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 a strong sense of texture with color dynamics and an 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 the 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 always been inspired by big city symphonies of artists like Dziga Vertov and Walter Ruttmann. Staying behind a 16mm Bolex camera helps me look at the world as through a 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 a different tempo and historical path. I want to fill that filmed footage with lightness, especially in current times of uncertainty. Alongside this, I will foster communal engagement by presenting a final expanded-cinema performance in the Kreenholm Villa and organizing public screenings for locals of 16mm Estonian travelogue films from the 1960s and 70s — visual and informative diaries that document the country and its sights in poetic form. This will bring film projections back to the 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.