BIRTHDAY RUMAGGING SESSION // PERFORMANCE BY JOSEF KA // SAUNA GALLERY // HELSINKI FALL 2022

BIRTHDAY RUMAGGING SESSION
20-09-2022

Every year on my birthday I create a new performance — a personal ritual marking transformation, memory, and the passage of time. Each work becomes connected to the specific experiences, places, and psychological states that shaped that year of my life.

In 2022, the performance was deeply influenced by my participation in Hermann Nitsch’s project “Orgien Mysterien Theater” in Prinzendorf, Austria.

The work revolved around the themes of birth and death, combining physical action with symbolic materials: an umbilical cord, water, meat, and a many-meter-long piece of silk fabric moving through the space like a living body or a stream of blood.

The performance explored the tension between vulnerability and sacrifice, body and ritual, violence and purification. Water became a symbol of cleansing and origin, while meat functioned as both flesh and mortality. The silk connected the elements into one continuous organism — fragile, visceral, and ceremonial.

The piece reflected on the cyclical nature of existence: separation from the body, rebirth through pain, and the impossibility of fully escaping one’s origins.

performance by @josefkartist
mc @sussimusi
music aleksandr aleksandrov
photo @markmaher11

@saunagallery
2022

Published by Josef Ka

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International performance, visual and sound artist Josef Ka blends richly varied influences – everything from Butoh dance to cinematic theory – with her decades of nomadic world travel to create bold, highly personal site-specific art. Josef Ka’s themes range from investigating the place of the human body in contemporary reality to exploring the inner body as a representative system of our human and post human kind. Her artistic practice often actively invites the audience inside a sort of private reverie, making it is a deeply participatory one; she actively engages with both her audiences and with a wide diversity of other experimental artists. In addition to her own work, Josef Ka curates a regular series of events and exhibitions at her Helsinki underground space – Sauna Gallery – and teaches classes on the theory and practice of performance art. She is also the inventor of the WORST THEATRE and her yogic training system, KA-YOGA. https://eskargoeskargo.com/

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