ltha O’Neill

Itha O’Neill [BA Hons, FM] is an experienced curator and editor with over 15 years of shaping contemporary art exhibitions, with a particular interest in new media, advanced technologies, and installation art. She maintains strong connections within the museum and contemporary art fields in Finland and internationally, and currently serves as Head of Curatorial at Amos Rex, a future-focused art museum in Helsinki. O’Neill has curated a range of prominent exhibitions, including There Are No Ordinary Moments by Jeppe Hein (2013), a research-based show on Symbolist artist Beda Stjernschantz (2014), Elemental by Studio Drift (2019), Inner Journey by Bill Viola (2021), The Nest by Tadashi Kawamata (2022), and Transparent Happiness by Yinka Ilori (2025).

She leads the museum’s curatorial direction along two key strands: art, technology and society; and art in the public realm. The former includes the internationally recognized Spirit Systems of Soft Knowing ༊·̊'' by artist collective Keiken, for which the artist received the 2024 Lumen Prize (BCS category). Her work bridges traditional curatorial methods with experimental approaches, grounded in a commitment to cross-disciplinary collaboration and creating accessible, resonant experiences for diverse audiences.

Museum as Free Agent?

As an institutional curator at Amos Rex, an independent, privately funded, future-focused art museum in Helsinki, I see our curatorial position as that of a free agent firmly rooted in the Nordic and European art worlds. Amos Rex operates from and in Helsinki without the obligation to represent a national canon or fixed slice of contemporary art, and approaches art as “thought from the future”: a space for exploring emerging ideas and conditions. Our curatorial thinking embraces the not-yet-known, inviting collective, experiential encounters that resist categorization and position the museum as a civic platform for imagination. While institutionally grounded, we work with a free-agent mindset: curious, experimental, and open to art’s evolving boundaries, situated in the Nordic context but not bound by borders.
In my talk, I’ll ask:
What does it mean to curate from a position of institutional freedom?
What are its risks and responsibilities?
Are we ever truly free, and should we be?