- ÖH
Duration: 2h
“ÖH” is a multisensorial installation created from ordinary objects, large wooden structures, handmade rugs and textiles. The work binds together a sensorial logic as a choreographic proposition. Here subjects and objects are multiples, intertwining between different meanings and associations. A site, where colours narrate and textures dialogue. Sensuality, hybrids and the uncanny create an artistic world of discovery and divergence.
“ÖH”, arranges and deconstructs ordinary landscape into the poetics of everyday. An idea of piling up instead of dividing creates a world where many colours of human and objecthood are possible and explored. The work attempts towards liberation from binaries and construction of polyphony, where abrasion points, reverie, dissecting and care all play a well grounded part in an idea of creation that cannot be separated from destruction.
Jokiniemi searches between human and non-human beings for a space where the naive, intimate, surreal and unknown touch each other, a space for beauty that stands alone alongside mainstream aesthetics, while gearing towards a powerful metaphor for resistance and escape from categorization and limiting forms.
Jokiniemi´s work focuses on other possibilities than spoken language as integral knowledge formation practices. Hence drawings, symbols, signs, gestures and tactile materials play crucial parts in her choreographic corpus. Text is as much objects, movements, words and sounds. In ÖH, a catalogue of drawn images think the subconscious of the work by sculpting the performers’ embodiment and weaving into textile. The performance invites the audience into a web of weaving meaning and contact, tripping into the associative.
- About Sonja Jokiniemi
Sonja Jokiniemi works as a choreographer, performer and artist. Jokiniemi is based in Helsinki, Finland and Lausanne, Switzerland. She graduated from the Performing Arts programme at DAS Theatre in Amsterdam 2013 and with a BA degree in Contemporary Dance at Laban Centre in London 2006. Additionally she has completed a study in Expressive Arts therapy from Inartes Institute in Helsinki 2020.
In her work, Jokiniemi engages the practice of drawing, human and non-human actors, textile making, questions of language and communication and exploration of bodies and sensations as a way to think around networks of things and beings, their ordinary and uncanny relationships. She is interested in alternative modes of storytelling, of objects and processes traditionally located as women´s craft. She engages in a quest for manual labor, haptic relationship to the surrounding world and aesthetics of intimate resistances.
Sonja’s work has been supported by many performing arts venues such as STUK-A House for Dance, music and Image (BE), Zodiak Centre for Dance, Moving in November festival and Kiasma Contemporary Art Museum (FI), MDT (SWE), BUDA Kunstzentrum (BE). She has recently exhibited at Den Frie Centre for Contemporary Art in Copenhagen and Dr.Guislaan Museum in Ghent. Jokiniemi has been awarded three grants by The National Arts Promotion Centre Finland (Taike): a one-year artist grant for 2017, a three-year artist grant for 2018-20 and a five-year artist grant for 2021-2025.
- Credits
Performance & collaboration: Sonja Jokiniemi, Leila Kourkia, Marlon Moilanen, Herman Nyby, Maria Saivosalmi, Tuuli Vahtola
Choreography and concept: Sonja Jokiniemi
Visual design: Heikki Paasonen and Sonja Jokiniemi
Sound design: Gil Schneider
Rya rugs implementation: Aino Ojala, based on drawings by Sonja Jokiniemi
Producer (premier): Riikka Thitz
Photos: Katri Naukkarinen
Videoteaser: Mariangela PluchinoPremiere on 10.11.2020 in the frame of Moving in November festival & Zodiak – Center for New Dance
Co-production: Zodiak (Helsinki, FI), Moving in November festival (Helsinki, FI), STUK – A House for Dance, Image and Sound (Leuven, BE) in the framework of the Life Long Burning – Towards a sustainable Eco-System for Contemporary Dance in Europe project (2018-2022) supported by the Creative Europe programme of the European Union.
Residencies: Mad House Helsinki (FI)
Supported by: Arts Promotion Centre Finland, The Finnish Cultural Foundation
Visit supported by: Kulturfonden för Sverige och Finland and The Finnish Cultural FoundationProduction, touring and artistic advice: Moving in November/ Isabel Gonzalez & Kerstin Schroth
International distribution: Something Great
- Timetable
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