PERFORMANCES + INSTALLATIONS
As we reach the end, we go to the beginning, which only means the end must change
2024, Sound and soil installation in Taivallahti Pier, Helsinki in collaboration with Maiju Loukola
Above: Still photos from 'As we reach the end' installation, 2024
The legacy of market capitalism lives in the language we try to think against it and binds our imagination and in its worst rhetorically drags prematurely vital spaces into ruins. To retain sensations and transcend time. What is done today becomes as ruins of the future. In thousand years, as the aesthetic capsules of the 2024 are opened, we will see what kind of deadlock the then existing beings were facing.
This work speculatively attends the not-yet-been future and imagines the Taivallahti site and the planned spa hotel as a ruin inhabited by more than human beings and materials and a newly cultivated landscape with specific characteristics and streams of life. It imagines the area as multi species condition, fragile, fleeting, unpredictable, but still resilient, entangled by human and more than human rhythms. It knows no bounds or limits and continuously alters durations as we know them. The work can be experienced by walking around in the Taivallahti pier area and by paying careful attention to the surroundings and scanning QR-codes for the sound.
Taivallahti Protectorate was a quicksand-like working group by Henna-Riikka Halonen and Maiju Loukola and Chat GPT and Midjourney AI’s. They let their interventional practices land on the Taivallahti peninsula in parataxis, side by side, for a period of time as wind blows.
Listen to the sound installation
Photos: Vincent Ganza and Henna-Riikka Halonen
SPILTH
2023 installation
Above: Still photos from 'Spilth' installation, 2023
The installation Spilth is a multispecies assemblage that consists of strange things, beings, and materials that have at some stage fallen on my path and have since refused to leave me alone. Each of them has a different time, a unique history, and a material genealogy that intertwines. Together, this range of organic and synthetic materials and beings that might be considered invasive or waste create a network of meanings that remind me once more about the entanglement of contemporary humans in the cycle of consumption.
For me, they stand as enigmatic players, they absorb, adapt, thrive, and persist often in defiance of our attempts at containment. Thinking has emerged from working with and giving careful attention to them. Asking what is it that this kind of coming together of various charged bodies and processes might produce and what means we can find for a better co-habitation in the future? In their company, I have been reminded that the more-than-human world recognizes neither the barriers nor the categories we impose and that we must learn to stay with complexities.
The Speculative texts become part of the thinking-writing-making assemblage simultaneously connecting and projecting one signal into many in new directions and meanings.
The things, beings, and materials:
The great cormorant bird Charlotte; Text to speech AI Chat GPT, an orange, a porcelain cup, a park bench, 2 Televisions, Absorbent snakes for Oil, Sedimented glass rock, photography paper, Oil spill on water, pencil drawing on paper, glow in the dark rope, Ceramic tiles with colorant and gelatin, glass, soil, fluorescent light.
Exhibition at Pengerkatu 7 työhuone 2023. Photos: Vincent Ganza
The character is lost, I am exhausted and want to lie down. All the words, although constantly repeated, have gone missing.
2019, A Play within a Play, a DIY performance, Art Inside Out & Skogen Gothenburg, Sweden
Above: Still photos from 'The character is lost' performance, 2019
She is divided into two halves, willing and resistant, convincing and uncertain. As one half of her sits there and sees how the other half acts and never owns the strange or playful spirit. A missing word of feeling or empathy, innate inability of language to touch. And in between all these social games she has forgotten how to play. (A Stage, black or white curtain, a red ball, a donkey mask, a chair, a video projector for the words, wear uniform bright blue or green)
Move your chair in a spot in the room where you feel the most powerful. Now change your position on the stage and pay attention to your posture. Take the ball in your hand and look at the audience and give them an apologetic smile. Walking back and forth and moving your arms and legs quickly will give an odd feeling. Instead – If you do need to move, it should have a purpose. Roll the ball but do not let it fall. Avoiding audience eye contact and looking at the watch, at your feet, or constantly looking at the screen or your presentation looks facetious and unprofessional. Shift to a new way of acting or speaking. Put the mask on, proceed with care and play.
Full work available here
FEST
2019, Performance at Varberg’s Stadthotellet as part of Art Inside Out residency
Above: Still photos from 'Fest' performance, 2019
Fest was an immersive performance ‘masked’ as a party in Spegelsalen at Varberg’s Stadthotellet. The performance of Fest aimed to commemorate the 100th anniversary of women's voting rights and reflect on equality issues both historically and in contemporary society.
This event celebrated and recreated a social gathering organized before Swedish women had the right to vote by Varberg's women's suffrage association at Varberg’s Stadhusets festvåning in 1910. The original event featured songs, speeches, and a theatre play about a wedding in which debates about women's suffrage took center stage.
This new version of the Fest began with a fictitious premise involving a double booking and an abandoned bride and was done in collaboration with the local youth theatre group and professional actors using the methods of Augusto Boal’s Forum Theatre.
