Instagram live
UA TALKS x in the deep / on the surface
During this years UrbanApa x Ateneum, the UA TALKS platform joins forces with the festival and its themes in a series of light discussions about topical issues relating to the undercurrents and surfacing issues in our society and culture. You can follow the discussion on UrbanApa’s Instagram.
The duration for each discussion is about 40 minutes.
Wednesday 15 Nov: on the surface / in the deep
at 12:30-13:10
Sonya Lindfors, Director of UrbanApa, and Marja Sakari, Director of Ateneum Art Museum, discuss the festival theme, the role of institutions and all things UrbanApa x Ateneum in Finnish.
Thursday 16 Nov: On Building Resistant Communities
at 12:00-12:40
Isa Hukka and Shubhangi Singh discuss community building and creating lasting and supporting connections.
Friday 17 Nov: Valtauksia ja vallankumouksia
at 11:45-12:30
Minna Lund and Pazilaiti Simayijiang discuss in Finnish the potentials and possibilities of revolutions, change and hope.
Sonya Lindfors is a Cameroonian-Finnish choreographer and artistic director that also works with facilitating, community organizing and education. She is the founding member and Artistic Director of UrbanApa and the Artistic Director of #StopHatredNow. Lindfors makes her own and collaborative works such as performances, curated programs and performative actions. Lindfors’s time is divided between her own artistic work, educational work and working as the artistic director of UrbanApa. In all her positions she pursues creating and facilitating anti-racist and feminist platforms, where a festival, a performance, a publication or a workshop can operate as the site of empowerment and radical collective dreaming.
Isa Hukka is a writer, performing artist, and student based in Helsinki. They study philosophy, focusing on a feminist critique of identity politics. In addition to taking part in crip grassroot organizing and making performances in Helsinki, they have worked with translating. Various magazines have also published Hukka’s award-winning poetry. Currently, they work as a facilitator in a crip performing arts project that is part of Coming Stage, Baltic Circle’s multi-year project funded by Kone Foundation. Some findings of the project are shared in an upcoming performance “rampa landscape – lazy, late, absent” which premieres on Sunday 19.11.2023 at Baltic Circle festival.
Shubhangi Singh’s practice as a visual artist and filmmaker responds to contemporary politics and the interconnectedness of production and reproduction of popular everyday material. She works across the media, ranging from text to moving images and site-specific installations. Her practice often draws upon the empirical as well as the existing and recorded knowledges to address movement, identity and queries related to the gendered body and its relationship with the public sphere.
Minna Lund is a Master of Arts, Bachelor of Theatre Arts, theatre director and performer. Her artistic work is linked to the stage, writing, dramaturgy, curating and directing. Currently, Lund is interested in exploring a freer and more undisciplined way for the audience to experience performance, maximalism, speculative fiction, dystopias, theories, emotions, romance, poetry, saliva, death, death as a bodily event, and the tense and fluid stage. Lund’s work is guided by feminist practices and dreaming as activism.
Pazilaiti Simayijiang is a Helsinki-based Uyghur with a multidimensional story in terms of youth, activism and identity.
Installation
At the Studio
Chih-Tung Lin
Chih-Tung Lin has learnt somewhere that we are destined to work together, a curator and an artist. But what do we know about each other? What do we not know about each other? Do I know how you work? Do you know how I work? Deep down do we know how to work with each other? At the Studio shares through a series of comic strips, a curator’s constant questioning and reflection on their work and the intertwining social relations with the artists, whom they work with.
This work is supported by Grafia and Arts Promotion Centre Finland.
Chih-Tung Lin (she/they) is a curator and artist based in Helsinki, Finland, originally from Taiwan. Lin graduated from Praxis Exhibition Studies Master Programme at University of the Arts Helsinki in 2021. They curate, do performance art, and make illustrations, but mostly their practice lies between these mediums. They often deal with social relations, roles, and play in their works.
Performances
- Date & time
- Location
- Duration
- Language
-
Wednesday 15.11 10:00—20:00
-
Ticket sales hall + workshop space tables
-
10h 0min
-
English
-
Thursday 16.11 10:00—20:00
-
Ticket sales hall + workshop space tables
-
10h 0min
-
English
-
Friday 17.11 10:00—20:00
-
Ticket sales hall + workshop space tables
-
10h 0min
-
English
-
Saturday 18.11 10:00—17:00
-
Ticket sales hall
-
7h 0min
-
English
Performance
Dis/orientation rehearsal no 1
Performers: Heini Hermunen, Anni Puupera, Linda Holma & Choreographer: Laura Jantunen
Dis/orientation rehearsal no 1 is a first outing of a longer research which focuses on the question of disorientation as a bodily experienced state. During the project, disorientation is approached as an everyday and transient bodily condition. The work proposes that disorientation would no longer be perceived as something to be diverted from, but rather encountered as a place where one can settle down and relax. What if the experience of disorientation was the basis of our existence?
Organiser and choreographer of the performance Dis/orientation rehearsal no 1 is choreographer Laura Jantunen. Performers are all from open dance classes Jantunen started to organise during fall 2023. The performers have been selected by chance, consent and interest.
Tickets
5 euros / museum card or ticket
Performances
- Date & time
- Location
- Duration
- Language
-
Wednesday 15.11 16:30—17:00
-
Main hall
-
30min
-
No dialogue
Screening
FILM SCREENING: In the deep / on the surface
This film screening features audiovisual works by multiple filmmakers, including Ritni Ráste Pieski and their working group, Jenni Laiti, Nell Lin, Rea Pihlasviita, KATOAVA collective and Suvi West. The film screening also includes a performance by Eugenie Touma van der Meulen.
