Past Residents Maria Metsalu
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Young boy dancing group, 2020
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Maria Metsalu, The Sun(preformance), 2022
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Photo by Stian Foss
Maria Metsalu is an Estonian choreographer and artist. She is creating visual performative works that regardless of the chosen medium place her own body in the epicentre. She views performative experiences and performing deviance as possibilities through which one may reflect upon the state of things and become inspired to act, formats through which collective memory could be created. Her work seeks to advance ambiguities, to proliferate meanings rather than systematise them into a clarity. She views performance as a radical space, capable of creating new meanings, new ways of looking and seeing.
Besides her solo work she is one of the founding members of international art collective Young boy dancing group.
During the residency I will be creating a zine together with Jaakko Pallasvuo (FI) (as a part of my recent project “ The Well”) and will start to work
on my next solo “The Sun (performance).”
From the beginning of 2021 I have been having writing sessions together with Jaakko Pallasvuo. A selection of these texts are currently being used in the performance version of “The Well” (premiere in December 2021 at Kanuti Gildi SAAL, Tallinn) and as well as a part of a group exhibition together with
Jaakko Pallasvuo and Tarvo Porroson (EST) at EKA Gallery, Tallinn. As a next step we are planning a zine which could exist both together with the performance as well as autonomously.
The “The Sun (performance)” is not a theory or a thesis. If it is anything, it is an experience – a radical contemplation about the Sun, the Human
and life of a Flower.
Using a keyboard as a tool and excuse, Metsalu questions the arbitrariness of her working life through acts of self-display as an object of spectacle – something that she both embraces and refuses. The show accommodates both chaos and its denial, it varies in bodily intensities like does the torrid, blinding Sun- oscillating between states of pleasure, indifference, passivity and suffering; hope and renewal, alienation and pain.
Maria Metsalu’s residency is realised with support
from the Nordic Culture Point.