Performance

Permanent Resident by Maria Metsalu

A person balances on a yellow ball while holding a purple and a pink ball, wearing a transparent outfit. — Photo: Kertin Vasser

How does fear manifest? Welcome to the world premiere of Maria Metsalu’s new performance.

Through a synthesis of movement, visual design, and poetic metaphor, Permanent Resident maps the geology of a psyche, creating a visually and physically demanding exploration of what it means to live intimately with a fear that has become home.

– Maria Metsalu

Permanent Resident is a new solo work by Maria Metsalu that proposes fear not as a temporary emotion, but as the fundamental architecture of the self. Installed within the Great Hall of the museum, the work unfolds as an internal childlike landscape - one in which the performer’s body negotiates a dynamic and paradoxical relationship with its surroundings.

Maria Metsalu is an artist whose work centers the body as a site and an archive of lived experience – a focal point where social and political issues merge. Often utilizing bodily charged expressions, the vulnerability and agency on display, inherent to such an approach, reveals the impact of our contemporary condition on a social body while also articulating the impulse toward self-determination. Central to her practice is the self-mythologization of identity in the digital age, where she examines the role of humans in both physical and virtual worlds. Her performances delve into the tension between abject embodiment and flawless high-tech, exploring the intersection of identity, voyeurism, and corporate technologies. Rather than resolving meaning, Metsalu cultivates ambiguity - opening space for expanded interpretation instead of offering a conceptual closure.

The artist co-founded the performance collective Young Boy Dancing Group (YBDG), where she continues to push the boundaries of performance and visual art through a post-apocalyptic, DIY aesthetic.

This is her first performance in Norway.