DOWNBEAT    

Within the frames of QUEER SAUNA SEASON we are happy to host a collective Mean Time Between Failures.

Recommended entrace 7 euros, registration is required.  

Full of pessimistic ambivalence and following the beat, two performers chew gum and offer the audience to join them in this everyday act. What comes out is messy, shape-shifting and unclear such as performance art making in the current times.

In DOWN BEAT performance Mean Time Between Failures duo activates the use of chewing gum through dance and performative gestures, which looks almost as disposable, basic and messy as the gum itself. The work has two parts. It begins with a 25-min accelerating dance show that oscillates between being rigorous and sloppy and a happening including audience participation.

The work is revisiting 1970s American artist Hannah Wilke’s artwork series S.O.S Starification where she also used chewing gum to criticized the instrumentalization of the female body, particularly in the male-dominated art world.

MTBF deconstructs and reimagines this work, in which they look at both the metaphorical and material relationship between chewing gum and the body. As performance artists—one a transmasc non-EU immigrant, the other a Finnish female-identified artist—we navigate the complexities of labor, identity, and consumption in a post-optimistic world. The ambiguity of the gum—its messiness, its refusal to be neatly controlled—echoes the anxiety of living in an era where resistance feels both necessary and futile, offering no tidy resolutions, only the uncomfortable persistence of failure.

Concept, choreography, performance: Dash Che & Suvi Tuominen
Sound design: Oula Rytkönen

Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF) is a Helsinki-based experimental dance and performance art collective and it was founded in the year 2019 by artists Dash Che and Suvi Tuominen. MTBF works at the intersection of dance, performance art and conceptual art. Their works bring together humor, provocation, absurdity and physicality. They have worked with several performing arts institutions and festivals in Finland and abroad. In STUK residency MTBF will work with sound designer Oula Rytkönen, who is a long-term collaborator of the collective. Oula views performance and sound as facilitation tools for playful renegotiation of the social and aesthetic realms. In their work with MTBF they have lately been using sample based music making as a method of co-energising and -pacing the performance space.