Tuesday, 26 August, 7 pm, Sorbus-galleria

Six Sims will be stuck in a pool while two Sims watch in a luxurious but unfamiliar setting. 

You will learn how to attract a male millionaire.

“Don’t leave me!” (Some women will die. A few women will be rescued.)

An aging track coach will attempt to live vicariously through her industrious prodigy.

Sailor Moon will cry for two and a half minutes.

Emil + Connie + Heather Washko will talk about the status of the American Dream.

I will attempt to embody representations of flora in film.

Some people in Troy, New York will try to pass as GAP models in shot-4-shot restagings of commercials.

I will get embarrassed when I show this one performance.

The Council on Gender Sensitivity and Behavioral Awareness in World of Warcraft will make an appearance.

10 pieces. 40 minutes. Hopefully you will bring beer.
Some Women Will Die…But You Might Learn How To Snag A Millionaire Husband? is a 40 minute screening program of documentation from interventions in video game spaces, video, and performance art made by Angela Washko in the last five years. The works presented use archiving processes and extract data from pop culture as storytelling tools – visualizing intangible but not invisible exclusionary value systems embedded in pop culture. In many of the works presented, Washko aspires to intervene on traditional, militant cultural norms particularly around what women should/should not be and create prototypes for actions by others. The pieces in the program also examine American “productive” society’s obsession with work and entitlement – the old “anything can be achieved through hard work” and framing of the un/underemployed as lazy. Despite an influx of queer utopianism into mainstream visibility and the obvious collapse of economic prosperity in America, domestic traditional “normalcy” is still programmed into software/games/artificial intelligence and is reflected back at us in reality television. Washko extracts recurring patterns from a vault of loved video games, personal experience, television, childhood trauma, and conversations with amateur philosophers to compose performative archives of a (pop) culture still producing and reinforcing narrow, unimaginative visions for America’s social, ethical, and economic future.

Angela Washko is in Helsinki as part of HIAP Residency Programme.