Autumn 2024 programme at Mad House Helsinki
Pihla Lehtinen's Somistepelote / Photo: Väinä Räsänen
In 2024, Mad House Helsinki will celebrate its 10th anniversary as an enabler of diverse performance and live arts. Mad House has become an important space and community, offering production collaboration to numerous artists. This autumn, the programme will feature works set in stage and urban spaces, and the fifth issue of Mad House Publication will be released.
The autumn 2024 programme will open in August with artist and larp designer Pihla Lehtinen's site'specific spoken word piece, taking place on the historic cruising rock of Central Park. Somistepelote is a fictional ghost walk through urban space and queer history. The work is created in collaboration with director and dramaturg Juuso Kekkonen.
Performance artist Kira O´Reilly´s work Menopause Gym opens Mad House's stage programme in September. It is part sculpture, part installation, and part performance art, featuring strange circuits, awkward balancing acts, and ungainly suspensions. The piece includes actions, objects, and sweaty coppery prints, accumulating detritus as the menopausal gym is activated. Also on stage at the end of September is performance and visual artist Diana Soria Hernandez's Ashes and Seeds, a memorial performance on the 10th anniversary of the disappearance of 43 Ayotzinapa normalistas students. The artworks asks, how does an event that shook the core of a population, live throughout its memory, holding on to its need for justice. The work's sound design is crafted by Alejandro Montes de Oca.
In October, poet Asiya Wadud will present a performance echo exhibit which is a one-to-one conversation between performer and viewer. It will take place alongside Howard Smith's environmental artwork "Liikkumattomia tanssijoita" in Arabia, Helsinki. Wadud will write poems about the encounters, which will be published in Mad House Publication Vol. 5.
Hold yr ache 2 my ache is performed at Mad House Helsinki in late October 2024.The work is an artistic collaboration between Lau Lukkarila, Zeynab Kirikou Gueye and Marika Peura, accompanied by designs by visual artists Ju Aichinger and Val Holfeld. The team care roles are taken upon by mirabella paidamwoyo* dziruni (racial awareness) and Claire Lefèvre (performance doula). Producer Laura Hähnel is behind the logistics of the performance. The work explores a wholesome corporeality in negotiation with the constraints of productivity, structural oppression as well as the stimuli and the appeals of affect.
In early November, Mad House will host a solo performance by Mad House's founding member Annika Tudeer and her group Oblivian Turn Turtle Turn -lecture performance, a solo work about life, death and dodos. The work is based on a group piece of the same name, which premiered at the Munich Biennale in June. The co-production celebrates Mad House's 10th anniversary and Tudeer’s 60th birthday.
The fifth volume of Mad House Publication will be published in December. Publication is an online experimental space and publishing platform. For the volume, artist-in-residence and Mad House member performance artist Olga Spyropoulou will create a work based on the history of Mad House Helsinki, drawing on social media archives. In the volume, artist and writer Vappu Jalonen continues the series AU, which started at Mad House in 2021. Artist Rusto Myllylahti's work will also be featured in the publication. Graphic designers Kiia Beilinson and Hanna Valle and coder Heikki Lotvonen will create the artworks in collaboration with the artists.
Other events and reading circle
In August, Mad House will collaborate with the Outsider Art Festival. The festival's performing arts programme includes works by Fri Nilas Lindell, Harold Hejaz, Noora Jupi and Timjune Tianjun Li , performed on the Parvisali stage of the House of Text.
During the autumn season, Mad House board members Vishnu Vardhani Rajan and Pie Kär will facilitate reading circles exploring the question, "What constitutes the 'de-' in the process of decolonization within the context of Finland?" These discussions aim to conceptualize and implement decolonization within Finland's cultural landscape.
Mad House Helsinki's 10th anniversary celebrations will take place in early December alongside the release of the fifth edition of Mad House Publication. Welcome!