17:30
Opening Words by Sonya Lindfors
17:40
Surrounded by Green Wings (2023)
KATOAVA collective
Languages: Finnish, English subtitles
7 min
Dance film Surrounded by Green Wings explores the relationship between young people and urban nature and was shot in the maple forest of Kumpulanmäki, which is planned for logging. In the film, two dancers express their profound bond with their city’s natural beauty. The film radiates warmth, vitality and a sense of curiosity, but it also takes a stand on the city’s zoning decisions. The dance segments of the film draw inspiration from the surrounding nature, combining delicate yet also dynamic acrobatic movement language.
17:50
Världens Hämnd
Rea Pihlasviita & Kimmo Koskela
Languages: Finnish & Swedish
30 min
Content warning: nudity
Världens Hämnd is a satiric-poetic film on Finnish life. It is about the roots, the primordial human-nature relation, and the myths of finnishness carried over the generations. A man and a woman in their daily chores and thoughts. Are they ready to face the modern times or are they drawn back to the primitive? This film was commissioned by YLE/FST (Swedish-speaking national TV in Finland) for the 80th anniversary of Finland’s independence.
18:20-18:30 BREAK
18:30
<Come home to the garden>
Eugenie Touma van der Meulen
Languages: English
30 min
<Come home to the garden> came from a desire to make an installation that can be lived in; that feels like a home to rest in. An installation that is Eugenie’s dream and memory of all the different homes they have had and will have together in one place, and also contains their longing and reaching for a real free Palestine. It is a striving for safety, and for community. For UrbanApa x Ateneum, Eugenie wanted to explore the possibility of creating a performance out of an installation. Now the performance will be a reaction to the heartbreaking events of this autumn, and as such is under development.
19:00-19:10 BREAK
19:10
Eana diehtá
Ritni Ráste Pieski, Pessi Jouste & Wanda Holopainen
Languages: Northern Sámi & Finnish, subtitles in English
5:03 min
Eana diehtá is a shortfilm about sámi queer joy and the meaning of community. It celebrates decolonial dreams and knowledge coming from the elders & Eana, the Land.
Nature is and has always been queer. We are still here, we are still queer.
Eana diehtá is a collaboration between three storytellers: poem and oral storytelling by Máret Ásllat Ivvár Ovllá Ritni Ráste, Ritni Ráste Pieski (he/they), auditional storytelling, composition and music by Guhtur-Niillasa Sire Nanna Pessi, Pessi Jouste (they/them) and visual storytelling, filming and editing Wanda Holopainen (they/them).
This short film was made independently for Sápmi Pride and is dedicated to our community at all times.
19:15
Teardrops of our Grandmother (2023)
Jenni Laiti & Carl-Johan Utsi
Languages: English
15 min
We witness the end of our world every day. The melting glaciers are the teardrops of our grandmother. My people have been here since the last ice age, and when the glaciers are gone, we will be gone too.
This work is about the end of the arctic world and is supported by Land Body Ecologies and Taike.
19:30
SÁMI ASSIMINATION
Suvi West
Languages: Northern Sámi & Finnish, English subtitles
20 min
The awarded documentary Eatnameamet – Our Silent Struggle by Suvi West dealt with the colonialism the Sámi have gone through. This compilation includes spin-off short films created from the material for the documentary. The episodes elaborate on the theme of the documentary from different perspectives, for example on transgenerational trauma, the impact of artificial lakes and the Sámi system of siidas (Sámi villages).
19:50
I am Salmon, Oncorhynchus gorbuscha (work in progress)
Nell Lin
Languages: English
20 min
Age recommendation & content warning: 18-years, nudity
For three years in a row, Finnish and Norwegian governments have banned fishing at the Tana River. This September I have been immersed in several small rivers along Tana witnessing the unusual amount of dead bodies of invasive pink salmon, which happens following a strict two-year cycle. Learning together with Norwegian fish guard, river guard, and Finnish researchers: The resulting performative-work-in-progress is part of “The Water Carries me”. It is a poetic work of reflection on decolonizing binary ideas of ownership, nationality, identity, cross-species politics featuring deep insertion-submersion (of bodies in transition) to place-species of flowing waters. The water carries me here, it will also carry you elsewhere.
Máret Ásllat Ivvár Ovllá Nilla Ritni Ráste, Ritni Ráste Pieski (he/they) is a queer Deanu-Sámi performance artist and activist. In art, they are busy with drag, decoloniality, queering up, joy and playfulness. Pieski has been active with queer Sámi issues. He was the main organiser of Sápmi Pride in 2021.
Guhtur-Niillasa Sire Nanna Pessi, Pessi Jouste (they/them) is a Sámi musician, violinist, composer and activist.They have a special interest in influencing through art, which they explore in particular through their band VIMMA. Jouste also plays regularly in the bands Ulla Pirttijärvi & Ulda and Suõmmkar. They have studied classical music at Tampere Conservatory and rhythm music at Metropolia University of Applied Sciences.
Wanda Holopainen is an art activist, documentarian, and storyteller. Their creative journey revolves around narratives, documentation, identity, and the art of communication. Through their artistic endeavors, Wanda endeavors to reshape and challenge our conventional understanding of the world.
Presently, Wanda is deeply engaged in the realm of analogue filming, utilizing this medium to deconstruct the lenses of colonialism and capitalism. This approach serves as a means to unveil new perspectives and insights. Beyond their personal projects, Wanda holds a significant role as the co-founder and creative director of Ataá Agency, a platform dedicated to pushing creative boundaries and fostering meaningful artistic endeavors in the production of content and knowledge.
