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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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Leena Kela
The Language of Performance Art
– A Dialogue of
Matter, Duration and Agency
/
Performanssitaiteen kieli
– materian, keston
ja toimijuuden vuoropuhelua
Doctoral thesis in Fine Arts
Kuvataiteen tohtorin opinnäyte
University of the Arts Helsinki, Academy of Fine Arts
Taideyliopiston Kuvataideakatemia
2025
