"Kultuur" contemplates the Sun. Performance not as thesis but as experience – something between a piano concert and a finger-painted surface.
The Sun radiates energy. The Sun might nurture life, or burn right through it. Metsalu gathers herself on the orbit of this duality.
Kultuur accommodates chaos and rejects it. Intensities vary between states of pleasure, indifference, suffering and hope for renewal.
Metsalu displays herself as an object of spectacle, then denies the spectacle. We face "Kultuur" as an audience, a collective body. This body will be fed, entertained and challenged.
The performance is divided into three baroque and splendorous movements – the parade at the hot dog cart, the concert of the Flower and the final consumption of the Sun, table d'hôte.
Kultuur is a celebration of life – of its fleeting, sensual nature. A desire for simplicity exists in tension with the allure of excess.
The pleasures are earthly, even if their energy comes from the body of a star.
Maria Metsalu is an artist who uses her own body to explore contemporary issues, often employing sexually loaded means of expression. She views performance as a radical space and performing deviance as a possibility through which new ways of looking and seeing could be created. Her work seeks to proliferate meanings rather than systematize them into a clarity. She is interested in an emancipated audience and in ways the position of the spectator can be challenged, destabilised or abolished altogether. Besides her solo work she is one of the founding members of Young boy dancing group.