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SELECTED PROJECTS & COLLABORATIONS
MERPERSONING (2020–) / BURNOUT MERMAIDS A.K.A. DUO BURNOUT BITCHES // KILO SWIMMING HALL, ESPOO
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Sirens, nymphs, nereids, naiads, vodjanois, mermaids, and kindred entities and deities are represented in mythologies and folklore of many cultures across the world (in Europe, Asia, Africa, Near East, India..). In pagan pre-Finnish stories, merfolk are called "vetehinen" or "vedenväki," and they were believed to live in lakes.
These entities are often depicted as hybrids, half-human-half-animal, or possessing features of both categories in some other proportions. Typically merfolk are described as having a magical potency of some sort and using it either against or for humans. The currently popular representation of a mermaid, particularly in the Global North's overpowering context, is fixated on a white, beautiful, feminine, and innocent character, commonly described through a heterosexist storyline. Merperson, a.k.a. mersona, manifests infinite, expansive identities and can subvert the cisgender and hetero narratives as queer, agender, etc. Indeed, as a magical entity, they/it might go entirely beyond the delimiting context of humanity and enter the realms of more-than-human and supernatural. In addition to the representations of attractive and alluring mermaids, the mersona can also appear as a grotesque or monstrous creature. |
Above: Wannabe Waterproof looking for Melancholic Meltdown (the other half of the Burnout Mermaids) in Nuuksio National Park. Pictures from the Merpersoning project are coming up soon.
Merpersoning is a participatory LARP-project on magical self-actualization and the embodiment of an imaginary form. In August 2020, the artist duo Burnout Mermaids (Wannabe Waterproof & Melancholic Meltdown) and a pack of other mersonas took over a swimming pool in Kilo, Espoo. Merpersoning questions the norms of swimming pools and -halls, as spaces where bodies are exposed to labelling, profiling, and regulating. It also a calls out the cis-heterosexist, monotone European fables, and representations of mermaids. Burnout Mermaids aka Burnout Bitches (Iida Nissinen & Melanie Orenius) are artists, art educators, bitches, witches, and mermaids who have met being partly in a burnout, partly in a magical realm. For this duo, friendship, witchcraft, and art-making are interwoven, and when there is no pressure in producing, they usually find themselves naked in the moonlight. Merpersoning is produced by Marianne Savallampi and Ali Akbar Mehta as a part of The Gathering for Rehearsing Hospitalities program 2020, co-curated by a contemporary art agency Frame, a media art organization M-cult and an anti-racist and queer feminist project Museum of Impossible Forms. Marianne Savallampi also directed a short documentary film of the Merpersoning project with film consultation and assistance from Danai Anagnostou. The film will be screened in M{if} in 2021. Merpersoning project is possibly going to have a continuation in 2021. |
ALREADY NOT-YET – BECOMING COLLECTIVE (2020–) / w/ IMA IDUOZEE, JOY MARIAMA SMITH, VISHNU VARDHANI, JEANNE VAN HEESWIJK
// HERE AND THERE
// HERE AND THERE
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"The already Not-Yet – Becoming Collective, with Ima Iduozee, Iida Nissinen, Joy Mariama Smith, Vishnu Vardhani, Jeanne van Heeswijk, is a tentative exploration on ‘commitment’ and how to share our realities in times of breakdown. How can we create different relational bonds to approach the notion of collectives not as a pre-existing social structure but as a learning process actively becoming in context? This is to start developing and enabling a series of participatory test sites and public scenarios to enact and imagine how we live together and define collective futures." [PUBLICS] ✹ The Already Not-Yet – Becoming Collective is a continuum for Jeanne van Heeswijk's project Trainings for the Not Yet. Becoming Collective is a practical experiment and a durational and open-ended, collective meta-study on why and how to come together with Ima Iduozee, Iida Nissinen, Joy Mariama Smith, Vishnu Vardhani, and Jeanne van Heeswijk. The project is commissioned by PUBLICS. |
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Above and on the left: Photos: Visa Knuuttila. Screenshots: Iida Nissinen, Ima Iduozee. Becoming Collective has had two public workshops that are in effect explorations on their objectives in the form of semi-improvised interpersonal enactments: – Workshop on 18 September 2020, and a part of the Lapsody: Paramatter, International Live Art and Performance Festival. Hosted by PUBLICS in collaboration with Live Art and Performance Studies (LAPS) MA program in Uniarts Helsinki. – Reading You workshop on 21 November 2020 as a part of the Making Matters Symposium: Collective Material Practices in Critical Times (19-21 November 2020). |
