People of the
Lost Utopian Meadow

Ali Akbar Mehta

Ali Akbar Mehta is a Transmedia artist, curator, and researcher, who creates immersive cyber archives that map narratives of history, memory, and identity constructs through a multifocal lens of violence, conflict, and trauma. Such archival mappings – as drawings, paintings, new media works, net-based projects, poems, essays, and theoretical texts, as well as performances both of bodies and networks – are rooted in posthumanist critical theories of making visible hegemonic power relations and silenced historical materialism. His ongoing doctoral research, tentatively titled ‘Practicing Online Performativity: Constructing Politically Conscious Archives for the Future’, is interested in exploring the performative relations between online archives and its users through the mediated interventions of Second Order Cybernetics, to create knowledge systems that outline a vibrant new political public sphere.

Vidha Saumya

Vidha Saumya is a Helsinki based Artist-Poet. whose body of works – Monumental Drawings, Intimate Mark-makings, Murals, Books, Poems, Sculptures, Embroidered Textiles, Food Art, Videos, and Digital Artifacts – are wry and warm in their politics and kaleidoscopic in their aesthetics. The concept of Heimat / (Home)land is at the core of her praxis.

varialambo

We, Varia Sjöström and Hatz Lambo formed the artist duo varialambo 2018 in Berlin and are currently based in Helsinki.

As interdisciplinary artists we are working in the tradition of post- traumatic-expressionism, futuristic feminism, and absurd comedy by using the elements of sculpture, installation, music, performance and poetry.

Our vision is to create a world where talking about violence is possible without repeating the painful experience.

“We like the idea of social fantasy. We like the state of over exhaustion and lasting plays. The repetition of given narratives is one of the last dinosaurs on earth. It’s time to bury it with dignity but fast.”

Palash Mukhopadhyay

Palash Mukhopadhyay is a UX Designer & Developer, self professed tinkerer and part-time wordist. He focuses on simplicity and specialises in rapid prototyping and digital toolsets, with over 15 years of experience in designing and developing for the web.

Kaino Wennerstrand

Kaino Wennerstrand works as an artist and sound designer. They make up one half of the artist duo Biitsi. Kaino lives in Helsinki.

Albert Ihanus

Alber Ihanus is a producer with Artlab Studios, Helsinki.

Tuike Alitalo & Simo Alitalo

Tuike Alitalo and Simo Alitalo are sound artists based in Turku, Finland. Their practice involves sound installations based on field recordings, environmental art, writing, participatory performances as well as communal sound performances and listening walks. Exploring the ways places are heard, their work emerges from the central questions of ‘acoustemology’, i.e. acoustic epistemology, questioning, “What do we experience through sound, listening and other auditive practices? How is our knowledge shaped by the things we hear in our surroundings?”