Mythological Migrations: Chapter 1: The Nightclub
Abdullah Qureshi is a Pakistani born artist, educator, and cultural producer. Within his practice, he is interested in using painting and collaborative methodologies to address personal histories, traumatic pasts, and childhood memories. His on-going doctoral project, Mythological Migrations: Imagining Queer Muslim Utopias, examines formations of queer identity and resistance in Muslim migratory contexts. In 2017, Qureshi received the Art and International Cooperation fellowship at Zurich University of the Arts, and in 2018, a research fellowship at the Center for Arts, Design, and Social Research, Boston. His work is currently supported by Kone Foundation, Finland.
Arshia Fatima Haq works across film, visual art, performance, and sound. Originally from Hyderabad, and Los Angeles-based, she is interested in counter-archives, speculative documentaries, and non-Western feminist practices, and is currently exploring themes of embodiment and mysticism, particularly within the Islamic Sufi context. She is also the founder of Discostan (est. 2011), the first space to transpose and reclaim the Islamic imaginary – from Buraq to psychedelic “Islamic states” – into and within a club setting, reconfiguring the dance floor as a devotional space. Discostan is an ever-evolving physical and virtual site of possibility, imagination, and liberation for immigrants and diaspora of South and West Asia and North Africa.
Tamara Al-Mashouk is a London-based Saudi artist. Through multi-channel video, performance, and architectural installation, her work explores the epigenetics of place and movement of people, with a particular focus on the intersections of being Arab, brown, queer, and female. Al-Mashouk is the founder of Queering Space, an on-going dialogue series that addresses sexuality and space, decolonial feminism(s), borders: both geographic and societal, and explores the word queer and queerness itself as sites of resistance and potential.
Zulfikar Ali Bhutto is a visual artist, performer, and curator. Bhutto’s work explores complex histories of colonialism that are exacerbated by contemporary international politics and in the process unpacks the intersections of queerness and Islam through a multi-media practice.
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Coalition Of Care:
Adelaide Bannerman is a freelance project manager and curator. She has helped to deliver numerous exhibitions, projects and events for institutions for just over 20 years, and currently works for International Curators Forum. Her independent research interests valorise performative gestures and engagements with live and visual performance art. She is also interested in exploring, noting and co-opting movement and improvisatory methods as part of her curatorial practice
Daze Aghaji is an environmental activist and stood in the 2019 European elections as a Climate and Ecological Emergency Independent. She is a member of the international movement Extinction Rebellion seeking to consult with fellow activists along the journey. Aghaji is concerned also about the representation of Black and POC presences and voices in global environmental activist movements.
Ain Bailey is a sound artist, DJ and workshop facilitator. Her practice involves an exploration of sonic autobiographies, architectural acoustics, performance, as well as collaborations with performance and visual artists. In 2019 she was part of the group exhibitions ‘The Range’ at at Eastside Projects, Birmingham and ‘RE: Respite’ at Transmission Gallery, Glasgow, Scotland, and had a solo show at Cubitt Gallery, London, entitled ‘And We’ll Always Be A Disco In The Glow Of Love’. Currently, following a commission by Serpentine Projects, Bailey is conducting sound workshops with LGBTI+ refugees and asylum seekers.
Anna Tjé yis a performance artist, researcher and founder of Atayé collective. Through a transdisciplinary practice at the intersections of the body gestures, poetry, music, textile, objects and video, Anna Tjé aims to deconstruct the survival mechanisms of healing in “subcultures”. Navigating through contemporary creation and research, she tackles performance art as well as film objects and installations in order to explore the notions of intimacy, trauma and resilience within the black female mind and body. Pulling from her personal archive and from the trajectories of black women feminists and queer activists from the African Diaspora throughout the world, she questions the property of Utopia, science-fiction and spirituality as vectors of emancipation and communication.