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RSVP - LETTERS AND DATES BETWEEN SPACES (2020–) / QUERQ COMMUNITY w/ THIRD SPACE COLLECTIVE // HELSINKI
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ABOVE: Snapshots from a collective collage and visual poem cut-out session for the Third Space's anniversary publication where the RSVP - Letters and Dates between Spaces project is reflected. The top right and bottom left images are some of Iida's remarks from the 'Notes on Vulnerability' -exchange. ✹ The collaborative project between Querq and Third Space began in Spring 2020 in the form of co-hosted (safety-distance) gatherings and exchange of “letters." These reciprocal openings extended from texts to visual and immaterial objects, scripts for activities, exercises, etc. An ever-present theme of vulnerability was the first topic to start the pen palling. Organically the exchange began to involve related notions such as care, togetherness, empathy, and friendship as a base for artistic collaboration. |
RSVP - Letters and Dates between Spaces is a durational project between Third Space collective and four Querq community members: Iida Nissinen, Laura Rämö, Tuisku Lehto, and Oona Heinänen. Querq (TBA as Nurja) is a self-sustained artistic experiment that started in early 2019. It focuses on decentralized community-building (opposing systemic hierarchies and power-structures), consent-culture, intimacy, pleasure, and care. Nurja promotes norm-critical, queer-feminist subversion of oppressive body politics. Iida, Laura, Tuisku, and Oona are some of the community's founding members and board members of the Querq Ry. RSVP - Letters and Dates between Spaces is an ongoing project that continues in 2021. Below: Photos: Roope Mantere. 
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THE HIEROPHANT (2019) / NISSINEN-YRJÖLÄ-NISSINEN -COLLECTIVE // THIRD SPACE, HELSINKI
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Tarot-luentaa kasvotusten.
Kysy vapaita aikoja viestillä numerosta XXX. Ilmaiset luennat suomeksi ja englanniksi aikavälillä 6.4-11.4.2019, 45min/istunto. Third Space galleria, Tarkk’ampujankatu 18, Helsinki. Nissinen-Yrjölä-Nissinen (Iida Nissinen, Eero Yrjölä, Elina Nissinen) on helsinkiläinen taiteilijakollektiivi, joka työskentelee mm. installaation ja osallistavan performanssin keinoin. ✹ Face-to-face tarot readings. To book your free appointment please sms XXX. Sessions available 6.4-11.4.2019, 45min/session, in Finnish/English. Third Space, Tark’ampujankatu 18, Helsinki. Nissinen-Yrjölä-Nissinen (Iida Nissinen, Eero Yrjölä, Elina Nissinen) is a Helsinki based artist collective working with installation and performative social compositions. |
SEASCAPE (2017) / NISSINEN-YRJÖLÄ-NISSINEN -COLLECTIVE // THIRD SPACE, HELSINKI
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What is a sea, a river, a human? A mistaken idea of an isolated agency. Human is water. The water in a river is never the same. The river flows; it turns into rain, tears, and sweat. Biological life is a constant circulation of water. Fertile water. Penetrating water. Holy water: part of myths and rituals in every religion. What happens when it runs out? A flood. A Tsunami. Polar ice is melting. OCEANS ARE GETTING DEEPER—water refugees. National identity: the land of thousand lakes. The landscape is a lakescape, a patriotic bedtime story. A voyage of discovery to outer space. Human is looking for a new exoplanet. Space colonialism. Water is everywhere/nowhere.–How could it be owned? Seascape is a multimedia installation that took place in Third Space and online. Nissinen-Yrjölä-Nissinen (Iida Nissinen, Eero Yrjölä, Elina Nissinen) is a Helsinki based artist collective working with installation and performative social compositions. |
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Hei! (Kuka ikinä oletkaan.)
Järjestämme päivällisen, ja sinut on kutsuttu. Pöytä on katettu päivällisvieraille 28.7.2018 klo 15 osoitteessa XXX (sisäpihalla), Helsinki.
Voit tulla juuri sellaisena kuin olet eikä sinun tarvitse tuoda mukanasi mitään erityistä. Tervetuloa!
K&I
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Hi there! (Whoever you are.)
We are organizing a dinner, and You are invited. The dinner is served on July 28th 2018 at 3pm at XXX (inner yard), Helsinki.
Please, come as you are; you don’t need to bring anything. Welcome!
K&I
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Dinner invitations are written by hand on tiny slices of paper and left in different places all over the city.
Sekä Että is an art and research collaboration w/ Kaura Raudaskoski.
