| ABOUT HER ART | |
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Photo: The performance "Muutoksen Merkit" ("The signs of change") at Mätäjoki environmen- tal arts exhibition in Helsinki 2001. Sanna Karlsson-Sutisna: dance and sculpture.
Performance artist:
In the context of Finnish performance art Sanna Karlsson-Sutisna presents, in many ways, a unique way of working.
Thematically she is clearly orientated towards the multicultural ‘bodily otherness ’, a source for
inspiration as well as for research. Her own experience - she spent the 90 ‘s in Cuba and Bali - gave the
insight that ritual can still be part of everyday life. She has always insisted on the social and societal
dimensions of art, taking art to the street, close to people -to whom it belongs.
By formation Karlsson-Sutisna is both a visual- and a dance artist. In creating a visual language of symbols
she uses - in her performance - here own body as painting tool, combining the Graham technique with patterns
of movement from Cuban and Balinese rituals and yoga. She also performs Balinese ritual dance, where the authentic
attire as well as music and sound play a significant role.
The aim is holistic - the entity rather than the sum of the parts: she creates the shape of Gestalt from the
bodily image of presentation, emphasizing the aim towards growth and setting the boarders as far as possible
from the self, performed by stretching the limbs to their extremes, thereby painting a circle as wide as possible.
The emotional setting is exceptional to be taking place in contemporary art: it could be characterized
as “friendshiply ”. Friendshipliness involves gestures of joy and generosity.
Modern Western body image has been characterized as “enclosed ” - enclosed in the private box of the self. In
her performance, Karlsson-Sutisna repeats the gesture of opening and being open, as well as the volume as to
ladle from the very heart of the earth as well as from the stars, spreading it in the surrounding space, to the
surrounding people.
In the symbolic language of the artist the tree is, as the human being, “a creature of two worlds ”. The roots
being in something “holy ”, incomprehensible and inexplicable, to feel good, human needs myths and tales, where
the ritual and societal encounter strengthens, reforms and maintains the awareness that there is also positive
meaning in the world.
In creating her own, personal entity of significant elements from different cultures, she aims at finding the
universal humanity, something all human have in common. By assembling the most interesting and beautiful pearls
found she gets, almost by definition, close to the innermost secrets of the human soul.
Visual artist:
Life and nature are the sources of inspiration for Sanna Karlsson-Sutisna, painter, sculptor and dancer.
Mainly qualified in the visual arts, she has, from her early years, dedicated herself also to dancing. Using
her body as a painting tool, she recreates symbols of the life-giving energies prevailing in nature, and by
building her performance with interactivity transmits them to her audience. To Sanna art is a social, and societal,
matter, which shouldn´t be enclosed in temples but be part of daily life. Consequently, she tries, as much as
possible, to have her art performed and displayed where people move, in streets, parks and other public places.
Certainly, a great deal of the ideological fundaments in her art and her life-long aims are to be found in her
childhood home, where different cultures met, where human values such as art and general solidarity prevailed.
In her early age her father, painting architect, involved her with painting. Later on, after graduation from
the Helsinki Art Academy, she went exploring cultures far west and far east - the Cuban and the Balinese - and
experienced the intertwining of ritual, art and everyday life that has become so distant to the Western culture.
Sanna´s aim to create a unity of human deep-experience takes the shape of symbols, human figures and/or simply
nature. In sculpture she uses different materials, but mainly wood, letting the material retain it´s own voice
and character. Her paintings breath a peace and a harmony, in colours as well as in shapes, emanated from inner
streams of energy, where love and compassion are essential elements. In appearance the paintings remind of
anthroposophic art, but are free from any dogmatic scales be it regarding colours or shapes. The shapes float
together with the deep, intense colour that she uses.
On a wider scale - a support for the aim to overbuild the gap between art and life, daily as well as spiritual.