Black Obsidian Sound System (B.O.S.S.) was established in the summer of 2018 with the intention of bringing together a community of queer, trans and non binary people of colour involved in art, sound and radical activism. Following in the legacies of sound system culture we wanted to learn, build and sustain a resource for our collective struggles. The collective running the system continues to grow and evolve and currently includes: Adae, Deborah Findlater, Evan Ifekoya, Gin Resis’Dance, Jlte, Hakeem Kazeem, Marcus, Macdonald, Mellowdramatics, Mwen, Naeem Davis, Natasha Nkonde, Onyeka Igwe, Shenece Oretha, Phoebe Collings-James Shy One, Sad Queers Club (sqc), Shamica
Katarzyna Perlak is a Polish born artist, based in London whose practice employs video, performance, sound and installation. Perlak’s work is driven by politics and feelings; examines queer subjectivities, migration and potentiality of affect as a tool for registering and archiving both present continuous and past historical moments. She is currently developing ‘tender crafts’ methodology and explores the relationships between notions of utopia, hope and the concept of the ‘wish landscape’.
Rebecca Bellantoni is an artist based in London. Bellantoni mines everyday occurrences and abstracts them. Investigating, through the lens of metaphysics, comparative theology, philosophy, religion and spirituality and the aesthetics of them. She gently prises apart the concept of the accepted/expected ‘real’ and the experiential ‘real’; looking at how these removed borders may offer meditative experiences and portals to healing thought. Her practice is wide ranging and encompasses video, performance, photography, textiles, printmaking, sculpture, writing and sound-text.
Rowdy SS is a London born and based artist. Often working at the intersection of sound/music, dance/movement and live performance alongside making videos; his works have delved into love, explored the societal implications of being, first a black boy then man and mined life to share his vision of said life. Rowdy is a Somerset House Studios Resident Artist, and also leads master classes and workshops for young people at The Roundhouse Camden, Slade School of Fine Art, Goldsmiths University and The Yard Theatre.
Maija Baijukya
Maija Baijukya is a self taught critical theorist, artist and organiser based it Helsinki. A Black queer non-binary mother of two, her art works through the untapped rage and intergenerational sorrows of her foremothers and strives to lead to a healing space for all involved.
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Karmaklubb*:
Dj Baby Dyke: A fluid creature, sometimes even a surprise to oneself. A love for really good club music and obscurities, cross time and space—from house with Arabic beats to minimal European electro, 70s samples and fresh house. Up for queering social spheres; breaking down boundaries.
Karolinski (aka Karoline Hegrenes) is not to be categorized, although some call her music dub tech. She recently released her first full length record, Abnormal Soundcape (2018), to great reviews. Fun facts: She runs her own record label, Fjordfjellogdaler (FFDR), is a base jumper, does downhill board … to mention a few. A cool lady and beautiful nerd.
Konsept [X] is a Bergen-based DJ-collective, organizational platform for visibility and hands-on-opportunities in the cultural field. Konsept [X] was established in 2017 with the aim of promoting diversity and balance in the music industry. They are also a non-profit organisation with the mission to be an inclusive arena for people who are interested in expressing themselves through music and other cultural endeavors.
Eva Rowson is an artist, curator, cocktail maker and producer based in London. Her work is organised around how we host, collaborate, build organisations—and how the different types of work involved are valued, and with what consequences. This research has been at the core of several collaborative projects including the art space 38b co-run from her living room in London and ‘golden jar’, a platform to support female and non-binary people working on and off stage in music in Bergen.
Harald Beharie and Louis Schou-Hansen recently went in to production of their new piece Shine Utopians, which will premiere at Dansens Hus, Oslo—the national stage for dance—November 7–10 this year. The project will take shape as one piece, performed in the context of making a fake new society over the course of four days at Dansens Hus. During these days there will be ongoing talks/lectures, guest performances, concerts, dinners, open morning practices and a party. Parts of the talks and lectures program + the party will be curated and executed in collaboration with Karmaklubb*. Harald and Louis both studied dance at Oslo National Academy of the Arts (KHiO) where they graduated in 2015.
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Camille Auer is an anarchist trans bitch artist, writer and performer. She works with sound, words, digital image and direct action. Her subject matter is the friction and diffraction that takes place in and between micro and macro realities, subject and object formation, matter and meaning, and marginalised individuals in an oppressive society.
