Natalia Kozieł-Kalliomäki ⎜Finnish cultural foundation (Finland)

BIO

Natalia Kozieł-Kalliomäki is a visual artist, Polish-original, living, working, inventing and having fun in
Helsinki; Finland. She’s exploring the substance of print through analog optical machinery and
alchemy of film processes. She aims to uncover how traditional film projecting can be reinvented to
tell layered stories within motion and static pictures, where simple illusions become enigmatic and
impossible gets present.
She entered analog film form studying painting and printmaking from where she brought the strong
sense of texture with color dynamics and ongoing fixation towards paper. Today she’s mostly
working with 16mm film expanded film installations and cinema performances. Film projectors, slide
projectors or simple magic lanterns always function as her primary tools and overhead projector as
her beloved instrument when performing with film.
Natalia’s installations and performances have been shown internationally across museums, galleries
and other art contexts including film, animation, theatre and music festivals. Her performances
include: Midnight Sun Film Festival, LUFF; Lausanne Underground Film & Music festival, The
Barcelona Independent Film Festival l’Alternativa, ANIMOCJE; International Film Festival in Poland.
Her latest expanded-cinema performance Oho! will premiere in March at OK LÀ! festival in Montreal,
followed by presentations in Quebec City and Toronto.

PROJECT

I have been always inspired by big city symphonies of artists like Dziga Vertov and Walter Ruttmann.
Staying behind a 16mm Bolex camera helps me to look at the World as through the magnifying glass.
In Narva, I want to boldly flip the script and create a “Border Town Rhapsody” — focusing on small,
overlooked places and everyday people living in different tempo and historical path. I want to fill that
filmed footage with lightness, especially in current times of what’s uncertain.
Alongside, I will foster communal engagement: presenting a final expanded-cinema performance in
the Kreenholm Villa, organizing public screenings for the locals of 16mm Estonian travelogues films
from 1960s and 70s — visual and informative diaries that document the country with its’ sights in
poetic form. That will bring film projections back to cinema of Kreenholm Villa, which hasn’t seen film
for a long time.
I am seeking actions that engage many senses, exploring synesthesia and inviting audiences to
experience film collectively and intuitively.