New Performance Turku Biennale
Coming Together 5.-10.9.2023

Performance art essentially exists in the encounter, tension and friction of people, actions, places, and communities. In the time of crisis, polarization and uncertainties, coming together is a way to decrease distance and build new connections. What have we learned in past years from being alienated from each other? How to reactivate a sense of connection with other bodies and other species? The biennale invites to investigate how performance art and other unusual experiences can create spaces for sharing. 

The New Performance Turku Biennale presents works from altogether 20 international artists and artist groups. In addition the biennale program consists of discussions, performance lectures and parties. The performances take place in various venues around the city of Turku: in theaters, museums, galleries, shops, streets, parks and community spaces. 

The biennale program presents meaningful, critical, and playful ways of finding each other. It explores new ways of relating to sites, communities and the city of Turku’s history, dreams, and futures. The acute political and environmental challenges of our contemporary world are in focus of many of the works presented. For the six days in September, the biennale is building a temporary community that shares experiences and time together.

Performance art and other unusual experiences

Performance art is a form of art that exists in the encounter actions that make the present flourish. It suddenly touches us gently, playfully, and vanishes after tickling our imagination. It’s an invitation to wake up, it acts as a thought-provoking machine, and as a path to find each other again. 

Performance art means a fraction of time, an action, a gesture, a site and a temporal community give birth to something unexpected. As you watch the artist perform, you are taking part with your own body, your attention, in the crafting of a moment. As you are touched, they too are touched by your presence. 

In many ways performance is the art of coming together. A place for questions, a place for finding one another. 

In the works of the artists at the New Performance Turku Biennale 2023, we are all invited to resonate and to be present. How can a performance help us see differently and deeper into the complex web of connections and tensions of our contemporary life?

e n t a n g l e d 

In an encounter we remember that we are right here on this earth, entangled with its creatures and its waters. We inhabit the earth that we continue breaking down and poisoning, even when we need (and very much want) to keep it alive and flourishing. How can we come to terms with such destruction, mourn the loss and work for new beginnings and survival? What is our response-ability to the land, this watery globe we treat as a resource that we often take for granted? 

Sonic explorations of Joanna Rajkowska (Poland) invoke the energies and voices of an injured land, and a choir resonates asking the earth for wisdom and forgiveness. Endangered and extinct species are in the focus of a performance group Every house has a door (USA), who together with Essi Kausalainen (Finland) evoke the intricacies of non-human life in their Carnival of Animals performance series on the stage of Turku City Theatre. Practices of care and of radical resistance are opened up in Wilhelm Blomberg’s (Finland) playful interactions, inside Turku Art Museum, where he asks: can we decentralize our priorities from human’s insatiable demands? gustaf broms (Sweden) goes beyond the skin that separates us from all other beings, inviting a communal consciousness, breathing himself though matter, branches, earth, moss and water. Sajan Mani (India / Germany) suggests we  postpone the end of the world and take a moment to explore the collective indigenous cosmological perspective on bodies, water and space. Mark Požlep (Slovenia / Belgium) examines the dense global infrastructure of maritime transport and containerization.

 

i n t e r s e c t i o n s

We remember we aren’t really strangers to each other. Isn’t all strangeness an invitation to discover what is possible? What holds us together? What breaks us apart? 

An art of coming together is also an art of recognising where our limits stand, of asserting our boundaries. It’s also about inviting solidarities, and reaffirming our commitments with varied communities, other bodies, and creatures. 

Coming together pushes back the artificial boundaries that try to separate us, because of our bodies or different abilities, the pieces of paper we hold as our credentials, or our citizenship. 

Stand-up comedian Jamie MacDonald (Canada/Finland) will be hosting the opening night of the biennale with a show which bases its humor on his queer transgender experiences. Coming together is literally an encounter of two in Jamal Gerald’s (Great Britain) invitation to an honest conversation on the differences and misunderstandings that divide us and the human struggles that connect us. How do we still build trust, and solidarity? Coexistence is not frictionless, but it is a game of rules and power moves. Dash Che (Finland / Russia / USA) is here to remind us how we are put in boxes and how we can playfully refuse and repurpose them. Stefania Ólafsdóttir (Iceland / Finland) opens an exploration of our watery origins and the cultural and technological mediations that shape our existence, our bonds, our sense of belonging and our kinship. For Moe Mustafa (Jordan / Palestine / Finland) it is sound that captures in a common movement, a resonance, and in a joyful presence in our bodies in space together. Peeling an onion, cooking together, mourning the loss, Lotta Petronella (Finland) and Gabriela Ariana (Chile / Finland) invite a group to come around the nourishment and storytelling that we depend upon for resilience. 

i n   d i a l o g u e 

Whenever an encounter takes place, it is always in a concrete situation – a fragment of space and time – that inevitably shapes what the encounter means and who takes part in it. 

NPT residences and smaller events building up to the biennale are important components of the program that allow for a sustained conversation between the artists and different actors and places in the city. This permits long maturation times supported by our curatorial team, and has built as well a tradition of dialogues with sites and audiences in Turku. Ideas and places come together through the creative process.