Mercedes Azpilicueta is an Argentine visual and performance artist based in Amsterdam. Her practice has spanned theatrical mises-en-scènes and video installations, textile sculptures and drawing, sound works and 3D animation. With a particular interest in notions of the vulnerable or collective body, and the primal or dissident voice, her works have drawn inspiration from sources as diverse as Baroque painting, text messaging, medieval tapestries, street slang, and literary fiction.
Berlin-based artist Yael Bartana is known for her photographs, films and installations that deal with questions of national identity. The starting point is her native country Israel. Key concepts for her work are “Homeland”, “Return” and “Belonging”. Her works construct narratives, create a distance, and offer us unorthodox views of existing states of affairs. The familiar settings are given a twist, to see whether the current situation looks different from another angle. In her films Bartana uses aesthetic interventions, such as altered soundtracks, slow motion and unusual camera angles. Bartana´s works have been shown in leading biennials and museums around the world.
Leah Beeferman lives and works in New York. Her digital prints, videos, sound pieces, and texts explore the relationships among observation and abstraction, natural and digital, physical and experiential.
Bonaventure is Soraya Lutangu’s nom de guerre. Under this alias, she has been developing sonic weaponry designed to confront oppressive power structures, tell the story of violence, indifference and abuse fuelled by racism.She uses music as an identity research tool along with practical and speculative initiatives to connect her African and European roots and investigate human relationships.
Tony Cokes makes video, installation, print, sound, and other works that reframe appropriated texts to reflect upon capitalism, subjectivity, knowledge, and pleasure. Cokes deploys sound as a crucial, intertextual element, complicating minimal visuals. He has shown works internationally at venues including Tate Modern, London, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, Museum of Modern Art, and Whitney Museum, New York, Schinkel Pavillion, Berlin and Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, among others. His work is represented by Greene Naftali, New York, Hannah Hoffman, Los Angeles, and Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York.
Jonathas de Andrade was born in Maceió and lives in the north-east of Brazil in Recife, a coastal city rich in contrasts, where old colonial buildings nestle amidst modern skyscrapers and where the failure of the tropical modernist utopia is a tangible reality. Anthropology, pedagogy, politics and morals are the lines of inquiry pursued by the artist to recount the paradoxes of modernist culture. De Andrade gathers together and catalogues images, texts, life stories and material on architecture, and, through memory, pieces together a personal narrative of the past.
Curator with a special interest in definitions of new models of contemporary art and its production, the construction of public space, language, and art practices defined as ‘non-authoritarian.’ Eva González-Sancho Bodero has been responsible for curating over 50 exhibitions at different art centres, of which half have involved the production of new work. González-Sancho Bodero is currently co-curating (alongside Per Gunnar Eeg-Tverbakk) osloBIENNALEN FIRST EDITION 2019–2024.
Núria Güell‘s artistic practice is about the analysis of how power devices affect our subjectivity, subjecting it to law and hegemonic moral. The main resources that she uses in her work are to flirt with the established powers, complicity with different allies and the uses of privileges that artistic institutions she works with have, as well as those socially granted to her for being a Spanish and European. These tactics, diluted into her own life, are developed in specific contexts intending to question commonly-assumed identifications and cause a disruption in power relations.
The work of Mette Edvardsen is situated within the performing arts, dance and choreography. Although her work explores other media and formats, such as video, books and writing, her interests always focus on the relationship to the performing arts as a practice and a situation. A retrospective of her work was presented at Black Box theatre in Oslo in 2015.
Terike Haapoja is a visual artist based in New York. With a specific focus in encounters with nature, death and other species, Haapoja’s work investigates the existential and political boundaries of our world. Haapoja’s work raises questions about how different structures of exclusion and discrimination function as foundations for identity and culture. The notion of a world that is deeply rooted in the physicality and co-existence of beings and their multiple lifeworlds is at the core of Haapoja’s politically and ethically driven practice.
Hlynur Hallsson lives and works in Iceland and Germany. Language and communication play essential roles in his practice as an artist and curator, and in his work, which moves across mediums, from installation to photography. Through conceptual and purposeful multilingualism, Hallsson explores the semantic difficulties of communication surrounding a work of art and the cultural preconditions of, and multifarious opportunities for, interpretation.
