Johannes Blomqvist was born 1985 in Tibro, Sweden but has now his base in Norrbotten (the most northern county in Sweden). Johannes mainly works with performance art, but sometimes also with theatre, dance and installations. He has participated at many festivals, galleries and other events in many countries, such as Norway, England, Spain,  Portugal the UK, Germany and Brazil. In Norrbotten his touring performance Personal Shopping has been a big success, and he has been organizing the performance Art Festival “LEIF” in Luleå. He has recently started a new platform for performance art called PAIN (Performance Art In Norrbotten), which organizes performance events, Artists Residencies and workshops in Norrbotten. Alongside, Johannes has worked as a companion for visually impared people and got an interest for perception and the complexity of our senses. During his residency at Ptarmigan in Helsinki, Johannes will develop and deepen his artistic research in these themes by making performances and other happenings together with visually impared people in the city. 

"I love performance art. It is for real. Real emotions, real people. I also love working  with real stuff - in nature and use organic, natural material such as dirt, water and food. I love the sublime, the dressed, the grand, the festive. I love combining this with the natural. For me the site, space and context always is the starting-point for my work. And while doing it being present and trying get my audience to be that too. I want to give my audience a experience and that it include use of more than just one sense. I want to really meet them. Be in the meeting. For real.  I also try to warp the reality a bit and what I show doesn´t have to make sense."

Kristīne Želve is a filmmaker, writer and curator of cultural events. She has BA in film and TV directing and Master of Arts in culture management. She has directed creative documentaries , TV productions and music videos, produced film and theatre festivals and urban art projects in Riga. Since 2005 she is a presenter of the daily culture program on Latvian State TV. In 2011 her first book of short stories The Girl Who Cut My Hair was published.

Since 2009 Kristīne is working on researching Latvian - Finnish melodrama master, filmmaker Teuvo Tulio (1912 – 2000).  She is making the creative documentary Fedya about his childhood in Latvia and currently developing the international multimedia project Teuvo Tulio – In Between the Worlds which includes exhibition, film screenings and discussion panels to celebrate Tulio’s 100 years anniversary. 

During her Ptarmigan residency, Kristīne will conduct further research into Teuvo Tulio's life and work on her film with some public talks and screenings.

Sasa Rajsic (1985, Yugoslavia) is a visual artists working in performance, video, installation, sculpture and painting. Rajsic is currently enrolled in Master of Arts Degree Programme in Live Art and Performance Studies at Theatre Academy Helsinki.

History is an important aspect of all of my work. I use historical references, not to literally interpret but to analytically approach and distinguish paradox within them. My work is conceptually based and tend to be as exploratory and critical of itself as I am of the ideas that are being communicated.

Ola Ståhl is a writer, cultural theorist and sound & text based artist based in Malmö, Sweden. He received his BA with First Class Honours in The History of Art, Design and Film with Professional Writing from Sheffield Hallam University, and his MA with Distinction in The Social History of Art and PhD in Cultural Studies from the Department of Fine Art, Art History and Cultural Studies at The University of Leeds. He is a founding member of artist collective C.CRED with which he has participated in several international art exhibitions and festivals including BIG Torino 2002: BIG Social Game (Turin, Italy), ISEA 2004 (Tallinn, Estonia), Version>05(Chicago, USA), and Urban Festival 2005 (Zagreb, Croatia). His work has also been shown in exhibitions and at venues such as Public Space With A Roof (Amsterdam, Holland, 2004), South Hill Parks Arts Centre (Bracknell, UK, 2007), Kunsthaus Erfurt (Erfurt, Germany, 2007), Esbjergs Kunstmuseum (Esbjerg, Denmark, 2008), Ormeau Baths (Belfast, Northern Ireland), and NEON Gallery (Brösarp, 2009).

In 2003-2004 he collaborated with NYC based artist collective the 16Beaver group on a series of projects and in 2006-2007 he worked with Philadelphia-based artist group Basekamp on, amongst other things, a contribution to the Locally Localized Gravity exhibition at the ICA, Philadelphia (USA). As an occasional cohort of the artist group Red76, he’s been working on projects both at Reed College, Portland, Oregon (USA) and at The Bureau for Open Culture, Columbus, Ohio (USA).