Jenni Laiti is Sámi artivist, duojár (traditional Sámi craft maker), indigenous rights activist and climate justice advocate. She is a link in the thousand years’s chain of the craftmanship of Sámi duodji (traditional crafts) and the Arctic Indigenous survival. Indigenous futurism, aspiration to justice not only for ourselves, but justice for all creation and the love for her land guide her.
Carl-Johan Utsi is a Sámi photographer working in Sápmi and Swedish Lapland. Mostly running with reindeer though.
Nell Lin is a multidisciplinary artist working with xeno-hydro-transitions. They approach their subject in question through physical and art-based insertion-submersions. They are drawn toward the gentleness in poetic relations, such as bizarre weather conditions, making wood fire, licking ice, deep skin dive in the Ocean. Their works have been exhibited and screened at Haus Der Statistic, Kunstkraftwerk, Helmut Space, Herðubreið Gallery, Augusta Gallery, Saari Residence, Songshan CultureWarehouse, PKTV, DahabFilmFest, HorseWhale/Hrosshvalr Pier Show.
KATOAVA collective is formed by four young artists. Iida Nikander (she/her) and Nooa Kenttä (they/them) are dance artists, Miska Lamberg works as a sound designer, and Valde Paananen (he/him) focuses on filming and editing. The collective aims to defend endangered areas through art. Their expression reflects their personal experiences and is built around values that are important to them. KATOAVA creates aesthetic and delicate art with meaningful content.
Eugenie Touma van der Meulen (they/she) is an artist, friend, reader, writer, lover, maker, doer, dreamer, encourager, poet, baker, justice-seeker, creative-thinker, kindness-spreader. Eugenie’s work explores longing, belonging, and the meaning of home. Currently, Eugenie is thinking about the intergenerational grief and pain they are living with as a Palestinian-Armenian, and that is now highly activated due to current events. How to create through that, when even survival feels unfair? They wish to create a space for people to come together and listen, be a part of their thoughts, and feel less alone.
Rea Pihlasviita is a multidisciplinary artist and film maker. https://rea.pihlasviita.fi/
Kimmo Koskela is a Finnish director, cinematographer and producer, who has been working in experimental short and feature films, dance films, documentaries, photography and various art projects since the early eighties. He has worked in collaboration with a number of celebrated Finnish artists such as photographer Arno Rafael Minkkinen, musician and composer Kimmo Pohjonen, choreographer Reijo Kela, visual artist Eija-Liisa Ahtila among others. Kimmo Koskela lives and works in Helsinki, Finland.
Suvi West is a documentary director, TV and media worker. Her movies have been screened in film festivals around the world and on Nordic TV channels. West is an indigenous River Sámi from the top of Finland, Utsjoki municipality. The majority of her work is set on her Sámi culture, society, identity and area. Themes that she deals with are inequality, colonialism, spirituality, nature’s rights and individuals’ place in society.
Performances
- Date & time
- Location
- Duration
- Language
-
Wednesday 15.11 17:30—20:15
-
Ateneum Hall
-
2h 45min
-
Multiple languages
Workshop
Deep Listening
Moe Mustafa
Deep Listening is a workshop about sound meditation that is inspired by Pauline Oliveros. During the workshop the participants will focus on ways of listening, concentration, and awareness for one’s surroundings.
The first part of the workshop will happen inside the Ateneum Art Museum 9:00-10:00. The second part will happen roughly during 10:00-11:00 in the form of a guided soundwalk outdoors. Participating in the second part is optional.
Please note that the workshop starts before Ateneum opens.
Photo by Aman Askarizad
Moe Mustafa was born in Kuwait in 1985 to Palestinian parents, was brought up in Jordan. Currently based in Finland, Moe Mustafa is a visual artist, performer, writer, and composer – under the pseudonym Atheer Soot (أثير صوت). His work unfolds and contracts in multiple ways, exploring the role of memory, the impact of familial and societal violence, and hierarchy of sexual desirability. Brash and personal, it is as such a fight against deniability.
Performances
- Date & time
- Location
- Duration
- Language
-
Thursday 16.11 09:00—11:00
-
Meet-up at the main entrance
-
2h 0min
-
English
Performance-lecture
Wet Dreams
Susi Siriya Orenius
Wet dreams is a lecture-essay-performance dealing with semi-limitless dreaming towards institutions. During the lecture, Susi Siriya Orenius will go through some selected institutions and share their “wet dreams” about these institutions, bringing out both bitter and fantastic notions that arise when thinking of national art institutions in Finland. It is a funny pitch without any certain goal.
Susi Siriya Orenius is a Thai-Finnish writer, dramaturg and director. They graduated from TheatreAcademy in the Summer of 2023. They work in the stage and audiovisual field. Storytelling, details,multi-layered realities and emotions interest them.
Tickets
5 euros / museum card or ticket
Performances
- Date & time
- Location
- Duration
- Language
-
Thursday 16.11 16:00—16:30
-
Studio
-
30min
-
English
Performance
The Hanged Them (in Reversed, Cowgirl)
Estrellx Supernova
The Hanged Them (in Reversed Cowgirl) is a political meditation that seeks to excavate the performers personal and tenuous relationship to being born on Turtle Island, colonially known as The United States of America, the rapid dissolution of their belief in the promises of the so-called American Dream, and the duality and potential we each possess of being harmed and harming others through our actions, words, or lack thereof.
