Artist talk was a performance held in Aalto Festival in May 2018.
It was part of my master thesis ”Awkwardness as a tool in my artistic practice”. I think artist talks are often cringe so I was inspired by the difficulty of talking about own artworks. Artists are often assumed to be goof public talkers and part of the work is to be able to present your artworks as efficient as possible.
My professor wrote me a recommendation letter and I applied to be part of Aalto festival. I booked the biggest auditorium for 500 seats and made an Facebook event. The description in the event was copy pasted sentences from my old art essays that did not make sense at all.
For 20 minutes I was holding as awkward artist talk as possible. I was struggling with the words, asking for the audience to try out hula hoops, presenting poems that I claimed that I used as a base for my artistic practice and did not know the authors of the poems, I complained about artist life and people around me etc. In the end I had an emotional breakdown.
After the performance we had a discussion about power-relationships and assumptions. I was criticising the selection methods for public speakers and assumptions towards that. Also, I wanted to point out how the power relationship spreads between the audience and performer. Or does it?
MIRADONNA SIRKKA 