Documentation: Watch here
Photos: Vincent Ganza and Henna-Riikka Halonen
Pinch Fold Cut Line
2017, Installed and performed at Triangle Arts Association NY in collaboration with Cheryl Wing-Zi Wong
Above: Still photos from 'Pinch Fold Cut Line' installation, 2017
PINCH FOLD CUT LINE is a collaborative project by Henna-Riikka Halonen and Cheryl Wing-Zi Wong with performers Kasey Gloria, Oldford Angeli, Sion Mark Boswell, Joel Henriques, and Chloe Bass. Installed and performed at Triangle Arts Association NY in 2017, it constructs a multi-dimensional domestic proposition with spaces within spaces, creating a disorienting, ever-expanding environment woven with vignettes. The work disrupts typical boundaries, allowing audience engagement with a porous space where images and objects intervene in everyday life. Stories are told, and words go missing.
*Tropism is a biological phenomenon indicating growth or turning movement of a biological organism, usually a plant, in response to an environmental stimulus.
EDEN, THE POW(D)ER OF FEAR
2014
Above: Still photos from 'Eden, The Pow(d)er of Fear', 2014
Eden, The Pow(d)er of Fear was a performance/installation and later a film that was constructed at Lilith performance studio, Malmo, Sweden in May-June 2014. The starting point for the project was the French Nouveau Romain writer Alain Robbe Grillet’s film, L’Eden et Apres (After Eden) from 1970.
The live performance Eden, The Pow(d)er of Fear took place in a labyrinth like construct, in which the young Actors from Malmo repeated strange rituals and viewers were let in to wander freely. A throw of a dice governed the order of the scenes inside of the set, where a group of “students” were spending time, indulging in transgressive behavior of all sorts; games, plays, rituals and other activities. All this triggered a hallucinogenic, baffling chain of events, which took quite bizarre forms.
The whole set of Eden, The Pow(d)er of Fear had a repetitive structure and was full of mirror images. lt was like a mise en abyme, a world within worlds, stories within stories where the line between “real” and “illusion” were difficult to determine.
Lilith Performance Studios
SOME POTENTIAL SCENARIOS
Berwick Gymnasium Gallery, 14th August - 12th September 2010
Above: Photos from 'Some Potential Scenarios' exhibition, 2010, by Colin Davidson
In this exhibition in Berwick Gymnasium Gallery Henna-Riikka Halonen assumed the role of a time traveller in Berwick-upon-Tweed, one who attempts to describe her story of place and understand its past, present and the future. She was a subjective storyteller projecting her own stories and collaborating with others to produce fictional scenarios taking place against the backdrop of Berwick's regeneration process.
In developing this work Halonen conducted several interviews with inhabitants of Berwick, people involved in decision-making and residents who are actively contributing towards the future of the town. The aim of the exhibition was to reveal and liberate the potential and multiple positions. Different viewpoints and stories have been allowed to enter the work not only as a form of research but also allowing the different participants to become active collaborators in the creation of this work.
Some potential Scenarios was an exhibition about the present, past and future that unfolds in four stages. It used sequentially formal languages of documentary, re-interpretation and full dramatization, mixing documentary, staging, acting and non-acting. The installation moved on to distribute the grammar of the narrative between past and future tenses.
The four stages of the installation took on several methods of making, it begun with a documentary-style video, which shows young dancers from Berwick-upon-Tweed reading quotations from futuristic literature. They discuss the notion of time and pose questions about their own personal futures and the future of the town. Reflecting their individual roles in the fictional drama and imagining a society where work does not exist and everything has become mechanized.
The second stage of the installation was a dramatization, a fictional video projection Strange Place for Snow and was presented on a more cinematic scale. Working with local actresses and dancers and filmed in venues with significance to the Berwick Futures' regeneration plan it is a fictional work portraying a woman's interaction with her environment, inundated with uncertainty she explores the changing architectural landscape of the town.
The third stage of the installation began with a proposal to a group of three writers, inviting them to imagine a fictional scenario about Berwick based on certain keywords and images provided by Halonen. These include an imagined preview of the exhibition by art critic Rosalie Doubal, a fictional regeneration report by local writer Wendy B Scott and a futuristic script by artist/writer Anna Pickering.
Finally in stage four a future stage set for an as yet unwritten production was suggested. Halonen presented (in a style reminiscent of a theatre or a museum display) drawings, costumes, props, and posters from the production of her work.
Buy the Some Potential Scenarios book here >>
THE GREAT BLUE
2008
Installation
Depford X exhibition, London
Above: 'The Great Blue', 2008
Work 'The Great Blue' refers to the blue fence that was surrounding London Olympic construction site, and became a landmark and a symbol of regeneration. It was typical to more deprived areas and is a symbol of their fast development. However, most importantly the blue fence represented power. It was not inclusive; but merely exclusive and stood for the systems associated with money, such as property development and privatization of public place .It took control of areas and transformed them for forever. In this project the blue wall took a form of a heroic sculpture, similar to statues and memorials that pay a tribute to power.
I Don't know what you are trying to Save me from, But I can feel your Hand
Video, photographs, paint and MDF, 2006
Above: Still photos from 'I don't know what you...' performance 2006
An Installation, inspired by 19th century notion of Hysteria, particularly phenomena called Arctic Hysteria, According to the description of Arctic hysteria, the sufferers were mostly women from Arctic countries. The symptoms included, running aimlessly around naked, rolling in the snow, imitating sounds of birds and mammals etc.
University of Goldsmiths 2005