Honkasalo-Niemi-Virtanen is a Helsinki based collective (2013-) of three artists working in the fields of music, theatre and time-based arts. Their research-oriented and multi-disciplinary practice has as its main focal point the tension between historical narratives and the uncertain borderlands between scientific facts, myths and imagination. The most significant works of the Collective are Chimera (2018), 7 Days Before the Deluge (2017) and Landslides, a Portrait of Mary Anning (2015). In 2018 Honkasalo-Niemi-Virtanen won the prize Critics Award for a new artistic breakthrough. At the moment the collective is in residence at ISCP New York for a 6-month period.
House of Disappointments is a creative club kid collective founded in spring 2017. Their main goal is to dress to impress and break norms of appearance, self expression and gender roles in a funny but sometimes provocative way. House of Disappointments is inspired by fashion, pop culture, drag queens and other club kids of the world. Personality is important to House of Disappointments and most of the looks are self-made or altered from second hand clothes.
Max Jaarte explores the nooks of dusky and enigmatic dance music, weaving together sludgy rhythms with twilit sounds of wave, industrial & electro.
Easily recognisable by his choices in clothing and makeup, Jopo Sḯmeon K has been a regular character in the Helsinki club scene for quite some years now. His biggest inspirations in both music and style have always been the goth kids, new wave punks, ravers and other rebels from previous decades till today and most of his dj sets have been built from that same vibe. However, no matter the amount of synth and wave he enjoys swimming in, nothing still beats the groovy disco beats we all know and love.
Karrabing Film Collective (est. 2013, Australia) is a grassroots Indigenous media group consisting of over twenty members. They approach filmmaking as a mode of self-organization and a means of investigating contemporary social conditions of inequality. Screenings and publications allow the Karrabing to develop local artistic languages and allow audiences to understand new forms of collective Indigenous agency. Their films represent their lives, create bonds with their land and intervene in global images of Indigeneity.
Keep It Complex is a collaborative and evolving organisation which confronts political issues through ideas and action. It’s about using art to have conversations with people you don’t usually talk to. It’s about not giving in to fear and apathy. Keep It Complex is about making clear what we want, without simplifying discussion: a peaceful, caring, angry, anti-austerity, factual, DIY, transnational, struggling, messy, family-friendly, queer, inclusive, intergenerational, generous, diverse society.
Valentin Kimstedt works in various fields of electronic music. He uses hardware most of the time. He collaborates with the Artistic Duo varialambo. He is based in Istanbul and working on the first release with his partner Abdul Jabbar Din. Hatz Lambo works in literature, performance and installation. He is researching on the Rape Prevention Chip D.E.X.Y. – invented by the Feminist Guerilla Group Dust and Seeds. Varia Sjöström is a performer, musician and actress from Berlin. As a descendent of the Feminist Guerilla Group Dust and Seeds her work is focussed on the Rape Prevention Chip D.E.X.Y. – and the impact of fragmentation through violence. Together Lambo and Sjöström have founded the Artistic Duo varialambo. They are both based in Helsinki.
Chris Kraus is a Los Angeles–based filmmaker, writer, art critic, and editor whose novels include I Love Dick (1997), Aliens & Anorexia (2000), Torpor (2006), and Summer of Hate (2012). She has written countless reviews, essays, and stories for publications such as Artforum, Art in America, Modern Painters, Afterall, The New Yorker, The New York Times Literary Supplement, The Paris Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Bookforum, and Texte zur Kunste. Along with Sylvère Lotringer and Hedi El Kholti, Kraus is co-editor of the publishing house Semiotext(e).
Linda Lazarov strives to diversify and challenge the dance floors of her home city Helsinki. Uncompromising yet pleasing, she’s a connoisseur of electro but you won’t be hard-pressed to find her mix it up with EBM, post punk and techno, always searching for synergy through stark, eerie and pulsating soundscapes.
Basim Magdy (b. Asyut, Egypt) works with film, moving image, photography, text, painting, drawing, installation and sculpture. He has had solo exhibitions in Europe and the US. The passing of time, past, present and future, is central to Basim Magdy’s work. Combining poetic language with a playful sense of the absurd, his works on paper and in film, photography and slide projection explore the hopefulness and failure of ambitions for a utopian future. Over time, cycles unfold as history is repeated and present is revealed to be determined by the past.
