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. Hosted by: Willem Wilhelmus.

Tanya Mars, Paris/Toronto
Tanya Mars is well known for performance works in which she creates spectacular images that function as living pictures. Considered one of Canada’s most innovative multidisciplinary artists, she has been active in the Canadian alternative art scene since the early 1970s. Her dramatic, humorous and satirical works—ranging from performance through to sculpture and video—have influenced an entire generation of artists over some 30 years. Her work is inspired by feminist and utopian perspectives and is witty, entertaining and at times bawdy.

Tanya Mars is a mentor to many emerging artists as an artist, teacher, curator and editor. She helped found Powerhouse in Montreal in 1973, one of the first feminist art collectives in Canada. She currently lives in Toronto and teaches at the University of Toronto Scarborough. (Canada Council for the Arts)

Pessi Parviainen
Pessi Parviainen is an interdisciplinary artist working in music, visual art, and performance, and specializing in work that combines all three. His work has taken the form of soundwalks, experimental music theatre, performance art and sound sculpture.

Parviainen began the KitaraRojekti (The Guitar Research Project) in 2007. Through researching experimental techniques, as well as instrument modifications and additions, the project aims to expand the visual, dramatic and gestural dimensions of the act of playing an electric guitar.

Satu Palokangas
Satu Palokangas is a dancer/performance artist, a certified Laban Movement Analyst and a Somatic Movement Educator. Her background is deeply imbedded in movement, improvisation and somatic studies. Currently she defines her work as interactivism, or a form of social choreography. (www.antifestival.com)

The Messianic Research Centre of Visual Ethics
MRCVE is a research organization established in 2002. It has been created to channel the critical study of visual phenomena from an ethical perspective. MRCVE operates from a scientific basis, seeking to point out some of the interfaces that define the world’s distinctiveness and to create modes that enable the collation of objective research results.

In the performance titled An initiation into western philosophy – part 2, MRCVE inducts the viewer through the history of western philosophy from its dawn to its nightfall. The methodological starting point is the following definition about the aim of philosophical research: When philosophy paints its grey in grey, then has a form of life grown old, and by means of grey it cannot be rejuvenated but only recognized; the owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk. (G.W.F. Hegel)