Join us for The Well‘s publication launch and an artist talk between Maria Metsalu, Jaakko Pallasvuo, Sam Riviere and Niina Ulfsak on the 16th of February at Biblioteka 7-9pm.  The talk coincides with the performance evening at ICA.

Maria Metsalu’s performance The Well and the new publication present an alternative rendition of the same premise: a person is lowered into a well by a quartet of psychoanalysts. The well’s floor becomes a stage, an echo chamber, a cell, a studio. A collaborative text by Maria Metsalu and Jaakko Pallasvuo, partly written by AI, The Well is a composition that eludes categorisation and perhaps enlarges the domain of authorship itself. The Well is published by If a Leaf Falls.

Maria Metsalu (1990) is an Estonian artist, who graduated from SNDO in Amsterdam in 2016. She is creating works that regardless of the chosen medium place her own body in the epicentre. She views performative experiences and performing deviance as possibilities through which collective memory could be created. She is interested in ways the position of the spectator can be challenged, destabilised or abolished altogether. Her work seeks to advance ambiguities, to proliferate meanings rather than systematise them into a clarity. She views performance as a radical space, capable of creating new meanings, new ways of looking and seeing. She is one of the founding members of Young boy dancing group and has collaborated with and performed for Tino Sehgal, Michele Rizzo and Gelatin among others.

Biblioteka is a public reference library with a variety of rare and special collections of books, zines and other printed materials within the fields of art, architecture and design. Originally from Kyiv, Ukraine, the library has been based in South London in Peckham since 2020.

Artist talk and publication launch: The Well at Biblioteka (Unit 6, Bellenden Rd Business Centre, SE15 4RF, London) on 16 February at 7–9pm.