Catalysti welcomes its 10th anniversary in February 2023! We want to use this opportunity to invite old and new friends, members, and colleagues to join us at an event to celebrate 10 years of working with each other and wrap up our first year of operating under a new organizational model. We also want to take a moment to envision the future and rethink our ways of working together with you. The program includes a workshop, talks, screening, and music performances. The event is free and open to all Catalysti members and non-members.
Preliminary schedule:
13:00-16:00 On emotional labor – workshop with Arlene Tucker at Global Art Point office
19:00-19:30 Performance: Aman Askarizad
19:30-20:30 Introduction Speech by Artistic Directors and board members of Catalysti
20:30-21:30 Introducing artists +Screening
21:30-22:30 Closing Party starts
21:30-22:00 Performance: Ana Gutieszca
22:30 Space Closes
Music performances by: Aman Askarizad, Ana Gutieszca.
Artists as part of the screening: Adnan Mirza, varialambo (Varia Sjöström, Hatz Lambo), Vera Lapitskaya, Vishnu Vardhani RAJAN, Samra Sabanovic.
Participation in the “On emotional labor” workshop requires registration at , but visitors can drop in and out freely for the rest of the event.
Warm food, snacks, and drinks will be served.
Music Performances: 1900-1930 Aman Askarizad / 21:30-22:00 Ana Gutieszca
Aman Askarizad (b.1986 Iran) is a visual artist, photographer, musician, and producer based in Vantaa. His activities revolve around politics of representation and facilitating ways of existing within dominant narratives. For Aman, the long-term relationship with Persian classical music has always been a safe boat in the turbulence of being.
About the performance: Walking behind a dried dam is an improvisational rhythmic and non-rhythmic Tar performance inspired by flow and contemplations with my instrument in recent weeks. Being in the grievance, gripe, resentment, and fury, the flow has brought me to the shore of Segah mode. This performance will be a continuation of the aforementioned flow.
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Ana Gutieszca is a visual and sound artist born in the dry lands of the northern Mexican plateau.
She is an inventor of broken noises and graphite universes: she is fascinated by the transformation of drawing into sound and using graphite as a tool for sound making.
She is also known for being the founder and sonic mind behind Third Space, curating numerous exhibitions and the Sound Room concert series since 2013, currently in a nomadic state.
About the performance: Ana Gutieszca’s music is rough as the desert, combining hypnotic brain-melting noise from self-made analogs and blistering broken techno beats from drum machines.
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Catalysti 10th anniversary screening: 20:30-21:30 Vapaakaupunki Olohoune
The Catalysti 10th anniversary screening features five video works that illustrate relationships and communication through the lens of poetic echoing, imagination, and visualization. Through their multifaceted and varied narrative styles, the authors capture dialogues within multiple dimensions by utilizing poetry, storytelling, sound, dance, codes, and computer software techniques, leading the viewer to experience the embodiment of inner dialogues and the references of shared ideologies, as well as the dialogic movements.
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Own
Vera Lapitskaya
Own is a short film which is a part of There’re no others project initiated by Indian poet Madhu Raghavendra and dance artist Vera Lapitskaya in 2022. The film is based on the original poem of Madhu Raghavendra which brings into focus the essential question of inclusion: how can we include all people in our society equally and accept all differences, so that there are no others, but all of us?
The initial point of There’re no others project was to consider the artist as a mediator in the society: how artists can act as a mediator from one person to another and how art can actas a platform for dialogue to discuss topics of inclusion, nonviolence, and peaceful existence of differences."
Biography:
Vera Lapitskaya works as a performer, dance maker, art educator and curator. In her artistic practices she is fascinated to reimagine the traditional art forms by pushing the borders and going beyond the surface of narrative meanings. Through the years Vera has been exploring a multi-layered proximity of human body to space, time, sounds, objects and environment. Instant and intuition are the essences which inspire and support her work the most.
Photo credits: Natalia Kochelenko
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I Need to Tell You Something
Samra Sabanovic
"Stuck in a sketch-like world labeled by post-it notes, a couple tries to communicate. //
Short statement: A commentary on film structures and conflict-based plots, as I create a sketch-like surrounding and characters that are stuck in their written lines. I wanted to visualize the nature of our relationships and communication. The situation exposes fears of being vulnerable, frustration and inability to understand one another, but also not giving up in its repetition. The film is dream-like, and the framing intentionally looks staged at times. The melancholic approach is emphasized by the original score and balanced with slight humor of the absurd."