Marepe (acronym of Marcos Reis Peixoto) is from an area in North Eastern Brazil where much of the inspiration for his work originates. The thematic repertoire of Marepe’s work is full of questions associated to his origins and personal life. Thus, there are works that bring in references to domestic practices and customs, the sphere of labour and commerce, popular celebrations, childhood and family memories, artist’s dreams and encounters. It is interesting to observe how many of these references, so very local and personal in nature, are displaced and made to travel, translated to different contexts in Brazil and, above all, internationally.
Mona Marzouk graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts, Düsseldorf in the late 90s and has been widely exhibited. Recent solo exhibitions include: BARK, Gypsum Gallery, Cairo (2018); RENEWAL, Villa Romana, Florence, Italy (2015). Selected group exhibitions include: Very Sustainable–Environmental Revelation, MOCA, Museum of Contemporary Art, Yinchuan, China (2017); Terra Mediterranea in Action, NiMAC, Nicosia (2017); Terra Mediterranea in Action, HALLE 14 – Centre for Contemporary Art, Leipzig (2016).
MSL: Antti Jussila is a collaborator. He makes art with a variety of media and others. His practice is about the labour of getting it together. Currently he works actively with MSL, Anna Breu and mörkrum, whose work has been presented in exhibitions and festivals such as Manifesta 10, Rotterdam International Film Festival, CCA Derry-Londonderry, Turku Art Museum, HAM Gallery and Zodiak among other places. Jari Kallio is a visual artist based in Helsinki, Finland. He works with a variety of media including moving images, performance and installation. His personal and collaborative works blend fantasy, sci-fi and virtuality with everyday life. Kallio works actively in artist collectives and groups such as MSL, kallio manninen and Anna Breu. Kallio’s work has been presented in exhibitions and festivals such as Manifesta 10, Rotterdam International Film Festival, CCA Derry-Londonderry, Kunsthalle Osnabrueck, Turku Art Museum, HAM Gallery, Mad House and Zodiak among other places.
Helsinki-based DJ Mr. A has been at the epicenter of Finland ‘s queer club scene for more than 2 decades: first and foremost as a DJ, then as a promoter, producer and later a radio host. Mr.A’s sets are always biographical. They are a smoothly balanced, incredibly accurate cross-section of the old and the new, always offering the floor the taste of today and tomorrow but never forgetting the roots and history of house disco or techno.
An eternal believer in the transcending power of music, Hanna Ojanen plays disco and house to bring the disco ball, the campfire of our ancestors, to the heart of every dancer. Fine art student and vinyl junkie. Yu Chuan established himself as a DJ after moving from Taiwan to Helsinki for study. He cultivates deep, sunny grooves with passion for Chicago and Detroit sound as well as disco and funk influences.
The Otolith Group consists of Anjalika Sagar and Kodwo Eshun who live and work in London. During our longstanding collaboration The Group have drawn from a wide range of resources and materials. We incorporate film making and post-lens-based essayistic aesthetics that explore the temporal anomalies, anthropic inversions, and synthetic alienation of the posthuman, the inhuman, the non-human, and the complexity of the environmental conditions of life we all face.
Jaakko Pallasvuo: As a Finnish artist I am interested in nature. In the encounter between the Sea and the Forest. I place my body on the line, and experience the ecological urgencies with corporeal intensity. I make performances here on the island, and invite diverse practitioners to share their discursive knowledge with me. Together we are, we practice Just Being, in the magical Finnish way, on this pier overlooking a dying ecosystem. We light the fire in the cabin stove only using torn pages from Bruno LaTour and Donna Haraway books. This is a #courageousinitiative #braveexploration #välinefoundation
Bhavisha Panchia is a curator and researcher of visual and audio culture, currently based in Johannesburg. Her works engage with artistic and cultural practices under shifting global conditions, focusing on anti/postcolonial discourses, imperial histories and networks of production and circulation of (digital) media. A significant part of her practice centres on auditory media’s relationship to geopolitical paradigms, particularly with respect to the social and ideological signification of sound and music in contemporary culture.