The Hanged Them activates and creates an atmosphere between tension and pleasure, grief and ecstasy, moaning and crying through subverted pop star energy, movement exploration, vocal sonic scripts, and gentle audience participation-engagement.
The initial framework for The Hanged Them (in Reversed Cowgirl) was created within the context of PACAP 6 – Performing Arts Advanced Programme, curated by Sofia Dias & Vítor Roriz and promoted by Forum Dança in Lisbon, Portugal.
Content warning: This performance has an age recommendation of +18 years. The performance includes nudity and loud noices.
Estrellx Supernova embodies a they/them energetics and is an Afro-Guatemalan-American choreographer, performer, curator, and writer. Their artistic alias, EHQS, is the root component of their macro-vision called The Universe of Rhizomatic Tenderness (TUoRT), an emerging ecosystem centering the presence and artistic-spiritual-erotic-material-somatic empowerment of Queer and Trans Creatives of the Global Majority and the Allies who they meet along the way.
Tickets
5 euros / museum card or ticket
Performances
- Date & time
- Location
- Duration
- Language
-
Thursday 16.11 17:00—17:30
-
Workshop space
-
30min
-
English
Performance
Kins keeper
Ajak Majok
Kins keeper performance is an interpretational body of work based on Ajak Majok’s self-published collection of poems carrying the same name. Both the performance and thecollection of poems are a part of Majok’s multidisciplinary project What if I was free? Inher work Majok centers the different intersections of black bodies, voices andexperiences.
Kinkeeping; the act of maintaining and strengthening familial ties.
Kins keeper is an excursion to the depths of familial ties of sisters, brothers & kins alike inmelanin. In the solo performance Majok narrates energy in motion between black bodies, kins, as interpretations of freedom with one another are shared, channeling the ancestral knowledge of the past, present & future.
This work is supported by Kone Foundation.
Accessibility: The artist invites audience to join them at the stage to follow this performance (sitting). Unfortunately the stage is not wheelchair accessible, but those using wheelchairs can follow the performance from the auditorium.
Ajak Majok is a Helsinki based South-Sudanese multidisciplinary artist and a political activist.
Performances
- Date & time
- Location
- Duration
- Language
-
Thursday 16.11 18:00—18:30
-
Ateneum hall
-
30min
-
No dialogue
We are fake, yet, we are here
Ragnar elnyG
Neither one, nor two.
Neither me, nor you.
Neither Id, nor ego.
Neither bad, nor good
Neither face, nor hood
Neither past, present, or to to be so.
To the past It’s straight standing frame
Is how time sees It’s slanting shadow.
We are all fake. Constructed. Bound. Unless “Yourself” is nice, sleek, politically correct and undisturbing for the other’s eye, you can’t “be yourself”. But is it bad to be fake? To which extent? Why if we can’t be real anyway? The amount of what one is allowed to say shrinks. Things are taken out of context. What matters isn’t what is said but who said it. Then, when you can’t speak anymore, you dance.
Performances
- Date & time
- Location
- Duration
- Language
-
Thursday 16.11 18:35—18:50
-
Ateneum Hall
-
15min
-
No dialogue
Performance
minimal/maximal/group effort
Julian Owusu
minimal/maximal/group effort is a communally produced solo dance piece in collaboration with members of the Räp Sou discord community. In the core of the piece is the question of how can one create art, and in particular solo work, without working alone. It negotiates the spaces between the energizing potential of working communally, even when collaboration may require great effort, and the draining effects of working in solitude. The work acknowledges that one never actually works alone and credit can never be singular. Even when standing alone on stage. minimal/maximal/group effort emerged in the aftermath of the pandemic after a realization of a collective sense of isolation. The Räp Sou community was formed during the pandemic and provided support to many rappers, producers and Hiphop-music enthusiasts, and continues to do so.
Julian Owusu is an Oulu-based freelancing dance and spoken word artist. His artistic core lies in the Hip Hop culture, community building practices, pedagogy, dance, decolonial practices and reimagining. This “solo” performance is a collaboration with musicians Eetee, Onkaloinen, Laaja, Tapsa2k, PMPEE, Zoo Unique and Sattalite through the Räp Sou discord community.
Performances
- Date & time
- Location
- Duration
- Language
-
Thursday 16.11 19:05—19:15
-
Ateneum hall
-
10min
-
No dialogue
Perfomance
Adventures of Harriharri – Episode III
Harold Hejazi
This video game performance chronicles the life and times of Harriharri living in virtual Helsinki. Harriharri is a newcomer who arrives with high hopes of being welcomed into the culture. Despite his sincere efforts, he faces continuous obstacles in pursuit of integrating into Finnish society. The game is performed live in an interactive-cinema format and narrated through rap and song. In this multiplayer experience, the audience’s decisions influence the narrative – making each performance unique.
Join Harriharri on a hyperpop fantasy adventure as he battles bureaucracies and systemic forces of social exclusion!
This performance was originally produced by Stage for Contemporary Performance and supported by Arts Promotion Centre Finland.
Harold Hejazi, who Fennicised his name in 2020 to Harriharri, is a Canadian artist and game designer currently living in Helsinki. In recent years, he has been using the medium of video games for live cinematic storytelling that examines issues of race, marginalisation, and contemporary multiculturalism in Finland.