His writing has been published in several journals including Parallax, Angelaki, Journal of Visual Cultures, ArtQuest, Unrealized Projects and Pequod, as well as in a forthcoming volume edited by Simon O’Sullivan and Stephen Zepfke under the title Deleuze and Contemporary Art (Edinburgh University Press), and between 2001-2003 he was part of the editorial collective of Parallax, an international journal of cultural studies. Additionally, he has contributed papers, readings and performances to many international festivals and conferences including the annual conference of the International Association for Philosophy and Literature on the theme Writing Aesthetics (Leeds, 2003), the CentreCATH conference The Ethics and Politics of Indexicality and Virtuality (Bradford, 2005), The Living Thought of Gilles Deleuze at Copenhagen Business School and The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Art (Copenhagen, 2005), and the Beckett & Company centenary conference at The Tate Modern and Goldsmiths College (London, 2006), and between 2003-2008 he taught at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design and London College of Communication, University of the Arts London.In 2010 he was selected to participate in the prestigious residency program at The Headlands Centre for the Arts in California, USA.

Ola Ståhl is currently working out of shared studio and project space Ystadvägen 13 in Malmö where he is also part of the editorial collectives of the journal FASAD and the independent press In Edit Mode.  During his Ptarmigan residency he will work on his project FILM.

Vigdis Haugtrø investigates how to redraw the spectator from here or their primary position of looking at art; to participate in art. Through this experience of physical activity the spectator can reach different levels of stored memory captured by the body instead of the mind. Through these often playful activities associations are set in motion and generate new energy. 

Artūrs Punte is our artist in residence from 15th September - 15th November 2010.

Artūrs Punte was born in Riga in 1977. He graduated from the Maxim Gorky Literature Institute, in Moscow, and currently works in advertising. Punte’s conceptual projects include “Bubbleshow” (www.bubbleshow.com, with Dmitrijs Zagga) and “Как хочешь!” (www.re-lab.net/KX, with Vladimirs Svetlovs); he is also the author of several poetic video projects and was an organizer of the poetic video festival “Word in Motion” in 2001 and 2003. Punte edits the journal “Орбита” and the Web site www.orbita.lv, and compiled the collection “Dengi/Науда” in 2001. He writes poetry in Russian and Latvian and translates poetry from the Latvian.
Punte has published works in the journals “Орбита”, “Даугава”, “Karogs”, “Luna”, “Латвийская литература”, and “Ariel” (Sweden); the collections “Dengi/Науда”, “Dzejas diena”, “Спутник” (Kemerovo, 2001), “Вавилон” (Moscow), “Nell`orbita di Riga” (Italy, 2006), and “Ars poetica” (Bratislava, 2005); and the anthologies “Братская колебель” (Moscow, 2004), “Девять измерений” (Moscow, 2004), “Освобожденный Улисс” (Moscow, 2004), and “Воздушный змей” (Tartu, 2006). Punte’s works have also been published on the Web sites www.satori.lv, www.orbita.lv, and www.textonly.ru.

During his stay, Punte will be creating a sound performance, workshop and screenings.  His project whilst at Ptarmigan is a sound performance  - “Poetry Map of the Town”.   He will be making field recordings in the urban areas of Helsinki – on the streets, in the shops, cafés and other public places.

An essential aspect of the performance will be the usage of hisself-made musical “instrument” that is a special freaky-looking gadget for live sound mix. The “instrument” is made from Yamaha sound mixer connected to four mp3-players and a microphone; the appearance altogether reminds of a retro-futuristic guitar.

The main idea of the project is filling the map of Helsinki and it’s suburbs with visual, audio, textual and poetry tags. He aims to do it with every place he visits – thus step by step (line by line – in case of poetry) building his own big virtual map of the imaginary city. Punte will  choose specific sites within the place to get familiar with, and reinterpret them by the means of poetic texts. Text may be expressed in various forms, such as short poems, letters, SMS and diary or tags and notes on the internet map (GPS based). As the project outcome, the virtual map will provide an experiential tour of the multiple layers of physical, social, historical and fictional qualities that have been identified through the research of cities.

