Creativity & Performance

Vishnu Vardahani Rajan and Jeanne van Heeswijk

The collective exercise crafting space to imagine and move toward a more just world with artists Vishnu Vardahani Rajan and Jeanne van Heeswijk asks: What do you invest your time and care in? If you were part of a space of daring political dreaming, what would you want the space to hold?

With these and many other questions, the Dreamscaping exercise builds a “stewardship curriculum” for the use of Toward Sanctuary Dome (Philadelphia Assembled, 2017) through collective thinking and training in what it means to offer and receive sanctuary for imagining and enacting a more just world. The exercise explores collective movement and imagining ways out of the never-ending crises, so as to get “un-stuck,” to common the uncertainties through learning the potentials of interdependence and collaboration, and to find rest together. Through working on multiple ways of “belonging,” learning to understand how various urgencies are intertwined, holding space for difference, and making community agreements, a series of potential pathways is drafted for weaving dreams from which to craft new realities.

Vishnu Vardhani Rajan (Hyderabad, Helsinki) is a body-philosopher and performance artist. A hyphenated identity, multidisciplinary practices and building connections between art, science, witchcraft, history and cultures define them. Vishnu’s work spans, dance, non-performance-performance, performing arts, performance poetry, stand-up comedy, moving images, punk-architecture and cultural poetics of community building. Quilting as a methodology centering topics of conflict, sleep and shame, Infinite Playlist Afterisms (IPA) centering politics of pleasure and joy and ‘Convivial Complaint Cell’ are their ongoing work. Vishnu’s persona, Vamp Master Brown, is the first Indian drag king in Helsinki. They are currently researching on how to combine various disciplines to achieve a new visual vocabulary and language in performance, and storytelling. They are currently reading Sara Ahmed’s Complaint with a reading-circle. Vishnu’s guerilla curatorial praxis aims to address Multi-Scalar social challenges.

Jeanne van Heeswijk (Rotterdam) is an artist who facilitates the creation of dynamic and diversified public spaces in order to “radicalize the local”. Her long-scale community-embedded projects question art’s autonomy by combining performative actions, discussions, and other forms of organizing and pedagogy to assist communities to take control of their own futures. Noted projects include: Het Blauwe Huis (The Blue House) in Amsterdam (May 2005 - December 2009); Public Faculty (2015-ongoing), Homebaked in Liverpool (November 2011 - present); Freehouse, Radicalizing the Local in Rotterdam (September 2008- present), Philadelphia Assembled, Philadelphia Museum of Art in Philadelphia (2014-2017) and Trainings for the Not-Yet, BAK, Basis voor Actuele Kunst in Utrecht (2018-2019). Her work has been featured in numerous books and publications worldwide, as well as internationally renowned biennials such as those of Liverpool, Shanghai, and Venice. She was the 2018-19 BAK Fellow, the 2014-2015 Keith Haring Fellow in Art and Activism at Bard College and she has received the 2012 Curry Stone Prize for Social Design Pioneers, and in 2011, the Leonore Annenberg Prize for Art and Social Change.