In collaboration with guest co-curator and collaborator, Farbod Fakharzadeh, Mental Health Arts Space will launch a two-year curatorial project titled “The Floating Republic” in 2026-2027. The focus is on questioning our ways of working in the visual arts in terms of collectivity, economic sustainability and redistribution. In particular, we will focus on the working conditions that shape our practices, especially at a time when budgets for art and culture are being drastically cut for projects initiated by and serving underrepresented and marginalised groups in the arts and cultures. 

“The Floating Republic”, as conceptually defined by Fakharzadeh, uses the idea of the pirate ship as a method to investigate institutional spaces and attempts at self-organisation. The three phases of the project aim to open up a space of exploration and speculative study, blurring the lines between artist and curator, and letting the social interactions, processual relationships and conversations become to a large extent the art “object”. 

This in turn creates a framework that welcomes collective processes, texts, manifestos, documented conversations and gatherings at MHAS. Drawing on the history of piracy, institutional critique, non-Western knowledge and the practice of refusal (that expands on the thematic concerns of the group exhibition “As We See Us: A Decolonial Salon des Refusés” at MHAS in 2025), we will explore issues of community building, resource sharing, autonomy and interdependence as pirate values. Mental Health Arts Space, the first docking station of “The Floating Republic”, will be reimagined as a space for alternative forms of labour, dreaming and resistance, while reimagining the power dynamics that define the environments in which we live and work. 

The Floating Republic will have its soft launch in February 2026. More details will be available here in January, including collaboration partners and events. Watch this space!