Regarding the project, Punte writes " The lines of my poetry often have concrete geographic connections, including coordinates in the spatial means. On one hand, these ‘coordinates’ lead to a very particular point, like a building or a certain café; on the other hand, maps themselves are very intense and visually rich material, which invites us to ‘read’ them more and more closely, do reveal them layer by layer, and to follow them. Thus, the most appropriate poetry reading could be a common journey of a poet and a reader/listener, using the specially prepared sound-scape or: map. Reader and the author, together look for a route on this map, zooming certain objects closer, illustrating the exact phrases with the sound, recorded there; mixing several sound tracks, using effect to create the most impressive sound picture for the poem. The destination and time for this travel is chosen intuitively; this performance altogether is very improvisational and processual."

This residency has been made possible due to funding from the Nordic Culture point.

Jonna Karanka is a Finnish visual artist and musician who finished her BA in Fine Arts at the Tampere University of Applied Science in 2001. At the moment she's doing her MA in Fine Arts at the Aalto University, School of Art and Design. She uses video, photography, collage and sound for sculpting layers of reality.

She has performed her music in such places as Palais de Tokyo in Paris, Anthology Film Archives and Issue Project Room in New York, Stockholm's Culture House and the Flow Festival in Helsinki. Her videos have been screened in various festivals in Finland and abroad (i.a. Kill Your Timid Notion, European Media Art Festival, Tampere Film Festival). Her previous solo exhibition "Black Honey - Pastel Fantasizer" was held at the 2nd Room Gallery in Brussels 2007.

Cathérine Kuebel was born 1978 in Graz (Austria) and is currently working as artist, illustrator & designer, lecturer and general doing-stuff-person based in Finland and Austria.

After finishing one MA degree in Graphic Design and one in Environmental Art some years ago life is taking new directions and everything is possible.

'Reverse Ghosts' (working title) shown in Ptarmigan will be part 6 of the ongoing 'Somnambulia Stories' series. 

Model Court is an ongoing curatorial/research project that was designed by the artists Sidsel Meineche Hansen and Lawrence Abu Hamdan and which also involves Lorenzo Pezzani and Oliver Rees. It uses the structure and technologies of the courtroom to interrogate the signifying and controlling role architecture plays in contemporary art and society.

The project began as an exhibition and accompanying publication commissioned by the Centre of Contemporary Art in Glasgow. The point of departure for this project was the work of Architect Hikaru Kitai, who is working on a World Bank sponsored commission to design courtrooms in the “developing world”. Kitai’s project occupies the ambivalent ground between a search for innovative forms of transparency and imposed forms of justice. Through conversations with Kitai the Gallery in Glasgow was redesigned as a model of a courtroom. In this first incarnation of ‘Model Court’ the legal technologies of representation and the protocol of spatial/legal practice were used to display a series of video, sound, written works and talks both by the artists and other practitioners.

Model Court has been invited to produce another body of work and an exhibition at Ptarmigan.  The project will be an exhibition that will host a series of works; an artist talk and a publication will be produced. This publication will be an approximately 80 page compendium of the research involving contributions from a wide range of participants.

The project will continue to deal with jurisprudence, evidence and the hidden apparatuses that become the essential constituents of tribunals - the typist, the illustrator and the media technologies that enable the public dissemination of verdicts. The rooms which play host to this project become spaces in contestation, developing a line of debate around the way in which the legal context challenges the way we see objects, models, films and other forms of production. The project thus aims to create a translation of spaces, to open the discourse between the gallery and the court, in which a trade of rhetorical devices and patterns of representation are constructed.

Model Court in Finland will be the product of the biweekly meetings of the group. In these meetings associated themes are discussed in great detail; texts, films and artworks are exchanged, sites and significant people are visited and plans are made for new articulations of the project. The exhibition at Ptarmigan will be both a product of this research, and additional events, meetings and workshops organised throughout the two week residency. The publication from this exhibition will be subsequently produced and have launch nights in London, Helsinki and Copenhagen; these events will involve an artist talk and further discussion about the work.