Tapping into the history of the city and the visions of its future, Suvi Tuominen (Finland) interpellates the ambitious new Museum of History and The Future; she works on site, at the gentrified port premises that will host the upcoming museum. Diego Bianchi (Argentina) collaborates with local performers in an ensemble of improvisations. He turns shop windows into living dioramas to playfully resignify public spaces with objects, props, and engage the gaze of passersby.

By participating in a performance we come together through creative processes. Artist duo Ana Matey and Isabel León, as EXCHANGE LIVE ART, (Spain) open the floor to exchange their rich archive of performance scores with the audience and to explore collective creation in a playful installation. No performer will step on stage in Tuomas Laitinen’s (Finland) performance, but the audience itself is forming the performance as a collective corporeal intelligence.

Sometimes a performance can guide us to places we wouldn’t otherwise have an access to as does Recover Laboratory’s intervention (Finland), inviting us to an underground journey into the Kakola Hill, inside the Wastewater Treatment Plant.

Choreographer Yasen Vasilev (Bulgary) investigates in a solo-collective exploration what it means to be human, and re-imagines the limits and functions of the body to deconstruct (un)conscious habits of movement. For Sindri Runudde (Sweden) the encounter is of humans and a queer mythical seal creature. The dancers meet in a fantasy world, a sensory deep dive for young people and adults alike. Tuuli Vahtola and Iida Hägglund (Finland) propose a playful dissonance between a listening experience and a live dance performance, between mental journeys and shared, collective spaces. 

a u d i e n c e    a m b a s s a d o r s 

New Performance Turku comes back to life in September 2023 with a strong sense of the stakes we are facing as society and species. 

We want to hear people’s thoughts, stir the emotions and find out how we cope together with this uncertainty and these artificial boundaries that separate us. This time we are delighted to have in our team a group of Audience Ambassadors. It is the audience of the festival where all the resonance and the questions, the joy and the playful gathering of energies around performance take place. Proposing different paths and connections between varied works of the festival, NPT Ambassadors take the biennale journey as local hosts and participants. 

a c c e s s i b i l i t y 

NPT proposes a gathering that welcomes everyone, allowing us to explore together wherever we are coming from. Nothing is more important to the biennale than ensuring that everyone feels safe and welcome. The full programme is free of charge and open to everyone.

Check our safer spaces guidelines and follow the advice on arrival, accessibility and content warnings related to each performance. Some of the language-based performances will have Finnish sign language interpreters. A few of our partner venues are not physically accessible, and will be marked accordingly in the program. Do ask about any specific accessibility needs you may have as a member of the audience  – contact person can be found from the description of each performance. We also encourage you to give feedback about all of our activities, at any point. You can do it anonymously here.

Several works are particularly suited for families with children: for example Sindri Runudde’s Sälskap and Dash Che’s work.

Also many other works are suitable to experience with the younger members or the audience too. Age limit for the evening programme on Friday and Saturday is 18.

c o l l a b o r a t i o n s 

The New Performance Turku Biennale is coming together with various collaborators to expand and enrich the biennale experience with performance and Live Art professionals, curators, critics and students. Time For Live Art, supported by the Creative Europe program of the European Union, is a collaborative project gathering Studio Thor / Trouble Festival (BE), Performance Festival in Ljubljana (SI), New Performance Turku Biennale (FI) and MIR Festival (GR).

Emerging Curators Residency is organized together with The Performing Arts Centre – Eskus and it invites to the biennale five international and Finland-based curators working in the field of performance and Live Art. Critic in Residence is a residency program for a critic organized together with The Finnish Critics’ Association.

Performing Identity is an Erasmus+ funded project between art universities La Cambre (Belgium), Burren College of Art (Ireland), LE 75 (Belgium), UA Poznań (Poland) and festival partners New Performance Turku Biennale and Verão Azul (Portugal).

We are also proud to present the range of our local and national collaborators and communities: the City of Turku, Turku City Theatre, Aurinkobaletti, Tehdas Teatteri and Jokistudio, Turku Art Museum, Taiteen talo (House of the Arts), Regional Dance Centre of Western Finland, Kahvila Koroinen, Adventure Park Seikkailupuisto, Visit Turku Archipelago, Titanik Gallery, Turku Region Wastewater Plant, Tallink Silja, Pro Manilla Foundation and Manilla Culture Factory, Uniarts Helsinki, Turku Arts Academy and Goethe Foundation Finnland.

New Performance Turku Biennale is the occasion for c e l e b r a t i o n 

How can we talk about coming together if not through celebrating coexistence? Coming together is about being grateful for resilience, the many support structures that keep us going – help us thrive and create. 

Taking time together for the six biennale days in Turku, around a striking group of performance artists, we hope you will allow yourself to be surprised, moved and embraced by bodies, objects, creatures, rhythms, rites, discussions, silences, humming, brewing, touching, dancing, playing.

s u p p o r t e r s

Creative Europe program of the European Union, Erasmus+ program of the European Union, the City of Turku, Arts Promotion Centre Finland, Turku 2029 Foundation, Pro Manilla Foundation, Turun Teatterisäätiö (Turku Theatre Foundation), Kordelin Foundation, Finnish-Swedish Cultural Foundation, Embassy of the Argentine Republic in Helsinki, Telepart/Finnland-Institut in Deutschland, Goethe Foundation Finnland – thank you for making our contents possible.