AKU – Visual Acupuncture
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Visual acupuncture is a creative tool that AKU uses when approaching the city. The aim is to energise the surroundings and to enhance the place-related consciousness. Interventions involve activities such as: performances, visual alternations, arranging seminars, or social engagements. Aku uses the idea of the Chinese acupuncture and the idea of mapping energy points. The City is onceptualized as a living organism.
Aku performs Visual acupuncture by way of interventions in urban surroundings. Acupuncture functions as a metaphor, and a frame for different actions. An action in one place might have an effect on another place in the city.
Denis Romanovski
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Denis Romanovski is an artist and organizer based in Gothenburg. Since 1999 he focuses mostly on performance art, presenting his works in various countries worldwide. As an organizer he has been co-running performance festival Navinki in Minsk (1999-2008) and during recent years – Performance Art Links festival in Stockholm.
His artist practice often extends to and merges with research, experimentation and participation. His Interest in performance art is motivated by its ability of highlighting individualities within collective presence of the audience and, thus, forming individual non-narrative memories of experience.
Eero Yli-Vakkuri
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Eero Yli-Vakkuri has created research orientated works since 2007. His aim is to affect the well-being of the environment in both social and ecological levels. Part of the productions can be seen as performance art, some projects are actualised as communal workshops and some projects have developed into articles or videos. What’s common in all his works is that he doesn’t aim in resolving the problems in the society, but rather creating solutions that might eventually correct the faults in the society. Since 2015 he’s been working around sound, investigating how the city space is experienced and shared through sounds and what kind of communities the sounds bring forward.
Fake is fabulous inc.
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Jürgen Bogle started in the year 2008 as a young dancer and developed his work into a performative practice. After studying and performing in Berlin, he started his curriculum in Performance in Switzerland in a transdisciplinary approach at the Bern University of the Arts in the frame of the studies Contemporary Arts Practice. Since graduating in 2016 he is now performing in Switzerland and Finland. He tries within his work to unite theory and practice. Often the notion of Utopia plays an important role in his concepts. Jürgen has an activist background and understands his work within a political framing. Different time layers and appropriation are keys to his performative approach.
Hiroko Tsuchimoto
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Hiroko Tsuchimoto (b.1984, Sapporo, Japan) is a visual/performance artist, living in Sweden since 2008. She began her career at Musashino Art University in Tokyo and went on to study at Konstfack University College of Arts, Crafts, and Design and Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm. Her works are generally manifested as stage performances and social experiments in public spaces. In her performance pieces, she often provides communal experiences to audience members through physical assignments, dialogues, and collective movements.
Since 2008, Tsuchimoto has presented her works internationally both inside and outside art spaces. She is also active as an organizer to promote ephemeral art in Stockholm. She is an organizer for PALS, Performance Art Links, and a board member of Fylkingen. In addition, she currently focuses on developing her methods to lead performance art workshops in non-hierarchical and decentralized settings.
Ignacio Pérez Pérez
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IGNACIO PÉREZ PÉREZ (Venezuela, 1984) is a performance and nomadic visual artist working internationally. His work explores phenomenal reality as a long journey to arrive here where we are. He creates experiences of ritualistic playfulness and worldly contemplation that observes and encounter otherness and its permanent state of transformation in the realm of everyday life. His practice crosses diverse fields as performance art, street photography, walking, poetry, meditation and networking.
He has shown his works in public spaces, museums and festivals in South, North America and Europe. In 2006, he cofunded along with Aidana Rico and Amira Tremont PERFORMANCELOGÍA, archive and dissemination of performance art (www.performancelogia.blogspot.com), and since 2008, is member of PerfoLink, latin american platform for performance art (www.perfolink.org). In 2009 he started Global Performance Art Walks (http://facebook.com/globalperformanceartwalks), collective project of performances made by walking.
“Art is what makes life more interesting than art.” – Robert Filliou
Irma Optimist
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Mathematician Irma Optimist started doing performance art in 1989. Since then she has performed at dozens of festivals, museums and galleries all over the world. During the beginning of her career, she was famous for the ironic and parodying aspects of her performances. These were directed as criticism of the prevalent masculine concept of art. Many of the works are interactive and simultaneous, based on mathematical dynamics of chaos.
In most of her work, Irma Optimist has been very personal, discussing the conditions of identity, femininity, death. Gender, locality and nature have been her themes. The works themselves are transformations, in which the existence of the artist is connected to ritual and live installation.
Irma Optimist has also acted as a curator and brought many well-known international performance artists to events she has organised in Finland. Since 2000, she has been involved in organising Là-bas, a permanent forum for living art and experimental culture. Irma Optimist has been awarded with the Lifetime Achievement Award of Finnish Art Society in 2012 and 2013 the State Prize of Art.
Jani Petteri Virta
Jani Petteri Virta (b. 1977) is an artist and MA from Finnish literature from Eastern Finland, based in Turku. In his works the main aspects are commenting the state of the world, big emotions and the confusion followed by these aspects. Having performed with over fifty performances, Virta loves words and performing, but doesn’t like thinking or being in the centre of the attention. His performances are usually combined by pieces not fully fitting together – he keeps them attached using either tape or his mind powers.
John Court
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John Court (b. 1969 in the UK, living in Tornio since 1997) is a duration performance artist for whom the time is one of the most important elements of his work. Sometimes that makes him performing for 8 hours, duration of a work day and sometimes performing the whole time the event is going on or the performance venue (museum, institution) is open each day. More recently he has been interested in letting the objects and materials he uses in his performances to determine the duration of the piece.
