Leena Kela

Finland °1979
research interests: performance art, science, collaboration, language, materiality, corporeality
affiliation: doctoral candidate, University of the Arts Helsinki, Academy of Fine Arts
en

Dialogues - collaboration as a method for researching the language of performance art

 

My on-going artistic research focuses on methods, phases and languages in collaboration processes between myself as a performance artist and experts from various disciplines. My research consists of several collaborations that I realize together with scientists, specialists and performance artist colleagues. Different collaboration processes create possibilities to construct new meanings based on the meetings of skills, knowledge and personalities of the participants. By stepping into new areas of knowledge in collaboration processes I am also looking for possibilities to widen the methodologies of my own artistic work. I research language(s) of performance art by exposing my artistic practice and processes to different work partners. When talking about language of performance art I mean the non-verbal language or multiple languages, which are based in metaphorical nature of bodily and material action in performance art. The introduction part of my artistic research is a project called Alphabets of Performance Art, where I examine the relationship between materiality and corporeality in performance art.

research

research expositions

  • Alphabet of Performance Art (last edited: 2025) author(s): Leena Kela This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
    In her video performance Alphabet of Performance Art Leena Kela performs with the materials and objects that are typical for performance art. The work is based on over 15 years of research within the art form. She has selected 26 different materials and objects that form the language of the performance art and will perform them from A to Z. If A is an apple, what do you think P could be? Paint, paper, piss?
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  • The Language of Performance Art – A Dialogue of Matter, Duration, and Agency (last edited: 2025) author(s): Leena Kela This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
    In this artistic research I approach performance art as a language formed through the interplay of materiality, duration, and multiple forms of agency. I adopt a linguistic lens, not to reduce performance art only to language, but to use it as an analytical tool to render its characteristics, regularities, and modes of operation visible. A work of performance art emerges within relations between the performer’s corporeality, materials, space, and time. It weaves together visual, conceptual, and embodied thinking, privileging ephemerality and immediacy over permanence. The audience is integral to the work, as performance is an ephemeral art in which performer and audience share the experience in the same moment. Documentation, especially photography and video, enables the reshaping of temporal and spatial relations, as the camera frames, selects, and reconstructs the situation. My inquiry focuses on relations among human, more-than-human, and nonhuman agents. I situate my practice within the field of new materialist and posthumanist contemporary art, where works take shape through multilayered collaborative processes across diverse agents. Performance studies serves as one of the conceptual frameworks.
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