A choreographic installation by Simo Kellokumpu (FI), in collaboration with Vincent Roumagnac (FR) and Nao Yazawa (JAP).

pompom
Gallery Augusta (Suomenlinna B 28/2, Susisaari)
17 – 21 October 2018

Welcome to the opening on Thursday 18 October from 5 pm to 8 pm!

Opening hours:
Preview on Wednesday 17 October from 5 pm to 8 pm.
Thursday 18 and Friday 19 October from 10 am to 8 pm.
Saturday 20 and Sunday 21 October from 1 pm to 6.30 pm.

Choreographer Simo Kellokumpu presents the final outcome of his project pompom, which was carried out in Tokas (Tokyo Arts and Space) residency from September to November 2017 (Helsinki-Tokyo Residency Exchange).

pompom is a work in collaboration with two other artists: French theater-artist Vincent Roumagnac, and Japanese manga-artist Nao Yazawa. The project is based on the questions of Kellokumpu’s current artistic practice and doctoral artistic research project Choreography As a Reading Practice. pompom examines the choreographic embodiment of the relations in between movement, place, and material surrounding in the frameworks of hyper-mobile Tokyo, in contextual dialogue with Japanese art of manga.

The project filters experiential movements of Tokyo by compounding western site-specific and context responsive choreographic practice with contemporary science-fiction and Japanese manga. The starting points for the project lies in questions such as: How, as a temporary guest (or “choreoreader”), to embody contemporary Tokyo through the lense of movement? How does Tokyo and its moving spaces, mobility systems, and transforming materiality affect the experience of place, and how they shapeshift choreographer’s body? What kind of choreographic art is produced by inhabiting, and translating these intermassive movements with Japanese manga? What kind of critical and material meeting points, parallel interests, translations, transpositions, paradoxes, and tensions are emerging when intimate western practice meets the megalopolis of Tokyo, through a dialogue with Japanese manga?

The working group has produced a large-scale installation, which consists of five Tokyo-responsive videos and 25 manga panels (+ mangabook), which expose the queer manga character pompom. These elements and their critical dialogue materialize the choreographic embodiment in which the machine, the human, and the cosmos intraconnect, entangle, and bug in a state of constant becoming-other in the framework of the posthumanist visual culture.

After being shown in Gallery Augusta at HIAP this October, pompom will travel back to Tokyo and will be installed in Tokas Residency exhibition space from 7th to 22nd of December.

The project is supported by the Finnish Cultural Foundation, HIAP – Helsinki International Artist Programme, TOKAS (Tokyo, Japan) and Arts Promotion Centre Finland.