LAPS graduates receive Kone Foundation working grants
LAPS programme has reason to gratulate Stefanía Olafsdottír and Onur Tayranoğlu who received a grant from Kone Foundation to develop and continue their artistic practices in 2024 and 2025.
LAPS programme has reason to gratulate Stefanía Olafsdottír and Onur Tayranoğlu who received a grant from Kone Foundation to develop and continue their artistic practices in 2024 and 2025.
In the performance series titled ”Dear BioDaddy,” Stefanía Olafsdottír delves into the complexities of Assisted Reproductive Technologies (ART), specifically sperm donation, exploring its violent histories and unexpected consequences with a geographic focus on Scandinavia. As a TechnoChild, born through ART, Stefanía is entangled in the biopolitical webs of these realities and curates a performance space to confront and embrace the paradoxes inherent in family concepts. The research explores questions of identity in relation to gender and nationhood, paralleling the inquiry into biological inheritance. The focus is on community building based on technological commonality and home-making in a beyond-human world. The work aims to inhabit and find a home in the paradoxical spaces of the individual’s identity, leading to a deeper exploration of the construct of family and a reorientation towards the concept of home.
Onur Tayranoğlu is a transdisciplinary performance artist, based in Helsinki. They approach various mediums such as text, video, digital media and installation through performance and theory based research processes. Their artistic practice is informed and inspired by intersectional experiences, practices, histories and theories of queerness. In their two-year-long experiment, “Queer Autonomous Zone Along the Pink-line” Onur Tayranoğlu embarks on creating a queer autonomous zone along the pink-line, a rhetorical border dividing Finland and Turkey. The pink-line, conceptualized by South African journalist Mark Gevisser, serves to analyze global divisions based on queerfriendliness with roots in racism and colonialism. Utilizing this rhetorical landscape, the Onur engages in speculative work for intersectional queer liberation, collaborating trans-nationally with LGBTQ+ communities in Finland and Turkey. The collaborative efforts encompass public interventions, performances, exhibitions, and performative gatherings with visual artist Melisa Yağmur Saydı.
Congratulations to Stefanía and Onur!
When performance
The master’s programme in Live Art and Performance Studies (LAPS) was launched in 2001 as a Finnish-language degree programme, Esitystaiteen ja -teorian koulutusohjelma. Since 2013, LAPS has been an English-language, international and residential MA programme based in Helsinki. The programme combines critical thinking with experimentation in artistic work and artistic research. The objective of the programme is to enable artists coming from different environments, classes, cultures and upbringings to focus on their work, develop their research and map out the future of their artistic practice. The central question for contemporary performance concerns the futures of performance and cultures at large —on the exploration of the possible futures, ecologies, technologies, cultures and economies of performance. These themes are widely explored over the duration of the two-year programme. This blog discloses the various aspects of the LAPS programme, from individual notions and statements by individual students to narrations of themes or topics of a course or providing background in preparation for a public performance event. The blog posts reflect the various collaborations, projects, or individual artistic processes taking place within the LAPS programme.
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