24.10.2024

Performance club Muscles & Soft Tissue

Be curious and spend an evening with us enjoying performance art!

Muscles & Soft Tissue

During the evening we will see three amazing performances. The club brings together embodied performance art. Whether it’s a human body, a group body, a virtual body or the body of an object. The Muscles and Soft Tissue performance club is inspired by healthy masculinity and soft values. Independence and ability, caring for others, communication and play. The body needs to move, and the body needs to experience intimacy.

The event will take place in the Hugo event space of the Kalevan Navetta Arts and Culture Centre on Thursday 24 October from 18-20.30. You are warmly welcome! Admission to the club is free.

Program timetable

6 pm Doors open

Hostess of the evening: Pii Anttila

Refreshments available at the Äärellä restaurant downstairs that can be brought upstairs to the event space.

6.15 pm Ilia Ollikainen: Soft Body Modifier, 40 mins

break

7 pm Tiia From: Kind Violence, 15 mins

break

7.30 pm Anders Lillhonga ja Matti Haaponiemi: Either put on these glasses or start eating that trash can, 45 mins

8.30pm Evening ends

Performances

Ilia Ollikainen: 

Soft Body Modifier

Soft Body Modifier is a nostalgic re‐dive into the fantasies of an internet‐raised queer teenager who flipped a laptop open and never closed it. A fantasy where screens blend into reality and there are no boundaries of the digital, or that of flesh and blood. This performance is a love song and a lament to that adolescent digi-experience that formed my post-human now, to the spaces and people that are gone (and those that are still here) and that are left to decay as ghostly machinery in the circuits of my chimerical body.

Ilia Ollikainen’s  practice is focused on combining sound art, performance and text into performative events, realized as both collaborative efforts and as solo endeavors. The text heavy performances utilize auto-theoretical accounts of instances of vulnerability and yearning, showcasing the complicated needs, questions and wants of their queer body. By centering their individual bodily experiences in relation to others and our current material realities, their works insist on asserting their non-normative position as worth being known.

 

Tiia From:

Kind Violence

Tiia From is a fourth year student at the SAMK Kankaanpää art school. Her art is heavily inspired by daily social phenomena. Through her art she aims to create spaces for human interaction, feelings of connection and learning experiences.

At the Muscles & Soft tissue -performance club From premieres her performance “Kind violence”, in which she’ll attire a medieval war armour and invite the viewers to a wordless dialogue. What does kindness look like, when it’s shaped by precognitions of power?

 

 

Anders Lillhonga ja Matti Haaponiemi:

Either put on these glasses or start eating that trash can

It is the year 1985 – Dawn of a new age. A quiet dubbed shout echoes from the Far East. Mystical and seemingly childish forces captivate an entire generation. Poor quality becomes the new norm. Sword blades shimmer on CRT televisions in all the colors of the rainbow, and mass-produced Ninja action films dominate Beta and VHS shelves. Karate dojos fill up, synthesizers pump out subharmonic evil, and greased muscles bulge in every teenage boy’s dreams.

40 years later. The world is absurd. The glory of the golden generation has dimmed. Joke books have been replaced by memes, hybrid cyber warfare is a reality, and Uri Geller has returned. From the moss-covered granite ruins of nostalgia, two VHS warriors emerge, swaddled in a time capsule, unwittingly waiting for this moment since birth.

 

At the heart of Anders Lillhonga and Matti Haaponiemi’s improvisational work is interaction and play, combining the heroes of childhood action films, pop culture, computer games, and the mysticism, aesthetics, and pseudo-science of oriental martial arts. In addition to palpable physicality, their work overflows with analog and synthetic sound and video landscapes created by the artists themselves. This ever-evolving improvisational performance reminisces about the past while developing alongside lived experiences. For the creators, the work is at its best when enjoyed together with the audience.

Artists’ works has been supported by Pirkanmaa Dance Centre and Art Promotion Centre Finland.

 

 

Curated by local artists Aeon Lux and Alan Bulfin. The event is produced by Pii Anttila from Seinäjoki Kunsthalle. Seinäjoki Kunsthalle’s performance club has been organised since 2020.

 

Check out the previous years’ club on Instagram:

https://www.instagram.com/reel/C0yY2OxtqCt/

https://www.instagram.com/reel/Ck0DMslD7A4/