Beyond Telepathy consists of a series of new performance works investigating the potential and the necessity of communication – without a shared language yet driven by an acute sense of codependence.
The project is envisaged as a long-term collaboration between the curator and the invited artists, who all share an ongoing commitment to the proposed question in their practice through cross-disciplinary and experimental artistic methodologies.
Moreover, the dialogue and research forming the base of the project is deeply invested in addressing ecology through a range of performative perspectives and transformative encounters. The initial concepts include diverse approaches ranging from participatory walks in the city to technologically mediated events and organic processes in the gallery.
Beyond Telepathy will be launched in Paris in collaboration with the gallery The Window and the Hors Pistes Festival organized by the Centre Pompidou. The project presents the work of the artists Essi Kausalainen and Jenna Sutela in The Window alongside a new public intervention by Otto Karvonen commissioned for the Hors Pistes and developed during a residency in Paris. While Kausalainen and Sutela are in their new works navigating the thresholds of inter-species communication in intimate collaborations with other organic and inorganic bodies, Karvonen draws into acute focus the absurd yet treacherous limits met when projecting cultural values and significations onto non-human beings and things.
Curated by Taru Elfving, Beyond Telepathy is in Paris brought into conversation with locally based artists engaged in co-resonant enquiries in collaboration with Julie Dalouche, curator of The Window.

The performances will be accompanied in the gallery by a programme of performative moving image works by Jenni Hiltunen, Sasha Huber and Timo Vaittinen, curated by Hanna Maria Anttila / AV-Arkki, The Distribution Centre for Finnish Media Art. The screening brings together works that all in their idiosyncratic ways examine the potential of embodied expression and ritual in challenging normative representations, whether politically or privately charged.

Taru Elfving