Scott Andrew Elliott is a Canadian artist and recent graduate of the Environmental Art department of the University of Art and Design Helsinki.  His work is focused primarily on environmental installations in the form of large site specific architectural works. Each work demands active participation from visitors.  The projects examine the relationship between person and architectural environment.

Elliott has presented his work in Canada, Finland, and France.

Born in 1984 in Ireland. Has completed her BA in Fine Art in National College of Art & Design in Dublin in 2006. She has been actively involved in founding and running artist led spaces in Berlin from 2007-2009.  She has recently completed a residency in Reykjavik, Iceland.  Hughes has also exhibited in various countries including Ireland, Germany, Russia, the Netherlands and Iceland.    In May 2009 she was selected to take part in an major exhibition Made in Berlin in State Gallery of Kaliningrad, and the German-Russian House, Kaliningrad, an exhibition of contemporary Berlin based artists.  Other recent exhibitions include 48 hours Neukolln festival in Berlin.  Jane Hughes is currently studying on the MA programme in Environmental Art in Taik, Helsinki, Finland.

From a city with 6,217 inhabitants per square kilometer to the third most sparsely populated country in Europe, my initial goal is to explore the connection and possibilities of art and environment in Finland. It is my second year of studies in the MA in Environmental Art program at the University of Art and Design Helsinki. I appreciate the space here which has broadened both my physical and mental boundaries. Environmental Art for me is not merely about nature or landscape. Rather, its locus would be on the correlation between humans and the entities embracing us.

I am interested in examining the relationship of my existence with the surrounding environment. Most of my works are site specific and I like to use any found material. The works are reflections of my observations. It’s also my practice to use material from around the site I’m working on. Sometimes my works are so blended into the site or even hidden; it takes time for the viewers to identify them. The process of locating them is the key in engaging the viewers with my works.

PULLED OUT OF HAT-elsa p-m´s electronic art and accessories for junky
drerams

I am a 26 year old art education student and  "crazy"(add whatever word in
here)maker.
Junk, crap, waste... you name it, means endless possibilities to me.

Ross Manning is an Australian artist that works with custom electronics, instrument building and junk assembly. Creating music solo or along side his automated instruments, Ross’ output traverses many medias, encompassing installation, sculpture, sound art, image and live performance.

Scientifically Speaking with Irene Moon began around 1997 to elevate entomology as a rock genre, a place it deserves to be credited and somehow neglected. Irene Moon, the laboratories public persona, was created as a synthesis of a prescription addicted high school algebra teacher and one of the Lennon sisters in the early days of the Lawrence Welk Show. She is quite strict, verbose, well articulated—and always dressed to perfection. Under the name Irene Moon we have proceeded in creating multimedia environments, organizations, happenings, and music. "For your pleasure or perhaps only just for mine."

The activities are broken up into parts based around two "Organizations" that present "Opportunities" to the public. The organizations are the I.M. Laboratories and the Begonia Society. The primary purpose of both of the organizations is to educate. The educational goals are science and the Moon esthetic. History has often given us the mimic, or the fool to show our own folly. The natural sciences are an imperfect art, idealized and often misinterpreted by the public. My installations, happenings, and films, presented under a scientific pretext, introduces chaos and decadence into this assumed sterile realm, revealing an underlying dependence in society on progress and the images symbolizing the advancement of humankind. Recent work with the IM Laboratories continuing Lectography explores communication of scientific thought, idiosyncrasies and stereotypes of scientist/lecturers and the assimilation of scientific advancement into our daily experience. This is primarily expressed through a series of factual lectures with slides (most recently powerpoint), handouts, demonstrations and live specimens. Pop quizzes and original music accompanies Irene Moon. Recent infiltration into the Department of Entomology at Field Station B.

In the constant quest for association… Irene has positioned herself as a Graduate student in the Department of Entomology at the University of Kentucky, with a research concentration in Systematics. THE GOAL: To forward the conneXXXion between the fashion of science and the world of the Begonia Society. Opportunities presented in the past to musical audiences are now divulged in a scientific environment, the intimate bond between modern entomologists and their work is open for observation by the Moon public.