Flow Festival Cut a Deal With Its Boycott Campaign. The KKR Question Is Still Open.

Who actually owns Flow Festival?

Flow Festival is not an independent operation anymore. It sits inside Superstruct Entertainment, one of the largest festival groups in Europe, and Superstruct is owned by the private-equity firm KKR, which acquired the group in 2024. That purchase is the whole reason this story exists. When a buyout house takes control of a festival portfolio, the ownership question follows every event in the group, and pressure applied to one festival is really pressure applied to the fund behind it.

The activist campaign Flow Strike launched in 2024, after the acquisition. Flow Strike says its objection is to KKR's ownership, pointing to investments the campaign links to Israel's occupation of Palestinian territories. In March 2025, PACBI (the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel) published a statement calling for targeted boycotts of the whole of Superstruct Entertainment, which widened the pressure from one festival to the group.

What did Flow actually agree to?

The two sides announced a joint agreement on 18 June 2026 that ends the boycott. The terms are about programming, not ownership. In the joint statement, Flow said it supports Palestinian civil society's call to refrain from specific forms of cultural cooperation with Israeli state institutions. Flow pledged to continue excluding performances funded or organised by the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs or other Israeli state bodies, and said it would not present Israeli and Palestinian artists together in ways that "give the false impression" that both sides exist on equal footing under conditions of occupation.

Flow said it wants to be "a pioneer, both in Finland and internationally, in ethically sustainable festival production."

Those are commitments a festival can make on its own, inside its own booking process. They cost the operator very little and they let both sides claim a result.

What is still unresolved?

The ownership question. Flow Strike acknowledged that some of its wider objectives were not achieved: it said its demand for KKR to divest from companies doing business with Israel remains outstanding. A local festival can change what it books. It cannot change who owns its parent company. Flow Festival 2026 runs 14 to 16 August 2026 at the Suvilahti former power plant in Helsinki, and it does so still inside the Superstruct group, still under KKR.