David Burrows and Simon O’Sullivan work as Plastique Fantastique, a collaboration produced with Alex Marzeta and Vanessa Page and others including Mark Jackson, Motsonian, Benedict Drew. Through film, music and song, images, artifacts and performance, the UK-based group deliver communiques addressing precarious ecologies, nascent tech-life, animals that speak and and non-human agents.
Anni Puolakka is a visual and performance artist based in Helsinki and Rotterdam, NL. She incorporates biographical and documentary materials into fictional worlds in her videos, performances, installations and images. They play with the boundaries and potential of humans as they seek meaningful and vibrant – sometimes drowsy or ambivalent – involvement with other beings and objects. Puolakka’s work is often collaborative and situated between visual art, performance, theater and cinema. Her works have recently been shown at Kim? (Riga), No Moon (NYC), Bunkier Sztuki (Krakow), Le Lieu Unique (Nantes), Kiasma Museum of Modern Art (Helsinki), and Performance Space (Sydney).
Sepideh Rahaa is a multidisciplinary artist and researcher based in Helsinki. Through her practice, she questions social norms and conventions while focusing on womanhood and resistance, silenced histories and migration, and the body and representation. Currently she is pursuing her doctoral studies in Contemporary Art at Aalto University, focusing on identity transformation and hybridity with a critical and analytical view on representation and image production. Rahaa aims to initiate methods within contemporary art for creating spaces for dialogue.
Kate Rich is an artist and trader, based in Bristol (UK). In 2003, uneasy at the prospects for long term survival in an art world shaped around narrow funding channels, she started Feral Trade, a grocery business trading coffee, olive oil, cola and other vital goods. For the past 5 years she has been conducting workshops in ‘outsider’ business and economics and in 2019 convened and hosted RADMIN, Britain’s first Festival of Administration. She has recently embarked on a long-term project to design and launch the Feral MBA, a radically different kind of business school for artists which considers business and administration as neglected sites for design experiments, radical politics and meaningful work.
Schoolboi Cute is a Helsinki based dj formerly known as Matheuw. Music-wise Schoolboi doesn’t fit inside a box, but rather likes to explore more freely in and outside each box. Schoolboi’s selections might contain variable amounts of; sex, sweat, tears, bass, acid, breaks, techno, house, vogue house/ballroom, baltimore club, booty bass, dancehall, ambient and whatnot.
Skuja Braden (founded in 1999) is a bi-national same-sex collaborative duo based in Aizkraukle, Latvia. This double-headed, four-armed creature sits up late at night imagining parallel worlds where bodies are made of porcelain, flames leap out of oceans and lips touch lips, delivering cool water from inside. Skuja Braden’s works contain a fierce strain of feminism, political commentary and pinches of Buddhism. These elements come together in faceless little beasts that relate to each other through spatial installations while always referencing the ageless traditions of ceramic and porcelain.
Leyya Mona Tawil is an artist working with dance, sound and performance art practices. Leyya is a Syrian, Palestinian, American engaged in the world as such. Her 23-year record of compositions and performance scores have toured throughout the US, Europe and the Arab world. Lime Rickey International is the “alter ego” of Leyya Mona Tawil – it is her container for narrating current realities in the global Arab diaspora via ‘future folkdances’ built with elements of contemporary dance, Arabic folk forms, sound art and conceptual art practices.
Through photography, film, video and performance, Vancouver artist Althea Thauberger is primarily concerned with the collaborative possibilities of the social documentary form. Her recent projects involve extended engagements with the sites of their production in order to trace broader social and ideological histories. These sites include The Bohnice Psychiatric Hospital in Prague, Czech Republic; the former Rikard Benčić Factory in Rijeka, Croatia; the image holdings of the former National Film Board Still Image Division, now at the National Gallery of Canada; and the Capri Cinema in Saddar, Karachi, Pakistan.
DJ Wekesa aka Sophia Wekesa is a Helsinki-based dancer and a DJ. She’s a founding member of Mellow Yellow collective aiming to create safer spaces in music and club culture. Her sets include dancehall, r’n’b and afro beats. DJ Renaz aka Renaz Ebrahimi is known as a journalist and radio host, as well as a member of the Mellow Yellow collective. Her sets are focused on hip hop and R&B, combining both new and old, classics and new gems.