Biography:
Samra Šabanović (b. Bosnia and Herzegovina) is a visual artist and filmmaker based in Helsinki. She has been primarily working with photography and combining it with text, video and performative narrative. Her interests oscillate between philosophy and politics: the right to be, human dignity, love and inaccessibility in images.
Since 2021, Samra has been pursuing to find out what (her) genuine film would be and if it could be made. Along with self-deprecating humour, she employs immersive absurdism, the concept of refusal as a political act, and meta elements as an expression of doubt.
In Helsinki, she is co-curating an image-based research project, "I was there but you didn't see me,” exhibited in Artsi Museum, Third Space, Alkovi and public advertisement boards. Her recent short film “I Need to Tell You Something” premiered in the official selection of Sarajevo Film Festival in 2022.
Samra graduated from Academy of Arts in Novi Sad, holds a Master's degree in Visual Cultures, Curating and Contemporary Art from Aalto University and is Academy of Moving People and Images alumna.
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Glitch Recon(naissance)
Vishnu Vardhani RAJAN
Glitch-Recon(naissance) is set in Oceania. A dystopian city built in 1984, where people are under constant surveillance. Julian, a super hero descends to apply glitch to break the ever encroaching systems. Julian also teaches Edward how to think through error in order to desist toxic gaze to reclaim eros.
Biography:
I am a BodyPhilsopher. My hyphenated identity, building connections between art, witchcraft, alternative histories, punk orientalism, marxism, and naxalism define me. Sleep, conflict, nutrition, gaze and surveillance are my research interests. Night politics, conflict-positivity and food are recurring themes in my work. Twerking and Napping in public spaces, connecting people and community building praxis are my whatchamacallits for everyday-activism. My work spans multidisciplinary practices such as performance arts, Masc-drag, stand-up comedy, filmmaking, quilting and spoken word poetry. Oscillating between cultures, methodologies and sexual identities each different from the other are instrumental in my visual language.
Infinite Playlist Afterisms (IPA) and Convivial Complaint Cell (CCC) are my present, long term, research and non-performance-performance works.
I am currently busy with concepts like utopian-plagiarism and blending my love of cinema and passion for filmmaking with my ongoing practices to achieve a new language in storytelling.
Photo credits: Ashwin Kumar Rajan
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A fluid concept of home
Adnan Mirza
For me, brick is an essential phenomena for the concept of a home. The idea of ‘home’ has intrinsically become transitional. With the constant travel between different places. Oftentimes I try to conjure the concept of home. It is this struggle that has resulted in an array of superimposed moving bricks in the air under cloudy blue sky. Just like the generative nature of life and personal events, bricks are being generated with the aid of code and computer software and supporting my fluid concept of home. It is so fluid that it does not portray home anymore. The intention is to create a dialogue between moving imagery, technique, aesthetics and medium to invoke a sense of fluidity. In the process one tries to decipher what completes the image and what does not.
Biography:
Adnan Mirza is based in Helsinki, Finland. After graduating in Fine Arts, he pursued his career working in the video game industry as an artist while also presenting his work nationally and internationally. Later he moved to Finland to pursue his masters studies in New Media from Aalto University. The medium of his practice, which was earlier restricted to drawing on two dimensional surfaces, evolved with course of time towards digital medium due to his extensive exposure to the digital world. In recent years, he has been producing single channel video loops, digital prints generated with the aid code/other software and interactive installations. Though he loves to paint with mediums such as ink and stains. His work interestingly falls between both experimental drawing and digital imagery that is informed by traditional drawing practice. His intentions are to explore further this content in the realm of the digital world, as it communicates to its audience aesthetically in a unique manner.
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POEM TO PARTICIPATE FOR TWO BODIES AND MORE
varialambo (Varia Sjöström, Hatz Lambo)
languages: russian, german, english
video: varialambo
performance: varialambo and two sculptures
music: Valentin Kimstedt
voices: Graham Valentine, Varia Sjöström, Hatz Lambo
editing: Paola Fernanda Guzmán Figueroa
advisors: Shubhangi Singh, Kush Badhwar
Biography:
varialambo formed in Berlin in 2018
We create concepts for a future, where violence in general is extinct. But how can we address violence and stigma and avoid the trap of repetition, sentimentality, and secondary traumatization? Our approach is adventurous: creating utopian counter worlds and moving on the borderlands of comedy and trauma.
„We like the idea of social fantasy. We like the state of over exhaustion and lasting plays. The repetition of given narratives is one of the last dinosaurs on earth. It’s time to bury it with dignity but fast.“
Photo credits: Jasco Viefhues
