17.10.2025-23.10.2025

Jonas Vuorma

anna neuvoa/ohjaa minua

(Osa sarjasta Identiteettilarppi, 2024-2025)

Vuorma Jonas (b. 1996) is a performance and visual artist (LAB University of Applied Sciences, Institute of Design, 2025), born into a railway station home in Southwest Finland and of East Karelian descent. Their artistic approach has been shaped by growing up in a large, multicultural family and being influenced by a wide range of realities and environments across the country.

In recent years, Vuorma’s work has taken the form of explorations involving stepping into different roles, states of mind, and situations. The work is characterized by aimless documentary processes, often expressed through text and mobile photography. Themes such as East Karelian identity and eating disorders from a male perspective are central to their current practice.

“In my experiments, I aim to place myself in various suboptimal realities—experiments that probe the mind and body. I’m fascinated by engaging in dialogue with the habits and thought patterns we’ve internalized. In my work, I translate challenges drawn from real life into unrecognizable behavioral models that I then perform.
My tests are holistic, temporarily altering the experience of being human in that moment. The approach is often very practical and unpretentious: it’s literal enactment or simple documentation of a moment. I don’t aim for predictable outcomes or enlightenment, though I can’t rule out the possibility of it.”

The individual’s perspective is emphasized.

Through both deliberate and perhaps indirect acts, Vuorma seeks to question the elitist structures of the visual art field and society at large, while avoiding contrived or superficial political gestures.

anna nuevoa / ohjaa minua  (guidance requested) is a Part of the series “Identity LARP,” 2024–2025.

Within a role, there is the possibility of discovering something that would not otherwise dare to surface.

The exhibition presents paper-based textual diary material from research into Karelian identity and self-image — created during a broader project of reconstructing the self. It includes moments from a six-month session spent in a state of awareness, exploring lost East Karelian roots and seeking selfhood in a non-physical realm. During the session, the research focus gradually shifted toward a more personal inquiry into identity. Emotional states, shifting moods, and open questions to the world leave nothing outside the experience of being human.

Each leaflet stands as an independent work, yet can be viewed as part of a larger chronological whole.

The work premiered at Imatra Art Museum in February 2025, in its complete archival form.

http://wuorma.com