FREEDOM FOR EVERY BODY—INTERSECTIONAL APPROACHES TO ANIMALITY AND ECOLOGY

Terike Haapoja is a visual artist based in New York. Haapoja’s large scale installation work, writing and political projects investigate the mechanics of othering with a specific focus on issues arising from the anthropocentric world view of western modernism. The question of animality and the possibility of a community of difference are re-occurring themes in Haapoja's work.

Haapoja represented Finland in the 55 Venice Biennale with a solo show in the Nordic Pavilion, and her work has been awarded with several prizes, including ANTI prize for Live Art (2016), Dukaatti-prize (2008) and Ars Fennica prize nomination. Haapoja's collaboration with writer Laura Gustafsson has been awarded with Finnish State Media art award (2016) and  Kiila-prize (2013). 

Haapoja is the co-editor of publications The Helsinki Effect – Public Alternatives to Guggenheim's Model of Culture Driven Deveopment (Terreform UR 2016), Altern Ecologies – Emergent Perspectives on the Ecological Threshold in the 55, Venice Biennale (Frame 2015), History According to Cattle (punctum books, 2015), and Field Notes – From Landscape to Laboratory (The Finish Bioart Society), among others. Terike Haapoja is an adjunct professor at Parsons Fine Arts, New York.

In her GIDEST seminar, through a presentation of her installation work as well as other projects, Haapoja will discuss how attempts to include nonhuman beings in social structures challenge underlying notions of humanity and personhood. Further, she proposes that only by deconstructing the human-animal binary and becoming aware of how race and animality are mutually constructed in western imaginary it is possible to fight the  forces of white suprematist capitalism. Art, in this view, is a central platform for approaching the not yet thinkable.