Hosted by: Willem Wilhelmus

Art Contact Team: Tomasz Szrama, Leena Kela, Päivi Maunu, Ilona Räihä

entrance: 5 eur

Art Contact is a meeting point for experimental live arts – dance, music and performance art. Since 2004 Art Contact has hosted performances in Helsinki by dozens of local and international emerging and established artists.

Gwendoline Robin (Brussels)
Gwendoline Robin associates the object with the body in space to create ever more complex installations and performances; objects responds to space, movement to fire, light to the sound of the explosion, and the artist’s body can explore, perform and dance with the danger and poetry of fire. There is an immediacy in Gwendoline Robin’s work; a relationship with the present moment given by the suddenness of the explosion, the very essence of fire, the evanescence of smoke. It confronts us with surprise, fear, danger, relief, and with wonder, too, and humour.
(Extract from Gwendoline Robin in conversation with Tania Nasielski)

Agnes Nedregård (Bergen)

Whiteout
Whiteout is a visual performance approaching the moment of collapse of a belief system – the moment of confusion and disorientation when we realise that our current “perception filter” is no longer sufficient in deciphering what we experience. Whiteout is part of a larger research project called “Imploding” – dealing with how our personal histories and backgrounds inform the way we see and interpret the world around us. The work is made specifically for the event at Art Contact and is funded by the Scottish Arts Council.

Agnes Nedregård is interested in how personal and cultural baggage informs our interpretations of situations, places and people. The experience of being a human body is placed at the centre of her explorations, charging her performances with physical energy, actions and symbols. Her artistic practice is based in live performance whilst encompassing video, film, drawings and sculptural installations. Nedregård is an MA Fine Art graduate from the Glasgow School of Art (2005) and in 2007 was artist-in-residence at Stills in Edinburgh. She is editor of www.performancekunst.no, a website for Nordic performance art, and has collaborated with artists including Brazilian aerial acrobat Raquel Nicoletti, Scottish composer Harold Nono and performance group FireBirds (2004-05).

Beyond Improvisation Collective
Beyond Improvisation Collective creates performances through the means of instant composition. The members of the collective have extensive experience in improvisation and an ongoing interest in expanding their perspectives of improvisation as performance art.

Sound creates silence and movement emptiness. Beyond performative and symbolic. Under your skin (sneaks) into your imagination. Awakens kinestethic empathy. Builds spaces through music and dance and goes beyond…

Dancers-movers Sini Haapalinna, Anna-Kaisa Hirvanen, Jaana Klevering, Pia Lindy and Ronja Verkasalo.
Musicians-sound artists Otzir Godot (percussions), Eija Kankaanranata (kantele) and Jaap Klevering (digital vocal sound).

Karolina Kucia
Karolina Kucia completed an MA in Fine Art at the Poznan Art Academy in Poland. Her studies covered sculpture, performance-, video- and sound art. Her works have been presented in Poland, Finland, Slovenia, Slovakia, Russia, France and Estonia. Kucia is currently studying MA Theatre studies in Performance Art and Theory at the Theatre Academy of Helsinki. Concepts in her present practice include organicity and metabolism.