On May 13 (Wednesday) at 6:30 PM, an event organized by the SODAS 2123 cultural complex will take place in the ŠMC reading room, titled “Forms of Intimacy: Two Performances for Objects and Voices,” featuring the work of Finnish artists Marikki Nyfors and Helena Pulkkinen.
Two performances as scenes of attachment to objects: ladders and book trolleys and other things to grab onto; also to voices and other forms that take shape and blur as the tongues roll.
An Iron Maiden by Marikki Nyfors
“I hear the third best song with ‘tower’ in its title: bronze is won, speech silver, silence golden, and the hardest of all metals might be the one I used to listen to when I really wanted to belong. An Iron Maiden is a performance playing with distance, isolation, and dreaming – appointing song as an ultimate bridge of relation. A ladder is really just a slide missing its tongue, and I don’t wanna miss a thing.”
Reading B, c, de, signs of corners by Helena Pulkkinen
A song and an arrangement of the corners of the room. The sound performance views voice as orientation, a system and a non-straight-line attachment.
Marikki Nyfors and Helena Pulkkinen are participants at the Resistance Song Residency at Sodas 2123 running through May that explores the political, social, and affective dimensions of song, examining how collective singing can foster solidarity, healing, and shared ritual. The spring cycle of the residency is curated by Vaida Stepanovaitė.
MARIKKI NYFORS is a Finnish artist working with contemporary dance, performance, music, storytelling, writing, and film. She graduated from the STUDIOS MA program at P.A.R.T.S. in 2024. Inspired by songs, objects, personal narratives, language, and play, she creates works for audiences of different ages. Her multidisciplinary practice seeks for emotional engagement. Marikki loves collage, playground slides, the organ, and desperately finding meaning in connections and coincidences. In her textual and sound-based work, she often employs sampling — interweaving familiar references and intertextual elements into new compositions. The question of objecthood consistently accompanies her artistic research.
HELENA PULKKINEN is a Helsinki-based artist working with sound, space and sculptural objects. Through sound performances, published soundwork and installation, their work is tracing how material flows intersect with more subtle emotional and social currents and how personal experiences and emotions become entangled with spatial, institutional and public frameworks. They are especially interested in the potential of sound activating seemingly static structures and materials. Pulkkinen has studied at Art School MAA and graduated with a Master of Fine Arts from the Academy of Fine Arts Helsinki sculpture department. Their work and collaborations with other artists have been presented in exhibitions, festivals and performance events in Finland and internationally, including Kirpilä Art Collection (FI), Kuntsi Museum of Modern Art (FI), Helsinki City Museum (FI), Medūza gallery (LT), Madhouse Helsinki (FI), Lausanne Underground Film & Music Festival (CH) and Norberg Festival (SE).