Meanings and Materialities
Meanings and Materialities
Exhibition 6–15 June
Open every day 12:00-18:00Pilvi Porkola
In this presentation, I will talk about performances, gifts and artist pedagogy. I will refer to two performance concepts A Gift (Porkola 2014) and Uskominen/Believing (Reality Research Center 2010) in which gift was understood as sharing and negotiation between the performer and the audience. In the performance A Gift, I wrapped gifts from my clothes and gave them to the audience with an autobiographical story. The exchange was based on negotiations and the choice of the audience: who wants to receive the gift. The story was something extra that the recipient didn't expect to receive, but that redefined the meaning of the gift. Uskominen/Believing was a one-on-one performance where the performer and the participant walked around the city and negotiated what could be understood as an (immaterial) gift in public space. I combine these performance examples with gift-giving exercises in my own artist pedagogy.
Following the Marcel Mauss’ (1950) idea of giving gifts as complex interactions, I explore performance as a framework to articulate social relations and contemporary issues (Nicholson 2005) as well as artist pedagogy which aims to focus on the future through arts and dialogue (Erkkilä-Hill 2020).
Dr. Pilvi Porkola is a performance artist, writer and researcher. Currently she works as University Researcher at Research Institute, Uniarts Helsinki. Previously she has been working as a Post doc Researcher in “How to Do Things with Performance?”- project (2016-2021) at Uniarts Helsinki, funded by Academy of Finland. She has also worked as Senior researcher in “Political Imagination and Alternative Futures” (2020-2024) at University of Turku, funded by Academy of Finland. Her current research topic is Performance and Politics of Art Pedagogy as part of Uniarts’ Profi7project.