Sonja Jokiniemi

Sonja Jokiniemi (born in Kuopio, Finland) works as a choreographer, performer and artist. Jokiniemi is based in Helsinki, Finland and Lausanne, Switzerland. She graduated from the Performing Arts programme at DAS Theatre in Amsterdam 2013 and with a BA degree in Contemporary Dance at Laban Centre in London. Additionally she has completed a study in Expressive Arts therapy from Inartes Institute in Helsinki 2020.

The artist’s works are situated in the cross-overs of performances, drawings and textiles, where  drawings act as an important part of scripting the performance works as well as being part of the stage designs or installations.  A lot of her work is rooted in the quest of storytelling, language systems and haptic relationality- calling towards alternative ways of speaking, knowledge formation and re-systemizing the values of language and perception.

Jokiniemi is interested in the exploration of multidirectional, messy human experiences and bodily sensations as an important landscape for thinking around networks of things and beings; their ordinary and uncanny relationships. More recently an increased investment in the research of manual labour, craft traditions and cross generational knowledge sharing, results in the intertwined production of textile and dance art.

Sonja’s work has been supported by many performing arts venues such as STUK-A House for Dance, music and Image (BE), Zodiak Centre for Dance, Moving in November festival and Kiasma Contemporary Art museum (FI), MDT (SWE), BUDA Kunstzentrum (BE). She has recently exhibited at HAM-Helsinki Art museum, Oulu Art museum, Ars Libera gallery, Den Frie Centre for Contemporary Art in Copenhagen and Dr.Guislaan Museum in Ghent. Jokiniemi has been awarded three grants by The National Arts Promotion Centre Finland (Taike): a one-year artist grant for 2017, a three-year artist grant for 2018-20 and a five-year artist grant for 2021-2025.

Odd Future

"We have gotten tired of been manipulated. Storytelling implied by The Society of the Spectacle is everywhere: from cellphone marketing to political strategies via healthcare products, TV series or war justifications. At a critical moment where artificial intelligences are more and more used in those efficient technics, cleverly, many artists have understood that their main values do not reside in their challenged narrative skills but in the urgency they have in building their own sensible, complexe yet unmanipulated version of those topics.

Sonja Jokiniemi’s odd world is an utopia. Against growing normalisation and soft fascism, she proposes a very personal version of counterculture, where the inhibited, different, unvoiced side of each one of us would be seen as optimistic hope for revolution. - her playful performances set up intimate new explorations of semantics, vocabulary and thinking."

- Patrick de Rham, ( 2016 , former director of Les Urbaines festival )

Latest works

ÖH ( 2020 )

Mound Bound (2020)

Howl (2019)

Blab (2017)

Contact

Sonja Jokiniemi -jokiniemisonja @ gmail.com