Live Art and Performance Studies Group

Six students of the Live Art and Performance Studies program at the Helsinki University of Arts write about performances and artists at the New Performance Turku Festival. They will also open the discussions at the Afterwork Discussion events during the festival.
 
 

Jolijn de Wolf

Jolijn de Wolf was born in the Netherlands in 1984. She makes performances, videos and photographic etchings. In her work she examines the schizophrenic experience of being human.
Using brutal honesty as a weapon she captures inner processes into images. Her work often contains contrasts like guilt versus forgiveness, failing versus growing, hurting versus healing and fear versus courage.

Since she graduated for her bachelor of Fine Arts in 2009 at the Hogeschool van de Kunsten Utrecht, she has been working as an independent artist exhibiting in the Netherlands and Europe.
She has been selected to attend several workshops, residencies, and festivals including International Performance Association in Bucharest, Performance Art Studies # 38 in Greece, Listus residency in Iceland and ARTCEB residency art centre in Surinam.

Since fall 2015, Jolijn is a student at the MA Life Art and Performance Studies in Helsinki, Finland.

www.jolijndewolf.nl/blog
 
 

Antonín Brinda

Antonín Brinda is an artist based in Prague, Czech Republic and from now on in Helsinki as well. He works in the fields of performance art, installations, theatre, light design as well as in a theory and organizing of art events.

In his solo or collaborative artworks he likes durational performances, body art and is interested in areas such as urbanism and psychogeography, ideology, sexuality, nudity and gender. Some of the works might be really serious and even painful but because the guy is Czech, traces of a (bitter / playful / postmodern) humour are also not an exception.

Brinda is also a co-founder and co-organizator of a multigenre Kůra festival in Kutná Hora, Czech Republic (www.festivalkura.cz).

www.antoninbrinda.com
 
 

Harriet von Froreich

Harriet von Froreich was born in 1987 in Hamburg, Germany. She studied theatre and literature (B.A.) and literature, philosophy and aesthetics (M.A.) in Berlin, Frankfurt (Oder) and Paris.

Under the name Harriet Rabe she works in the field of performance and philosophy: performing, writing, presenting and producing stuff related to weird matter, fragmented bodies and talking spaces.

With her collective DONKEYS FROGS SHEEP & FOXES (Berlin), Harriet has been presenting performative and installative works at 100° Festival Berlin (GER) 2015 and Unithea Festival Frankfurt Oder/Slubice (GER/PL) 2014 and 2015. She also was affiliated with two recent actions of the Center for Political Beauty (Berlin) and participated as dramaturge and writer in several dance/performance productions.

Recently, Harriet has been thinking about process philosophy and materialism: things, objects, matter and ‘gegenstände’ in relation to their environment. She is currently working with the notions of situated knowledge and situated practices.

www.harrietrabe.wordpress.com
 
 

Jenny Suhonen

Jenny Suhonen (b. 1978) is a visual artist from Helsinki, and besides performance art she also works with painting and installation. Her art deals with different forms and natures of humanity with the aim of taking it to pieces. Suhonen aims to give the audience an opportunity to face themselves. She wants to stop and give time.

For last three years Suhonen has been working – among other projects – on participatory performance-project “Humanshredder”. The project goes through people’s personal emotions and experiences, turning them into images through processes that utilize performance art, installations and videos. Next Humanshredder-exhibition is in Titanik-gallery, Turku, 6.10-18.10.2015.

Suhonen has studied painting at the Free Art School in Helsinki (2008-2012) and architecture in the University of Oulu (1997-2007). Currently she is doing her Master’s degree in Live Art and Performance Studies at the Theatre Academy in Helsinki. Suhonen has been showing in several solo- and group exhibitions since 2011 in Helsinki, Turku, Lahti, Auttoinen and Berlin. Suhonen is member of MUU ry and painter’s union. She is also artist member in gallery Oksasenkatu 11 in Helsinki.

www.jennysuhonen.com
www.humanshredder.net
 
 

Petros Konnaris

Petros Konnaris was born in Nicosia, Cyprus in 1988. He is currently enrolled in the Live Art and Performance Studies MA program in Theater Academy in Helsinki, Finland.

In the past years Petros is collaborating and working in the fields of choreography, dance, performance and live art. He is interested in ideas of nudity, nakedness, playfulness, gentleness, togetherness, experientiality and the relationship between the performer and audience. As a creator and audience member, Petros is approaching performance/live art based on the emotional, physical or intellectual stimulations that might appear between him and the artwork.

www.petroskonnaris.com
 
 

Jay Mar Albaos

Jay Mar Albaos earned his bachelor’s degree from the University of the Philippines Visayas Tacloban College where he took up Communication Arts. He is also a former cultural theater performer who performed choreographed folk songs with a group and represented the Eastern Visayan region (the Waray tradition) in different cultural events and festivals around the Philippines and around Leyte and Samar. Aside from these, he also a playwright and a theater director, staged performances like Tortyur (Torture), Infidelity, and Kalarakan (Space) together with the Communication Arts batch 2012. Jay also writes poetry, short stories, and novels in the vernacular language.

For the past three years, he worked under the national agency for social welfare and protection, the Department of Social Welfare and Development. He became the regional focal person for Indigenous Communities in Region VIII – immersing, learning their cultures, talking with the elders, advocating for their rights while, at the same time, delivering participative development programs from the government.
Jay is interested in the Third World themes like gender, race, color, Diaspora, “globalization” and the ‘borderless’ borders, the folk, the indigenous knowledge. He is curious of the human body, movement and how relevant performance is to bigger contexts, though he is also questioning what ‘art’ is and what ‘purpose of art’ is.

Currently, he is in Finland and is taking up his MA Live Arts and Performance Studies at the Theater Academy of the University of the Arts Helsinki.

Jay Mar is from Tacloban City, Leyte, Philippines.