Performances
- Date & time
- Location
- Duration
- Language
-
Thursday 16.11 19:30—20:15
-
Ateneum hall
-
45min
-
English
Performance
here for a moment (duet)
Raphaël Beau & Yun-Chen Chang
This performance is made at and for UrbanApa X Ateneum 2023. It builds by spending time in the place, observing, collecting, assembling, and composing. The texture of a wall, a specific step in the staircase, a detail on a painting, an on-going installation: every element in the museum worth being looked at with the potential for being transformed.
The performance plays with the physical structures and textures of the museum as well as the situations occurring in real time, such as the audience moving in the space, channeling this ongoing flow of exchange between the audience, the place and the performers.
Touch is a way to meet with the museum and get to know the place while at the same time the place gets to know us. Raphaël Beau and Yun-Chen Chang engage with the space with different qualities of touch, exploring how touch allows them to approach things in a spectrum of varying depths.
We will meet 10 minutes before the performance at the ticket sales hall: at 14:50 on Friday and at 10:50 on Saturday. The performance is held in English.
Photo: Doğa Çal
Yun-Chen Chang is a Helsinki-based Taiwanese performance artist working in choreography, performance and visual arts. Her performance practice has evolved around a vulnerable body in a changing environment, a question of home, and a dream full of transformative potential. Still Changing and Relax on a Shaky Ground are two of her performance projects in which she performs with a large scale of chairs and tables with the intention of hosting an audience in a strange and precarious home. She is fascinated by the singularity of everyday objects in exploring site-specific movement variations. Her performance practice is characterized by playfulness and subtleness, risk and trust, vulnerability and endurance, subversion and transformation. She practices negotiating, collaborating, and observing power dynamics in a temporary audience community or in the context of artistic collaboration. She also experiments with different modes of spectatorship in a shared space.
Raphaël Beau is a performer-maker originally from France. His artistic practice play and act from what is here is the ground from which he makes performances and facilitates workshops. He explores performing in diverse contexts with a will for the performance to open multiple ways to be present to a place. In August 2021 he moved to Helsinki to start a Master in Dance Performance at the Theatre Academy, at the University of the Arts. His master’s studies and the university environment offered a context for his practice to grow and accumulate layers by being implemented again and again in various locations. The performance here for a moment is his practice at work, integrated into a score, implemented in the presence of an audience. It attempts to capture both the fleetingness and density of being here together in this place at this very moment. He has been inviting peer-artists to witness and dialogue about the performances he makes. Recently he invited performance artist Yun-Chen Chang to join the performance making process and expand here for a moment into a duet.
Tickets
0-5 euros / museum card or ticket
Performances
- Date & time
- Location
- Duration
- Language
-
Friday 17.11 15:00—15:30
-
Meet-up at the ticket sales
-
30min
-
English
-
Saturday 18.11 11:00—11:30
-
Meet-up at the ticket sales
-
30min
-
English
Workshop
Open Practice
Raphaël Beau & Yun-Chen Chang
Open practice is a workshop, which invites participants to explore Ateneum Art Museum from a multi-sensorial perspective, inspired by the making of the performance here for a moment (duet) which will be held on Friday before the workshop at 15:30-16:30.
During the workshop, the participants will be invited to experience some of the tools that artists Raphaël Beau and Yun-Chen Chang have been exploring in Ateneum Art Museum when creating their performance here for a moment (duet) for UrbanApa X Ateneum 2023. Participants are welcome to explore the museum through a sensorial approach and invited to play with the museum behavior norms: What kind of touch can be experienced in a museum where touch is restricted? What do we look at in an exhibition?
You can choose how much you want to engage with the tasks. This is an invitation to relate and be attentive with playfulness and curiosity about oneself, others, and the place.
We will meet in the Ateneum ticket sales hall at 15:15. The workshop will be guided in English, and it is suitable for all ages, but children under 12-years-old should be accompanied by an adult.
Accessibility: The workshop will take place in rooms 2.4, 2.5, 2.6, 2.7, 2.8, 2.9. All the spaces are on the same floor, except room 2.9, which is accessible with an elevator from room 2.8.
Photo: Doğa Çal
Yun-Chen Chang is a Helsinki-based Taiwanese performance artist working in choreography, performance and visual arts. Her performance practice has evolved around a vulnerable body in a changing environment, a question of home, and a dream full of transformative potential. Still Changing and Relax on a Shaky Ground are two of her performance projects in which she performs with a large scale of chairs and tables with the intention of hosting an audience in a strange and precarious home. She is fascinated by the singularity of everyday objects in exploring site-specific movement variations. Her performance practice is characterized by playfulness and subtleness, risk and trust, vulnerability and endurance, subversion and transformation. She practices negotiating, collaborating, and observing power dynamics in a temporary audience community or in the context of artistic collaboration. She also experiments with different modes of spectatorship in a shared space.
Raphaël Beau is a performer-maker originally from France. His artistic practice play and act from what is here is the ground from which he makes performances and facilitates workshops. He explores performing in diverse contexts with a will for the performance to open multiple ways to be present to a place. In August 2021 he moved to Helsinki to start a Master in Dance Performance at the Theatre Academy, at the University of the Arts. His master’s studies and the university environment offered a context for his practice to grow and accumulate layers by being implemented again and again in various locations. The performance here for a moment is his practice at work, integrated into a score, implemented in the presence of an audience. It attempts to capture both the fleetingness and density of being here together in this place at this very moment. He has been inviting peer-artists to witness and dialogue about the performances he makes. Recently he invited performance artist Yun-Chen Chang to join the performance making process and expand here for a moment into a duet.
