I am a performance artist and a director. For the past decade I have been inventing new forms of performance based on the bodily experience of the audience and on questioning the nature of spectatorship.

For me art is a mystery with no purpose. But if there was a purpose, it would be emancipation; in performances the one emancipated is the spectator. In my performances this emancipation has been tangible:  spectators have kissed, fought, slept, eaten, vomited, tattooded themselves and contemplated beauty. They have been listened to, played with, tied up, blindfolded, rode, served, massaged, bathed and imprisoned.

I have planted the soles of my artistic feet in Reality Research Center, a Helsinki-based experimental performative arts collective committed to question the nature of reality. I have also worked as a freelance director and curator in the field of contemporary theatre and performance art in Finland, and have been active in creating organizational foundations for the unorganized field of performance there. Internationally I have worked in the US, Japan, Germany, Sweden and Portugal. In addition to performative works, I have been searching for ways to verbalise their meaning. I am a founding member of the editorial board of Esitys-magazine and have written reviews and articles in it and other publications, most of them in Finnish.

 

“Like the African shaman who chews his pepper seeds and spits seven times into the air, I believe art re-ritualizes the everyday to reveal something fresh about our lives. This revelation is a vitality and it is a power to change the world.”

William L. Pope