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PROGRAMME

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Presenter Biographies

Pia Euro & Tanja Kiiveri

Pia Euro is a visual artist and university lecturer in Aalto ARTS’ ViCCA, who has graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki. Her main interest as an artist is to study the very thin line that divides art from something we can think of not being art. Pia is very curious to find new ways to present art, and cross disciplinary practice is her thing. She works with various methods and mediums – from video installations to material and spatial installations, and performances.

Tanja Kiiveri is a visual artist and a lecturer of Time and Space Arts, at the Academy of Fine Arts in the University of the Arts Helsinki. She lives and works in Helsinki.

Denise Ziegler

born in Switzerland, is a Helsinki-based visual artist and researcher of public space. Currentlyworking as a postdoctoral researcher at the Academy of Fine Arts, University of the Arts Helsinki. Ziegler’s interventional artworks pose questions to public infrastructure, to walls, fences, buildings and pedestrian routes. In a post-beuysian vein, the artist’s workshop is extended to public space in order to work with its mechanisms and possibilities.

Vincent Roumagnac

is a French-Basque theatre artist and researcher based in Helsinki. Interested in the way the notion and the practice of the “stage” evolve through climate-morphing and techno-conditioning, Roumagnac’s work materializes through multiple forms such as installations, performances, and videoscenic acts. Roumagnac is currently undergoing a postdoctoral research titled DATA OCEAN THEATRE as a visiting researcher at Tutke Performing Arts Research Centre Uniarts Helsinki. The artistic research is supported by Kone Foundation.

Annette Arlander

is an artist, researcher and a pedagogue, one of the pioneers of Finnish performance art and a trailblazer of artistic research. Graduated from the department of directing at the Theatre Academy 1981, Doctor of Arts (Theatre and Drama) 1999. Professor of Performance Art and Theory at Theatre Academy 2001-2013. Professor of artistic research at University of the Arts Helsinki 2015-16. Professor in performance, art and theory at Stockholm University of the Arts 2018-2019. AVEK, Media Art Prize 2014, State Prize for Multidisciplinary art 2018. https://annettearlander.com/

Pekka Niskanen & Mohamed Sleiman Labat 

Pekka Niskanen is a Helsinki and Paris based media artist, filmmaker, researcher, and a Doctor of Fine Arts. He has been exhibiting and curating exhibitions since 1990 in museums, galleries and film festivals around Europe, North America and Asia. His dissertation from the University of the Arts Helsinki is titled Art in the Construction of Identity Politics (2014). Niskanen has worked as a director of several community art films and video projects. He has worked in theatre productions mainly as a scenographer, e.g. Verdi’s Rigoletto in Göteborgsoperan. His teaching and pedagogy in universities are based on shared responsibilities with students, not forgetting the diverse and different places and positions of the participants.

Mohamed Sleiman Labat is a visual artist and a poet, born and raised in the Sahrawi refugee camps. In 2016, after graduating from Batna University with a degree in English literature, Sleiman Labat went back to his community. In 2017 he collaborated with English poet Sam Berkson to collect the oral poems from the greatest desert poets and translated them into English, published in the book Settled Wanderers. Sleiman Labat has built a multipurpose community and artist studio space Motif Art Studio in Samara camp. The studio is now a small hub for art creation and art education and has hosted a number of workshops, interactive sessions, talks and collaborations with local and international collaborators.

Elina Lifländer 

(DA) is a scenographer, spatial artist and University Lecturer in Design for the Performing Arts at Aalto University. Her works have been presented in several theatres and galleries in Finland and in international events such as the Prague Quadrennial and in the Research Pavilion at Venice Biennale. Since 2008 she has been exploring and researching alternative materials and working ways for scenographer from the immaterial point of view.

Mari Mäkiranta, Jonna Tolonen & Eija Timonen

Dr Mari Mäkiranta is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Lapland, Faculty of Art and Design, and an Adjunct Professor at the University of Jyväskylä, Department of Music, Art and Culture Studies. Mäkiranta’s work has focused on socially engaged visual arts, feminist epistemologies and arts-based research. She is a Principal Investigator in the Academy of Finland awarded Floating Peripheries – Making Sense of the Place sub-project. She has written several peer-reviewed articles and books and curated and exhibited art works in national and international contexts. She intertwines communal, embodied, affective and performative expressions in her video and photography art practices. 

Jonna Tolonen is a photographer and a postdoctoral researcher at the Faculty of Art and Design at the University of Lapland, Finland. Her thesis was titled ‘Visage of Madrid – Illegal Graffiti as a Part of Spanish 15-M Protests’. Jonna is a member of INDAGUE, the Spanish Association of Researchers of Graffiti and Urban Art, and has published widely on Spanish street art. Her current research interests deal with visual culture, socio-environmental justice, and artivism.

Dr Eija Timonen is an emerita professor at the University of Lapland, and an adjunct professor at the Aalto University Department of Film, Television and Scenography. She has led several research projects, and served as a member of the executive team at international and national conferences and academic journals. Alongside the research, she has an active art career in photography and fiction writing. The results of her work have been featured in many exhibitions, books, animations as well as in ice art-based-research articles (see www.lightofice.net).

Kaisa Karvinen & Tommi Vasko

Kaisa Karvinen is a Helsinki based architect and researcher, who has worked in the field of architecture from theoretical research to city planning and done spatial design for museums.

Tommi Vasko is a Helsinki based graphic designer and -researcher who writes theoretical and fictional texts about design practises of the near future and about visual phenomena rising between emerging information technologies and ecological thinking.

Kaisa and Tommi are the curators of (Re)configuring Territories research programme in Narva in Eastern Estonia. They are two founders of the autonomous educational platform Trojan Horse, an independent initiative that organizes summer schools, live action role-plays and other events in order to explore the boundaries and preconditions that define the field in which architects and designers operate today.

Naya Magaliou

is a visual artist based in Athens, Greece, and holds a master’s degree in Visual Cultures, Curating and Contemporary Art from Aalto University, Helsinki, Finland (2020). As a transdisciplinary practitioner, she moves freely between mediums, and this mobility of form lies at the heart of her practice. She works with print, painting, installation, typography, live performance and digital video. She is currently engaging in print and research-based work about creative labour practices, process driven thinking and how these issues inform hers and others’ practices. In addition, she has spent the last year collecting footage and memories about the identity of the female and European body.

Inna Sukhenko 

is a PhD candidate of World Literature Dept., Dnipro National University (Ukraine). Her current project focuses on ‘literary energy narrative’ within energy humanities. Her research interests include environmental and energy humanities, ecocriticism, nuclear criticism, comparative literature, and eco narratology. She is one of the contributors of The Routledge Handbook of Ecocriticism and Environmental Communication, Ed. S. Slovic etc (2019) and Energy Humanities and Energy Transition. Current State and Future Directions. Ed. M. Mišík etc (2020). She has been a fellow of the University of Cambridge (2013), University of Ohio (2015), University of Warsaw (2016), and University of Helsinki (Humanities Program, 2017).

Virpi Nieminen

is a visual artist and scenographer based in Helsinki, currently finishing her MA in Design for Performing Arts at Aalto University. She has worked in contemporary dance, immersive and site-specific performances, installation and live art. The relationship between the body and space is at the centre of her work. She thinks of the body as a scenographic medium and wants to develop scenography as a method for bodily practice. In her artistic work she wants to go beyond the limits of her knowledge, to get in touch with the unknown, foreign and strange.