veera nivalainen
photographic artist / veera.nivalainen@gmail.com / @veeniva
still pouring
from
the soft spot (ongoing)
Still pouring from the soft spot is a performance-installation giving space to sensitivity as multi-sensorial and visceral. Through dance and performance art as well as lens-based animation it aims to materialise emotional labour as not measurable, but experiential work. As supporting, holding, nurturing, staying silent, being in process, bursting, dwelling, cleaning. The project is based on curious, open and experimental collaboration between media- and dance art. Our aim is to make space for an open and soft reflection on emotional labour and sensitive, emotional bodies.
Still pouring from the soft spot is a multi-diciplinary collaboration between dance artist Sonjis Laine and photographic artist Veera Nivalainen. The continuous project takes different forms in different spaces and occasions. Our work on emotional labour and sensitivity has grown into an important practice of friendship, collegiality and taking care.
sharing fruit and other
intimate encounters (2023)
Sharing fruit and other intimate encounters is a photographic body of work investigating themes of intimacy, cohabitation and mundane meaningfulness. These are tied together by haptic, tactile materials and fruits especially take a center stage. In the arts fruits have traditionally symbolized love, romance and lust. Nivalainen is curious about these meanings, but also looks at fruits as ordinary, fleshly and decomposable bodies. They serve as metaphors for humanity, human relationships and human bodies, their materiality and the vulnerability. As such, the fruit also becomes a mirror for the artist themself: a way of investigating their own body and its (queer) feelings indirectly, hidden and in safety.