PORIN JUHLAVIIKOT 03.-18.09.2022
Lauantaina 17.09.
JULIAK
Julia Kovács Haavisto (1993) is a performance artist, born in Transilvania, Romania as a Hungarian minority. In 2005 moved to Portugal with her family where she lived and graduated from the University of Évora in Visual Arts-Multimedia (2017), and post-graduated in Art Pracrice (2019) at the same university.
In 2018 she made an Erasmus exchange to Finland, SAMK university, Fine Arts campus where she met her husband to be (Petri Haavisto) and confirmed her performance artist identity. Julia and Petri got married in a performance; Online Wedding Ceremony (2019) which happened in two countries and art-related spaces at the same time, In DAVD of the University of Évora, Portugal, and Hirvitalo Art House, Tampere, Finland.
Now she is living and practicing her art in Finland where she was awarded SKR artist grant 2021.
Julia discovered herself as a performance artist in 2015 and since then she created numerous performances for many exhibitions and events and even bigger projects like Growing Canvas (2021) which she created in collaboration with her husband and the city of Pori for the people of a specific city area to participate and by planting flowers in an artistically shaped garden, designed by the couple, where the walking paths reassembled the lifelines of a hand.
Our hands and lifelines tell a lot about our personal stories and our works.
In Poriginal Gallery, Pori (2021) in her Human Bricks, participative performance – installation piece she collected around a hundred palm marks, showing how we humans are all unique even when we are built from the same human bricks, everybody has their personal way of pressure the clay between them hands and everybody has their unique lines of life stories.
In her performances, she seeks to find different ways of communicating and connecting with Others (Nature, People, and surroundings) by challenging her routine and the routine of those surrounding her. Sometimes with nonstop two weeks durational performances, like Speachles Piece (2017), Blind Piece (2018), Hear Less piece (2019), and Local Language (Finnish) (2021) where she passed two weeks talking only this foreign language (to her) while the local people communicated English with her in order to create a meaningful interaction. Other times by short impulsive and repetitive performances like Feel where she submerges her head in different textures and temperatures from nature, for example in a crack from the frozen ocean, seeking for genuine direct contact.