How to Like Finland and How Finland Can Like Me (too)

This triptych performance work was made as an artistic part of MA thesis in Live Art and Performance Studies. The work dealt with the questions of patriotism, estrangement, foreignness, and institutional power through the means of fictioning, institutional critique, working with ready-mades, dance and conceptual art.

The work consisted of three consecutive parts staged in various locations significant in my life in Finland. 41st National Park of Finland opened in an abandoned playground in Merihaka apartment complex where I lived for several years. Factory of Patriotic Affects took place in one of the black box stages of Theater Academy in Helsinki - a place where I spent most of the time since I moved to the country to study. Small and Nice Immigrant Shop was installed in the old shopping center in Vantaa where I went for Eastern European food shopping.

Each fragment of the triptych bled into another, extended beyond its borders, left marks in each other’s territories just like a body of a foreign artist not contained in one place but spread and flickering in many simultaneously. Each artwork could be viewed as a beginning of a bigger artistic process where I commenced to explore my relationship with patriotism deeper through the modes of clashing various artistic registers together, examining bodily postures and intersecting references.

Photos by Joona Mäkelä. Merihaka, Helsinki, FI. September 2021.

Photo by Jussi Ulkuniemi. Theater Academy of University of Arts, Helsinki, FI. October 2021.

Photos by Anti Ahonen. IsoMyyri Mall, Vantaa, FI. November 2021.