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The annual IHME Festival brings international contemporary art to public spaces, and to where art has not been commonly seen. This year, the festival will take place 25–26 May at Korjaamo in Helsinki.

As part of the festival, IHME School project is now implemented for the seventh time. It is a partnership project of IHME and the Master’s students of art education at School of Arts, Design and Architecture. The purpose of the project is to develop art education in schools, to bring out the ideas of children and young people by means of art, and to make the interfaces of contemporary art and art education visible. There are already closer to twenty partner schools that have attended the project.

“Collaboration has offered the festival a way to extend their agenda to the schools, whereas to us it gives a great opportunity to experiment and explore the pedagogical possibilities of contemporary art practices in different school environments", says Lecturer Marja Rastas, who is co-ordinating the project in Aalto University.

In 2018, the IHME School project will be implemented in three cities: Hämeenlinna, Hyvinkää and Helsinki, where animation workshops are offered for junior high school students in local cultural spaces. The workshops are designed and lead by students Leena Fredriksson, Noomi Ljungdell, Mikko Myöhänen, Riina Näsi and Nanna Saarhelo, supervised by Marja Rastas.

This year’s IHME Project is a film by Swedish artist Henrik Håkansson, that puts the spotlight on an endangered halavasepikkä beetle that only resides in Vantaa. The festival program offers also new perspectives for dealing with the current topic: the relationship between humans and the environment.

The festival program also includes the Environmental Anxiety and Art Education Workshop, which will be held 25 May and will be hosted by doctoral candidate Henrika Ylirisku from the Department of Art at Aalto University and environmental researcher Panu Pihkala.

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