School with vocational degree in fine arts & sculpture. She is mainly working in small-scale ceramic sculptures. Her sculptures often tell colourful tales that are deeply attached to the present.  

Sixten Sandra Österberg received her BFA from the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts in 2018. Österberg´s works fluctuate between large and small perspectives where they end up in the borderland between abstraction and figuration. The visual narratives in the paintings explore and problematise the themes about corporeality and not too seldom, it includes the female body or a queer/-norm-breaking body/bodies.

The Stina Krook Foundation

The Stina Krook Foundation. The purpose of the Stina Krook Foundation is to support and promote visual arts and performing arts with a special consideration of the Swedish-speaking population in Finland. Stina Nicolaisen, nee Krook, established the foundation in December 1976. The first awards were presented on Stinas’ birthday on 15 March 1978. As of 2019, the foundation has distributed more than 500 awards to a total amount of 2 million euro. The surprise and joy has been great among the receivers, as the foundation does not accept applications. Instead, the board make its decisions based on suggestions by experts in the field of visual arts and performing arts.