He doesn’t consider his performances solo works, since they always include collaborative elements from curators, organizers, artists, viewers, objects, spaces and time. Court’s works are sensible to the site and they often create a parallel rhythm within the rhythm of the site with the ongoing repetitious action. All his works are fundamentally concerned with drawing or writing, in that drawing connects the elements of line, movement, space and time. www.johncourtnow.com
Kurt Johannessen
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Born 1960 in Norway, Kurt Johannessen works within performance artist’s books video and installations since the early eighties. His work is minimalist and poetic, and at times with a touch of humour. He is his own publisher and has produced more than 90 books, many of them translated into English. The books vary from just one sentence to short stories or just pictures. He has created 300 different performances and has presented his work extensively in Europe, and in some countries in Asia and America.
Maija Hirvanen
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Maija Hirvanen’s solo and group performances have been presented widely in festivals and venues internationally and in Finland. Hirvanen has also participated in a number of international artist laboratories as an invited artist.
Maija’s work has taken place at stages, gallery contexts and site-specific locations. She is interested in performance in it’s broad perspectives and for it’s transformative power. Hirvanen looks at performance as a practice that goes through the layers of our lives, from personal acts to collective ones, from the complexities of identity politics to the presence of the moving body.
Pilvi Porkola
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Pilvi Porkola is an artist and researcher. Her interests are autobiographical performances and art and daily life. She is working as an artistic researcher in Finland’s Academy funded project “How to Do Things with Performance?”. Currently she holds a post of professorship in Artistic Research in Uniarts, Helsinki.
Rachel Echenberg
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Sandrina Lindgren & Antti Tolvi
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The long term project Household Dance Protocol consists of workshops, performances and radio-pod casts. The project is initiated by Sandrina Lindgren and developed in collaboration with Antti Tolvi.
Sandrina Lindgren is a Swedish dancer, physical performer and theatre maker based in Turku. She works on the borders between physical- and visual theatre and choreography and dance with a special curiosity for how our present society forms our bodies. Sandrina holds a BA in modern dance from Amsterdamse Hoogeschool Voor de Kunsten and has also studied choreography and visual theatre.
Antti Tolvi is a self learned composer, performer and sound artist and a main figure in underground music and sound art scene in Finland since 2002. He is performing, touring and making art installations. Since 2014 he is organising the festival Kiilan Äänipäivät. He is also active as a Taiji Qigong teacher around Turku area.
Scottee
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Scottee is an artist. His debut solo tour The Worst of Scottee won the prestigious Total Theatre Award in 2014. Most recently he was included on Independent’s Rainbow List as one of Britain’s most influential LGBTQI+ people.
Last year Scottee created and directed the critically acclaimed Putting Words in Your Mouth which was become one of Matt Trueman’s top 10 shows of 2016. This was quickly followed by the sell-out preview tour of Bravado; Scottee’s memoir of working class masculinity. A national tour of the production will commence in late 2017 to coincide with his first book published by Oberon.
Scottee’s work often comes in camouflage. Its flippancy conceals its fight. It’s how he reaches people
– Guardian
Serge Olivier Fokoua (b. 1976, Cameroon) lives and works between Cameroon and Canada. He received his artistic training at the University of Yaounde, and through workshops organized by Renc’art studio. He also attended advanced training on cultural management in Institut für Kultur Konzept in Hamburg, Germany, and master of visual arts at Université Laval, in Québec.
Working mainly in installation and performance, Serge Olivier Fokoua’s work has been presented in numerous art exhibitions, performance events, and projects in Cameroon, Nigeria, South Africa, Senegal, France, Germany, Japan, Poland, Canada and Finland.
Fokoua is a co-founding member of Les Palettes du Kamer collective and since 2008 he is the Artistic Director of the Biennale RAVY: Yaoundé Visual Art Encounters (www.ravyfestival.org). Since 2006 he has been a member of IC Zone, an international network of festivals and art centres and has invited over 40 artists and international curators to Cameroon. Currently, he is actively working on multiple platforms for artistic exchange between Cameroon and several countries.
Tero Nauha
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Tero Nauha is an artist and a postodoctoral fellow at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies. He is a participant of a Finnish Academy funded postdoctoral research project ‘How To Do Things With Performance’, also. He defended his doctoral research at the Theatre Academy of the University of the Arts in Helsinki in January 2016. In 2015, he published his first fiction novel Heresy & Provocation for a Swedish publishing house Förlaget.
Tomasz Szrama
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Tomasz Szrama (b. 1970 in Poland) graduated in 1998 from the Academy of Fine Arts in Wroclaw, Poland. He currently lives in Helsinki, Finland. Szrama shifts between multiple disciplines, including photography, video and other time-based works. Regardless of the medium, a dominant thread common in his work is the use of his own body and methods of performance art. Characteristic feature of his work is the use of spectators, active participation of the audience and improvisation. Such a strategy embeds his presentations into the tradition of understanding performance art as a process art, where the very moment of creation is essential. His work touches on themes of travel, trust in interpersonal relationships, and the ever present potential for personal failure. Szrama has been performing internationally in various events and festivals in Europe, Asia, North and South America. He has been an active performance art event organiser since 2005.
Victoria Stanton
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Victoria Stanton is an interdisciplinary artist and researcher/curator/educator working with live action, human interaction, video, film, photo, drawing, and writing. Exploring within diverse media, while the outward results of her practice manifest in various forms, performance is the invariable core of her research. Her time-based work includes performance for stage and for the camera, infiltrating actions in public spaces, and one-on-one encounters in intimate contexts. Investing a performative presence and consciousness within multiple spaces/times, she continuously underscores the complex aspects of “transaction” and the possibility for transformation.
Considered a pioneer of transactional practices in Quebec, Stanton has presented exhibitions, performances, interventions, and films/videos in Canada, the U.S., Europe, Australia, Japan and Mexico.