ORGANS (2023)

ORGANS is a duo performance and installation concept which brings forth a familiar root vegetable, the potato. Potatoes became the staple food of many imperialist nations over the last several centuries. The performance plays with eerie movement vocabulary, nudity, swear words, language that draws from military communication, failed magic tricks and painted potatoes. By staging potatoes the performance gestures to the current geopolitical tensions and whiteness while also humoring and deconstructing them.

In the 40-min performance, two naked performers move through the space wearing only fake golden chains, neon-color socks, cheap Lidl shoes, glasses and hats. The performance begins with the bodies following cryptic commands that borderline military chatter, a strange post-apocalyptic dream and somatic exercises. The performers flex and weaken, collapse their muscular postures and start again occasionally synchronizing. Suddenly the work exits the ominous state into an awkward uplifting unison dance to continue as a fake Olympics circus piece turned into a naked performance lecture on potatoes colonial history and back into a dance piece. ORGANS, as many of our works, provokes, mixes and samples several aesthetic registers and genres, and explores a serious topic through humor.

ORGANS is in correspondence with the practice by performance artist William Pope L. who addresses subjects of nationalism, race, class and abjection by playing with unruly, decaying, corporeal and uncanny matters. The starting point for ORGANS was inspired by Trinket (2015), an exhibition by William Pope L. that staged hundreds of slowly decomposing red, blue and white onions posing in front of an unsettling background of a slightly altered US American flag. As an attempt to repurpose William Pope L.’s methods Mean Time Between Failures is staging potatoes. However, in the process of repurposing Mean Time Between Failures signals toward contexts and dynamics that we encounter both in our newsfeed and daily social engagements.

ORGANS was exhibited for the first time as a pop-up installation in MAA-tila gallery, Helsinki in March 2023 with the performance event on the opening day. Second time ORGANS was performed at Riga Performance Art Festival in June 2024. This time the work was presented solely as a performance in the concrete windowless former elephant stable space of the Riga Circus. Third time the performance was shown as a part of the Drifts Festival in the warehouse art space on Suomenlinna island in August 2024. That time the show gathered over 100 people.

Credits: 
Dash Che & Suvi Tuominen (choreography, performance)
Oula Rytkönen (sound design) 

The work was made with the support of the Kone Foundation.

Video of the performance can be provided upon request.