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VISUAL ARTS AND EXHIBITIONS
VISUAL ARTS AND EXHIBITIONS
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Embodied Consciousness in Digital Landscapes:
A Multidisciplinary Practice
Maria Nurmela's artistic practice thrives at the intersection of choreography, visual art, and technology, built on deep collaborative relationships that expand the possibilities of each medium.
Working primarily with photographer and filmmaker Vesa Loikas — a partnership that began in 2020—they create experiences where the body becomes a portal for exploring consciousness, ecology, and our posthuman future.
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Metsänhaltijat (Forest Keepers)
In Metsänhaltijat (Forest Keepers), this collaboration manifests as a participatory art suitcase combining Nurmela's contemporary dance and somatic movement practices
with Loikas's visual storytelling and augmented reality technology, creating
immersive forest experiences that deepen embodied awareness of local
ecosystems.
The 9000 series
The 9000 series exemplifies their full multidisciplinary scope, expanding to include Australian composer and soprano Jane Sheldon and sound engineer Jaakko Vastapuu, together creating installations that blend dance, fine art photography, multichannel
video, composition, and soundscapes to explore posthumanism, biological
corporeality, and consciousness—
presented in immersive gallery environments and in the metaverse at the Virtual Art House Turku as part of Indian curator Shashank Satish's Digital (Dis)Embodiments exhibition.
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Entanglement
Nurmela's, Loikas's, and Sheldon's internationally recognized AR video work
Entanglement, selected for the Fantasia exhibition in Vienna from over one hundred international applicants, demonstrates how these collaborations use augmented reality as a tool for somatic inquiry.
Whether commissioned by the City of Turku or exhibited internationally, these
multidisciplinary partnerships propose that technology can deepen rather than
distance our embodied awareness—by weaving together dance, photography, film, music, and digital media, they cultivate deeper consciousness of our biological being, our relationship to the more-than-human world, and the fluid nature of consciousness itself in an age of transformation.