Sonja Jokiniemi brings 'Howl' performance at Fest en Fest in London

Sonja Jokiniemi returns to Howl — a performance work from 2019, first premiered at Kiasma Contemporary Art Museum in Helsinki in 2019, now reimagined with a new sound work by Gil Schneider.

In the works previous to Howl, Jokiniemi, developing a strong personal discourse around alternative languages and new materialism, was finding in those stage objects real play partners, encouraging the audience to consider their presence with the same intensity as human performers. Full of peculiar textures in sculpting the associative, in general Jokiniemi’s work deals with manual labor, the handcraft, divergent psychosomatics of the body and material-human relationships.

In Howl, Sonja Jokiniemi goes back to a self performed solo. As always, a strong point is made in the interaction with objects on stage, inspired by her Eastern Finland roots: lichen, wood, clay, knife. Two big black and white drawings and some laced textiles hang from the ceiling. The audience is sitting around the performer.

In the performance, the constructive dialogue is for the first time failing: inability, frustration and fear seem to take the lead, allowing the performance artist to let progressively the civilised part of this human to object relationship, destroying the ideas of normality, civilisation, canalised sexuality and constructed intelligence, leading the audience to a new pallet of sensitive, psychoanalytic and carnal questions about the ecosystem.

Sonja Jokiniemi’s Howl at Fest en Fest is supported by the Finnish Institute in the UK and Ireland