Tickets
0-5 euros, museum card or ticket
Performances
- Date & time
- Location
- Duration
- Language
-
Friday 17.11 15:30—16:30
-
Ateneum, 2nd floor
-
60min
-
English
Performance
Bog Stories
Gesa Piper
Right wing politics are on the rise all over Europe. How do we come to be misled by ideologies, symbols, figures and promises? How can we have failed so badly in the so-called chances to learn from the past? What are the repercussions of national history and how do those leave their imprints on the personal? How do we really learn from history instead of just about it and how can a transnational perspective expand our understanding?
The German born artist engulfs on an attempt to work through herself, her father line and the fibers in her fabric that make her a national representative. Spoken text and performative elements weave a collage of the artist’s experiences, a collection of impressions and information with historical facts in the context of Finland and Germany during WW2. Piper wishes to open an awareness that can invite people of various nationalities to acknowledge the repercussions that we individually carry out, and from there a choice to change them to collectively build a community that’s based on solidarity and peace.
Gesa Piper would like to thank Georgie Goater, Johannes Birlinger, Aune Kallinen, Oula Silvennoinen, Raphaël Beau and Nori Varga for their perspectives when developing this work.
We will meet 10 minutes before the performance at the ticket sales hall, at 16:20 on Friday. The performance is held in English.
Content warning: this performance includes references to war, nazism and holocaust.
Gesa Piper is a German dance-artist and -pedagogue. She has been based in Finland since 2011 and is active as a performer, teacher and choreographer nationally as well as internationally. Her interests lie within the field of the multiplicity of human and more than human existence within its social and environmental context. Since 2012, several works of hers focused on time, memory and ancestry, also in dialogue and collaboration with other artists, such as Georgie Goater, Camila da Rosa Ribeiro, Arlene Tucker, Maikki Palm and others.
Tickets
0-5 euros, museum card or ticket
Performances
- Date & time
- Location
- Duration
- Language
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Friday 17.11 16:30—17:15
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Meet-up at the ticket sales
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45min
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Performance-lecture
Working Reality
Saara Mahbouba
Working Reality is a lecture-performance exploring biocapitalism through the labor of reality television stars. The work draws parallels between the reality TV industry and the contemporary art world– two fields at the forefront of precarious contemporary labor practices and the self performative work of existing in an attention economy.
Saara Mahbouba (b. San Jose, CA) is a Helsinki based visual artist, artistic researcher, and writer. Her research interests are primarily in the intersection of identity and labor. She works with a mix of critical theory and pop culture, using popular media to make her research interests more widely accessible.
Performances
- Date & time
- Location
- Duration
- Language
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Friday 17.11 18:00—18:30
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Ateneum hall
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30min
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English
Performance
In perpetual blooming, despite the gods
Maya Oliva
What happens when surroundings change involuntarily, and entities disappear? Where do these entities go? Are they inside my body? If so, where?
In an attempt to transcend a persistent lack of a feeling of belonging while inhabiting unfamiliar surroundings, I will undergo a journey marked by an obsessive repetition of movements. Insisting on repetitive gestures will carve a path for my body to anchor itself in the here and now, pulling it away from sinking into nostalgic memories of multiple lost past lives in other countries and romanticized escapist futures. Performing these seemingly mechanical movements will slowly reveal an intimate journey.
While expanding and dissecting patterns of motion, breath, voice, and languages that belong or have belonged to me will emerge through and between them. It is my wish to surface the unheard from deep within my flesh, inviting silenced voices from the past and inert elements to come to the surface.
Maya Oliva (they/she) is a dancer and choreographer from Italy currently based in Helsinki. Influenced by their nomadic childhood and family, Maya is interested in understanding the concept of belonging through transitions of movements and voice.
Performances
- Date & time
- Location
- Duration
- Language
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Friday 17.11 18:30—19:00
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Ateneum hall
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30min
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Multiple languages (no language skills needed to understand the performance)
Performance
GRooVE
Performers: Sini Tuominen, Ronja Jansson, Sami Elovaara & Autuas Ukkonen Choreographer: Ira Wuolle
Welcome to GRooVE.
Take a welcoming drink from the Divinity of Boredom and relax for a moment before the show starts. Look around you, who else is here? Inhale deeply and exhale. Move your toes inside the shoes. What do you hear in this space?
This piece began from the groove, which carries all sorts of things; joy, friction, complex
feelings, happiness, boredom, memories from the past as well as fantasies and hopes for the future. Groove is the beating rhythm of life, cyclical energy evolving from the deep inside us. At the same time it just is, as body hair or evening newscast. I wish that tonight you will find a connection to your own groove and meet the things it reveals to you.
In this process we have been asking the questions such as: What and where is the stage? How to shape the theatre space to serve the needs and aims of club and street dance culture? What is the difference between a cypher and a circle? How to nourish the fantasies related to being a dancer? Why is kick up such a tricky move? What is important to bring into the stage? I don’t think that we’ve found all the answers yet, but at least we are on the journey. So bon voyage!
Three scenes from the piece will be experienced at UrbanApa festival.
Yours truly,
The Host
What is wrong with grooving?
What is wrong with wailing?
What is wrong with living?
What is it they’re asking for?
– Letta Mbulu – What’s Wrong With Groovin’
This work was supported by ITAK (Itä-Suomen tanssin aluekeskus) and produced in cooperation with Saiffa dance school. We also got help and support from Itä-Suomen katutanssiyhdistys, Boulderkeskus Espoo, Suomen Breikkiliitto and Riveria Outokumpu dance departement.
