Prayer is a collaboration of artists from different fields (visual arts, media, dance, music, poetry), exploring the concept of a sacred experience.
How do we experience the space beyond ourselves, how do we reach it? How do we communicate it to others? Or with others?

Dancer and choreographer Panu Varstala has invited a collaborative of artists to contemplate the subject, each bringing in their own perspectives, experiences and ideas about the subject.

The ”prayer” will bring us the visual art and poems by Mika Karhu. Raimo Uunila´s media art combines Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) with aerial video shooting. Aino Peltomaa´s mediaeval chants and Panu Varstala´s movement, inspired by sufi whirling are both linked with ancient meditation techniques.

The group will invite the audience to join the experience by organizing demonstrations, where artists invite everyone to join with gentle movement, meditative sounds and/or discussion.

Panu Varstala, dance
Raimo Uunila, media art
Mika Karhu, poems, visual art
Aino Peltomaa, voice
A red stream.
Passing death.

In the burning skin
pain grows us together.

What Celan did not say.

Spoke to the stone.

But knowing,
that compassion is overstated.

The sounds of the night in us.
The dents of flaws in our reminiscences.

Modern analysis of ourselves.
We met too early.

Fell in love too late.

Now we have suffered of all the beauty
we were allowed to experience.

I wished for a new beginning,
when the moon speaks
the flowers open and you kiss me.

a poem by: Mika Karhu
translation: Aino Peltomaa

---