New Performance Turku Biennale has invited artists to work in Turku during Autumn 2024 to develop their work towards the next edition of the New Performance Turku Biennale, 2.-7.9.2025. The artists invited to work at the residency are Parsa Kamehkhosh, Emil Santtu Uuttu, Gaëtan Rusquet, and Sara Wollasch. The artist introductions can be found below.
The purpose of the residencies is to invite artists to work long-term on site-specific, community-based, and situation-responsive projects. The residencies offer artists time to focus on developing their work, while facilitating connections with local communities. Collaborations with local partners play a key role, providing not only possible venues for presenting the works but also serving as contexts for sustained engagement. These partnerships enable artists to draw inspiration from and respond to the spaces, communities, and their activities.
Throughout 2024, the program builds a bridge towards the 2025 New Performance Turku Biennale. NPT Biennale, taking place from September 2 to 7, 2025, will feature performances by both Finnish and international artists, as well as lecture performances by researchers. The biennale aims to showcase cutting-edge international performance art, sensitively recognizing subtle signals from our environment and expressing them through artworks and experiences. Additionally, the biennale fosters the emergence of new artists onto the global performance art scene, and making accessible to wider audiences.
Residency artists’ work will be presented during Gaetan Rusquet’s workshop and at the “Performance and Pizza” evening at Manilla’s Vanha Viinatehdas on Friday, October 25, 2024, starting at 7 PM.
Residencies are organized in collaboration with Titanik Gallery/Arte, the Regional Dance Center of Western Finland, Pro Manilla Foundation, the Sibelius Museum, Studio Alta/Meet Factory.
Sara Wollasch
Sara Wollasch (b. 1997) is an artist whose work explores themes of physicality, care, and new forms of coexistence and cooperation. Her performances often involve nudity and the stylization of the body, which she uses to confront social and political oppression and express female empowerment. Wollasch studied under Lenka Klodová, Jan Ambrůz, and Pavel Korbička at the FaVU BUT in Brno, and has presented her work widely, including at Prague’s Studio ALTA, and in international festivals. She is currently a curator at UMAKART Gallery in Brno.
Emil Santtu Uuttu
Emil Santtu Uuttu‘s writing and stage works deal either with deep time, incessant change and pleasures or the role of memory institutions and historical research.
Parsa Kamehkhosh
Parsa Kamehkhosh (b. 1985) is a performance artist and designer currently residing in Vantaa, Finland. He often employs objects and materials as manifestations of contemporary human everyday aesthetics and in relation to various narratives that define the position of humans in the universe and beyond. His works maneuver on the borders of the inner and external worlds, natural and supernatural, seen and unseen.
Gaëtan Rusquet
Gaëtan Rusquet (he/him, 1984) lives and works in Brussels as a performer, dancer, choreographer and scenographer, from performing arts to visual arts. After studying applied arts at ENSAAMA, known as Olivier de Serre in Paris, obtained a master’s degree in scenography and performance at ENSAV La Cambre.
In his artistic proposals, Gaëtan Rusquet looks at how one fits into a place – and what makes a medium – whether it is space, light, sound, video, movement, objects or materials, less defined.