Accessibility: The artist invites audience to join them at the stage to follow this performance (sitting). Unfortunately the stage is not wheelchair accessible, but those using wheelchairs can follow the performance from the auditorium.
GRooVE working group consists of artists with backgrounds in club and street dances, such as breaking, popping, hip hop and hustle as well as in other forms of art, such as in sound design, rap, photography and costume design. The group came together from the invitation of choreographer Ira Wuolle.
Sami Elovaara is a Helsinki-based musician, dancer and sound designer. As a dancer, Sami specialises in street dance and as a musician, his speciality is danceable beats and atmospheric soundscapes. As an artist, Sami is motivated by shared experiences, community and practicality. What is important to Sam in art is its accessibility and emotionality.
Sini Tuominen is a dancer, dance teacher, event producer and rapper. Sustainability and equality are important values in her work, both culturally and environmentally. Sini feels that all her activities are reflected in her artistic work and an important part of her artistic processes is not only the refinement of her own art but also introspection and openness to change and new influences.
Ronja Jansson, born in Sweden, is a dancer, dance instructor and cultural producer currently living, studying and working in Helsinki. Her main dances are popping and hustle, but she is recently also very inspired by the movements of breaking. Learning about the history, culture and the people behind the dances have always been an important ingredient of her practice.
Ira Wuolle is a dancer-choreographer whose work reflects street and club dance culture, multi- enthusiasm, polyrhythmic curiosity, multidisciplinary activity, do-it-yourself spirit, many forms of spoken word, and the need to work together and create communal spaces. Wuolle currently lives in Stockholm and is studying in the Master’s program in Choreography at Stockholm University of the Arts.
Autuas Ukkonen is a multidisciplinary artist whose work critically explores current issues with a humorous and analytical approach. Ukkonen’s recognisable and stylized visual world conceals personal reflections on queer identity, good taste and materialism beneath its colourful and playful surface.
Performances
- Date & time
- Location
- Duration
- Language
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Friday 17.11 19:30—20:00
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Ateneum hall
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30min
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No dialogue
Performance
Out of Sync
Out of Sync
Our smashing boy band Out of Sync is currently on a promo tour to launch our new album and we wanted to make sure to pass through Finland while we were in Scandinavia anyway. So here we are, giving a small taste of our arena show at UrbanApa x Ateneum!
Out of Sync is a drag king boy band that consists of worldwide touring artists Nico, Peter Cunt’dre and Hc Wayne. Feel free to fall in love!
Performances
- Date & time
- Location
- Duration
- Language
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Friday 17.11 20:00—20:15
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Ateneum hall
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15min
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No dialogue
Performance
MANDYT on the road
MANDYT
MANDYT on the road by MANDYT duo is a gig-style performance that flirts with pop, contemporary performance, contemporary dance and performance art.
The touring piece MANDYT on the road roams along ever-changing boundaries – what is too much, what is too emotional, too pathetic, too distressing, too self-confident, too disgusting, too sexy, too vulgar, too hot. What goes beyond what we are used to?
MANDY is an alter ego,
a character,
a state of mind.
MANDY is a performing arts star (and a garage band artist).
MANDYT enjoys being on the stage.
This work is supported by Arts Promotion Centre Finland.
MANDYT is a duo founded by dance artist Siiri Kortelainen and performance artist and scenographer Kaisa Rajahalme (2022), featuring two independent alter egos named MANDY.
MANDYT concept joins multi-dimensional, emancipated and emotional corporeality with expanding body representation and a distinctive powerful aesthetic born of skewed pop influences.
MANDYT is a multi-disciplinary all-encompassing piece of art that has been manifested to continue its life even in 2050.
Performances
- Date & time
- Location
- Duration
- Language
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Friday 17.11 20:30—21:00
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Bistro
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30min
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Mainly English
Live concert
Pimeä Hedelmä
Pimeä Hedelmä is a rap group consisting of artists Vane Vane and Kaisa Cleva and producer Liki. The band released their debut album HITMIX 2020 in December 2020. Pimeä Hedelmä music is bass-heavy and foggy in sound, but still more bouncy than slow. The band is especially known for its strong live presence. Currently, the band is making new songs and a dance performance called the weight of be sexy together with the queer art duo Amanda & Lydia. The performance will premiere at Turku Kutomo in December 2023.
Performances
- Date & time
- Location
- Duration
- Language
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Friday 17.11 21:15—22:00
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Bistro
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45min
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Finnish
Video
Fuck Ballet
Styles Alexander
A brief dark history of Ballet and an interrogation of the power ballet continues to maintain as a colonial conditioning tool. Styles Alexander will be taking over UrbanApa’s Instagram stories for the day with their content.
Styles Alexander is a choreographer and dramaturge based in San Francisco, California. Styles is co-founder of Rupture.
Workshop
Bodytalk
Simo Vassinen & MORA
The energizing and grounding workshop mixes dynamic meditation, diverse rave soundscapes, and psychoanalytical tools as a shared ‘question incubation’. We examine an open question selected together through various body activations – with the help of pumping beats, ambient sounds and a wide range of electronic music by dj MORA. We zoom into age-old techniques of ecstasy and rely with respect on the long heritage of queer mind–bodyscapes and other marginalized torch-carriers of precious information as we look for a mindshift through the body. What does the question look like at the end of a two-hour portal?
NOTE: Please bring a pen and a notebook, or something else for making notes by hand.
We will meet in the Ateneum ticket sales hall at 11:45, from where we will make our way into the Ateneum Hall together. The workshop will be guided in English and Finnish and it is suitable for participants of all ages.