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STRANGERS' DINNER (2018) / DUO SEKÄ ETTÄ // MY BACKYARD, HELSINKI
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THE FIVE STAGES - OFFERING (2017) / DUO BURNOUT BITCHES // GALERIE TOOLBOX, BERLIN
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The pentagram symbol is the shape of a five-pointed star, owning a magical association. The pentagram has been used within various beliefs worldwide, bearing as many meanings and uses. As these multiple religions and cults have taken the five points of the pentagram star into their own use, changing its meaning to fit their purpose, so do Burnout Bitches in their performance.
Below and on the left: Event photos Salla Keskinen. |
The Five Stages is a broader project initiated by Burnout Bitches, in which they study the five phases leading to burnout. The Offering is a ritual of building a pentagram. The gradual creation of the five points of the pentagram star follows the evolvement of the five stages of burnout. Performance, ironically, means both an artistic act or process and an accomplishment of work, feat, or obligation. During The Offering, the artists sacrifice themselves for the sake of proving their worth through work. The Offering appears as a combination of black humor and black magic. By creating an analog between a mental breakdown and the process of a spiritual rite, the performance in total is a metaphor for the contemporary worshiping of over-working morality. In The Five Stages project, the artists derive their inspiration from the loop of the five distinguished stages of burnout (honeymoon, balancing act, chronic symptoms, crisis, and submersion). The Five Stages is a perpetual motion machine, a vortex fueled by the values of a productivity-oriented, competitive society. No one is immune to this system. Not even, or especially, artists. The Offering – The Five Stages series. Performance with candles, tape, red plastic film, fake blood, rugs, typewriter and one cursed alarm clock, 25min. Galerie Toolbox, Berlin. Duo Burnout Bitches is an artistic collaboration w/ Melanie Orenius. |
CAMOUFLAGE SERIES (2017-2018) / THE ANATOMY LESSON OF DR. NICOLAES TULP w/ EERO YRJÖLÄ (2018) // GALLERY LAPINLAHTI, HELSINKI
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Camouflage Series (2017-2018) is inspired by theories of new materialism and hauntology. Oil and epoxy on recycled MDF.
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If you are willing to examine with care, you will surely penetrate the hidden nature of this mystery, and thus inevitably celebrate Divine Providence in these extraordinary monuments of His wisdom which God has so profusely established within us. 1 Works of art are mounted, hung, scattered for study. Their ungrubby surfaces are untouched by time and its vicissitudes. Art exists in a kind of eternity of display – there is no time. This eternity gives the gallery a limbolike status; one has to have died already to be there. 2 HAND. The artist, the scientist, the creator. Painting is material and chemical ingredients rearranged by a godly human hand. Pathological curiosity to modify, produce, organize, destroy, assess, control, determine and give meanings. SKIN. Painting: skin. Skin is surface. Surface: an artful illusion. A counterfeit comes with a risk of being revealed. As authenticity is disputed, the real and false get confused. Is camouflage phonier than its inspiration? DISSECTION. Dissection is an invasion - pure scientific practice. Iconoclasm: to wound, violate, vandalize. To cut open and tear the skin. When pristine turns into corrupted, the holiness of a painting is in crisis. 1. Schupbach, William: The Paradox of Rembrandt’s “Anatomy of Dr. Tulp”, 1982 2. O’Doherty, Brian: Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space, 1986 When Iida Nissinen and Eero Yrjölä attended The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp, they became graverobbers, human experimenters and pathologists. With that, the ghosts are now taking deep breaths, and something animate revealed to be a living dead instead. Exhibited in Galleria Lapinlahti. Exhibition event / Instagram |
SENSORYPLAY (2015-2016) // DISPLAYED IN VARIOUS EXHIBITIONS
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What does it mean to touch or to be touched? These paintings are inspired by the aesthetics of a YouTube-spread phenomenon called ASMR. ASMR videos vary from imaginary medical appointments to seemingly absurd play with household items. Peculiar to the videos is that they feature extraordinarily intent and durational engagements with ”human,” ”nonhuman,” ”animate,” and ”inanimate” elements and materials (for example, with human hair, light bulbs, foreign words, and shaving cream). Oil and spray paint on dumpster-dived wood slabs and recycled MDF. |
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SAFE CROSSING (2015) / PARTICIPATORY PERFORMANCE AND INTERVENTION // REYKJAVÍK, ICELAND
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Zebra crossing is a marker for safer space. While the documentation of Safe Crossing highlights the playfulness of the performance, the actual feeling of lying on the ground face down while letting people step and run over you reveals the far-reaching societal dynamics of trust, respect, power, sacrifice, and exposure. Safe Crossing was an intervention and participatory performance taking place all over the Reykjavík city center. The performance was conducted as a part of the Human Rights and Visual Art Education course at the Iceland Academy of the Arts in summer 2015. |
