Dasha Che & Suvi Tuominen
We are Dasha Che (they/them) and Suvi Tuominen (she/her), a performance artist duo currently based in Helsinki, Finland. In our collaboration, which began in November 2019, we seek ways to destabilise conceptual and aesthetic processes in artmaking. We met in the Live Art and Performance Studies Master’s program at the University of the Arts Helsinki and felt deeply entangled with each other’s way of thinking, moving and being. We initiated our collaboration during our studies as a way of embodying the rich theoretical frameworks of the LAPS program. Our collaboration and ongoing project Sinking in the Time of Neoliberal Work Conditions has begun its unfolding at the Helsinki International Artist Programme (HIAP) summer residency 2020 and has actualised in events such as the UrbanApa festival in Ateneum 2020, site-situated practices in the REDI shopping mall 2020 and the Nordic Summer University 2020. We also created a public critical response to the International Dance Day Message 2020.
Our duo combines the modalities of dance, choreographic thinking, installation-making and performative writing with both personal narratives and critical theory. We are artistically passionate about the questions of labor, economy, body and the friction between live situations and digital images. In our new project, we work in a norm critical way, challenging different paradigms that cultural fields have established. One example of such a paradigm is the translation of live performances and events into digital images. This paradigm became intensified during the COVID19 pandemic. We want to challenge this already established norm and bring in the notion that it matters how, why and when live situations, bodies and affects are virtually displaced and digitized. Specifically, we chose to work with the concept of a pornographic image as one of the epitomes of a digitized body.
Photo
Photo in the slider by Sheung Yiu
Main picture by Sheung Yiu
Photo in the gallery by Marko Marila