Simo Vassinen (FI/DE) is a dancer, performer, writer, translator, bodyworker, and former futuresresearcher. He lives and works in Germany and Finland with an urge to combine the transcendence ofdance and rave culture with psychoanalysis, dynamic meditation, bodywork, and futures studies,inherently informed by underground queer culture. Originally initiated with futures researcher RoopeMokka and dance artist Maria F. Scaroni and since taken different forms through various collaborations,Simo has presented Bodytalk at e.g. Kiasma Museum (FI), Untitled futures festival (FI), Ponderosa (DE),Fortuna Berlin / Social Pleasure Center (DE), Stretch Festival Berlin (DE), and The Borderland (SE).
MORA is a reccurring name in Helsinki’s electronic music and club scene through internationally andlocally recognized curations, they play live shows, and co-host a monthly radio show on IDA Helsinki. Thisnon-binary ‘genre-polyglot’ breathes in influencial, culture-driven inspirations from various continents,including but not limited to Latin American club edits, hard drums, and elements of rave infused withetherial soundscapes. Mixing the former with broken beats, bass heavy grooves, polyrythms and a slightlyhigher bpm — though also incorporating their Persian heritage.
In addition to exploring playfully complex and diverse sonic formulas, MORA proudly represents and aimsto make space for QPOC communities within the scene within their active work also under their collectiveproject; post êxistance. Neuroqueer identity and survival, sensory friendly approaches, safer spaces andaccessibility for marginalized minority groups stand as core values in the forefront of MORA’s work andinvolvement. Although each aspect of it constantly evolves and grows throughout time, as us humanstoo.
Performances
- Date & time
- Location
- Duration
- Language
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Saturday 18.11 12:00—14:00
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Meet-up at the ticket sales
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2h 0min
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English & Finnish
Performance
Only to find out that the garden has turned them away and left them to drift
Suvi Kemppainen
In this performance artist Suvi Kemppainen physically and energetically engages with heaven, a concept which they consider to be one of the pedestals of a good life. Rather than a utopian dream or a concept owned solely by religions, heaven is experienced as a concrete, intimate reality that shapes human existence with fantasies of a good life. For the moment of the performance heaven serves as both a choreographic and dramaturgical anchor, guiding the composition of the performance. Does hard labor grant a place in heaven? Continuing their practice on immaterial ownership, Suvi takes an otherworldly dimension to serve the wisdom of imagination. The performance explores the dialogue between live performance and a collection of artworks, each possessing their own distinct identity and situational context. Garden is a promise where every planted seed can potentially lead to aworld-changing event. What is the hierarchy between a still image — a historical document, an artwork, a cultural artefact — and dance, a disappearing act? The performance is situated in “Humanity” room at Ateneum which features paintings from artists from the end of 19th century to the beginning of 20th century. Suvi’s childhood fixation, Hugo Simberg’s “Wounded Angel” (1903) is located in that room which Simberg painted after hospitalisation and a manic-depressive period. In malaise and in vitality, I shall beckon forth specters from canvases and the depths of my psyche.
Suvi Kemppainen is an internationally working choreographer, dancer, performer and performance maker based in Helsinki. Kemppainen’s artistic practice is anchored in otherworldly psychopoetic dance and questions around immaterial ownership. These questions have inspired Suvi towards a movement practice that is informed by the ownership of the body and its bones – and also the letting go of this ownership. After graduating as a dancer from North Karelia College Outokumpu in Finland Suvi Kemppainen continued their choreography studies at the University of Arts BerlinHZT. Their latest works have been presented at the Sophiensaele in Berlin, BallhausOst in Berlin, Zodiak Center for New Dance in Helsinki and Kutomo Contemporary Art Space in Turku (ehkä-production). Besides creating stage works Suvi Kemppainen regularly facilitates and curates workshops. Suvi studies trauma informed practices and leadership for more transparent and respectful working environments in the arts field.
Tickets
5 euros / museum card or ticket
Performances
- Date & time
- Location
- Duration
- Language
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Saturday 18.11 14:15—14:45
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Room 2.6, 2nd floor
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30min
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No dialogue
Gathering
GATHERING — in the deep / on the surface
The Gathering is a softly discursive session inviting our guests to stay with the urgent collectively as well as discussing the possibilities (or impossibilities) of accomplishing structural change within institutions. As a part of the session we will experience a reading by NO NIIN and a sound work by Moe Mustafa amongst other things.
Performances
- Date & time
- Location
- Duration
- Language
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Saturday 18.11 15:00—16:45
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Ateneum hall
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1h 45min
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English
Performance
Eugenie Touma van der Meulen
<Come home to the garden> came from a desire to make an installation that can be lived in; that feels like a home to rest in. An installation that is Eugenie’s dream and memory of all the different homes they have had and will have together in one place, and also contains their longing and reaching for a real free Palestine. It is a striving for safety, and for community. For UAxAteneum, Eugenie wanted to explore the possibility of creating a performance out of an installation. Now the performance will be a reaction to the heartbreaking events of this autumn, and as such is under development.
Eugenie (they/she) is an artist, friend, reader, writer, lover, maker, doer, dreamer, encourager, poet, baker, justice-seeker, creative-thinker, kindness-spreader. Eugenie’s work explores longing, belonging, and the meaning of home. Currently, Eugenie is thinking about the intergenerational grief and pain they are living with as a Palestinian-Armenian, and that is now highly activated due to current events. How to create through that, when even survival feels unfair? They wish to create a space for people to come together and listen, be a part of their thoughts, and feel less alone.
