Taking risks in a safe zone: the scale of neutrality in Larissa Sansour’s exhibition in the Amos Rex museum, Helsinki, Finland

In recent decades, the question of museums’ neutrality has been widely discussed. Politicians, researchers and visitors approach museums from different perspectives: as relatively neutral bureaucratic institutions, political tools for creating national imageries, or as somewhat objective mediators of various worldviews. These perspectives seldom overlap, and even though neutrality may appear in them, its meanings are rarely elaborated. This case study constructs some discourses of neutrality on a scale from passive to proactive. It is based on interviews and textual materials of how the contemporary art museum Amos Rex (Helsinki, Finland) negotiated the notions of neutrality in preparing the politically charged exhibition of Larissa Sansour’s work (9.10.2024–2.3.2025). While the museum’s history is noted here as passively neutral, the negotiations in preparing the exhibition showed proactivity in staff education, vocabulary curation and collaboration. Exploring neutrality as a sliding scale opens up avenues for more nuanced usage of the concept.