3.2.-11.2.2024
MUU Helsinki Contemporary Art Centre

Notice exceptional opening hours:
Sat 3.2. at 12-18
Sun 4.2. at 12-16
Mon 5.2. closed
Tue 6.2. – Fri 9.2. at 14-19
Sat 10.2. at 12-18
Sun 11.2. at 12-16

MUU Helsinki Contemporary Art Centre produces, in collaboration with Zodiak – Center for New Dance, an exhibition by Margrét Sara Guðjónsdóttir and Susan Kozel. The exhibition is a part of Zodiak’s international Side Step Festival.

Opening on Saturday 3.2.2024 at 13:00-15:00.
Opening words:
Chairman for MUU Juhani Räisänen
Zodiak: artistic director Jenni-Elina von Bagh, together with the artists Margrét Sara Guðjónsdóttir and Susan Kozel
Discussion at 18:00
After the opening remarks, there will be a discussion about the collaboration between Guðjónsdóttir and Kozel and the origins of the exhibition. The discussion will be facilitated by Peter Mills, one of the curators of this year’s Side Step Festival.

Sivuaskel is an annual international contemporary dance festival. In 2024, Sivuaskel will be held for the 21st time. The 2024 festival venues are Zodiak Stage, Dance House Helsinki, MUU Helsinki Contemporary Art Centre and Kaapelitehtaan Konttori cafe. www.zodiak.fi/sidestep


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CATALYSTS – Somatic Resonance is an installation exhibition of somatic states from the performance work of Icelandic choreographer Margrét Sara Guðjónsdóttir, consisting of 14 photographs. The exhibition is a choreography of mixed reality technologies, kinaesthetic algorithms, affects, archival material, and live bodies.

This work is created by an interdisciplinary team of artists and researchers and is an intervention in the tensions and potential of current digital cultures. It participates in ongoing discussions around the expanded choreographies of interconnectivity of mediated bodies, healing, feminism, notions of energetic citizenship, AI and the pathology of the wider social-political body within our bodies. Visitors to the exhibition carry the states from this choreographic exhibition outwards, like ripples in a collective somatic field.

In order to enter into dialog with the  resonant states of the dancers informed by Guðjónsdóttir’s deep tissue de-conditioning practice FULL DROP into the Body. Visitors are invited to download the CATALYSTS app to immerse themselves in the 14 images that compose the exhibition. Images which are embedded with visuals, triggered by the app the team created. States of affective potential arise from awakening latent energies over time, across media and flesh, expanding what dance can be and how bodies can remember.


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Icelandic Berlin based choreographer Margrét Sara Guðjónsdóttir studied dance in Holland and worked as a performer with various performance makers around Europe during the period 2001-2014. During the same time and until this day she had been producing and touring internationally her own performance works.

Since 2010 Margrèt Sara has been addressing the pathological imprint of the social political body within our own bodies and its de-conditioning in her choreographic works as well as research into the deep tissue release practice FULL DROP into the body. She considers her work involving de-conditioning as a direct political gesture and activism. In a larger sense her performance works engage in the ongoing discussion of healing, feminism, interconnectedness and notions of energetic citizenship within the choreographic context. msgudjonsdottir.com/index.php/about/

Susan Kozel is a Professor of Philosophy, Dance and Media Technologies in the School of Art and Communication (K3). With an international profile as a contemporary phenomenologist, she applies philosophical thought to a range of embodied practices in digital cultures. Her research takes the form of both scholarly writing and collaborative performance practices. From 2012-2018 she directed Living Archives, a major research project into archiving practices funded by the Swedish Research Council. Her research into Somatic Archiving and the Performance of Memory continues by means of artistic practice and critical engagements with Augmented, Mixed (AR/MR), and Virtual Reality platforms.