The collaboration between the visual artist and the choreographer is inspired by Paul B. Preciado’s essay “Pornotopia,” which examines popular culture and architecture as producers of pornographic technologies.
Photo: Andrey Bogush & Juan Pablo Cámara
Borrowing from the vocabulary of peep shows, dark rooms and matchmaking apps, choreographer Juan Pablo Cámara and visual artist Andrey Bogush devise the Homopticum, a speculative choreography where discipline and repetition meet the monstrous, yielding control, surrender, and the potential for liberation. In a dystopian take on time and self-surveillance, across the mundane and spectacular, they examine the materiality of subjectivity and the art of fabulation, questioning homosexual masculinity within the object-human relation.
The performance is part of the programme for Kiasma’s Collection Exhibition Rock, paper, scissors.
Homopticum does not merely observe—it makes observation felt. The one on the stage, lit by the dim and flickering glow, shifting under the weight of too many eyes. The one watching, locked in their own gaze, aware of being seen even as they look. No one is lost in the crowd; no one is spared. The party splits into watchers and the watched, but the Homopticum knows the truth: they are all the same, exposed beneath its lens, each movement recorded, each glance replayed. The air thickens, something turns. The Homopticum blinks.
Andrey Bogush
Andrey Bogush (b. 1987, Internet) lives and works in Helsinki, Finland. They work with images and installations in which the fantastic and the familiar are indistinguishable. Their works have been displayed at Architecture and Design Museum, Helsinki, Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki, Plato Ostrava, Czech Republic, and The Finnish Museum of Photography, Helsinki. Their work has been featured in Artforum, The British Journal Of Photography, and Foam Magazine, as well in the surveys Photography As Contemporary Art, published by Thames & Hudson, and Photography is Magic, published by Aperture. They have been working in several residencies, including Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris, and HIAP, Helsinki. They hold a BFA and MFA in Time and Space Arts from the Academy of Fine Arts, University of Arts Helsinki.
Juan Pablo Cámara
Juan Pablo Cámara is an Argentinean-born, Berlin-based choreographer and performer who graduated from the School for new Dance Development in Amsterdam. Drawing from his country’s psychoanalytical traditions, he explores the boundaries between the personal, fictional, and cultural, using artificiality and hyper-theatricality as tools for world-making and identity construction. He has performed across Europe, North and South America, and collaborated with artists like Adam Linder, Michele Rizzo, and Jefta van Dinther. His recent works, La cosa piel and Main, Main, who’s there?, were co-produced by and presented at Sophiensaele in Berlin. Cámara was in residence at Work Space Brussels (2020), Tanz Haus Zürich (2021), and Sophiensaele (2022).
Concept & choreography: Juan Pablo Cámara and Andrey Bogush
Performance: Juan Pablo Cámara
Light design: Joseph Wegmann
Sound design: Mauro Guz Bejar, Juan Pablo Cámara
Costume design: Lenard Schnitzler
Outside Eye: Luis Garay, Zander Porter, Mathias Ringgenberg
In collaboration with: Kiasma Theatre
Supported by Tanzhaus Zurich, Arts Promotion Centre Finland, Finnish Cultural Foundation, Tapiola Artist studios, DIORAMA Berlin.