Artist talk: Nina Davies and 2girls1comp in conversation with Kaisa Karvinen and Jamie Sutcliffe

Artist talk: Nina Davies and 2girls1comp in conversation with Kaisa Karvinen and Jamie Sutcliffe

In connection with performance of "The Inexorable Non-Player Character", the artists Nina Davies and 2girls1comp will sit down for a conversation with curators Kaisa Karvinen and Jamie Sutcliffe. Join us for a deep dive into the thematics of the performance!

Time: 6th of Sep, 16:00–17:30
Location: Zodiak Foyer, Kaapeliaukio 3, in the inner courtyard of the Cable Factory.
With refreshments

Conversation will start from close to home: with the body. How do online and offline bodies shape each other in the current technological and cultural environment? What happens to a body in the feedback loops between materiality of the physical body and the TikTok trends blending into how we move, and game characters training the real world machines?

From there, we will open the conversation outward: what happens when the logics of gaming and play start shaping the public spaces and the spaces we actually live in, and wonder what consequences that might have for our lived experiences and political realities.

Nina Davies and 2girls1comp bring these entanglements of body, play, and space into focus through their practises; Davies through dance and it’s connections on digital platforms, 2girls1comp through the modding and reworking of games' internal logics. Curator Kaisa Karvinen comes to these questions from the built world: as an architect and curator, she looks at how the futures and histories of our physical spaces get constructed, and who gets to do the constructing. Curator Jamie Sutcliffe, meanwhile, has explored in his own work the politics of gaming's impact on contemporary art practices.

About the participants

Nina Davies is an artist who considers the present moment through observing dance in popular culture and how it is disseminated, circulated, made, and consumed. Her previous research has examined the commodification of the dancing body on digital platforms, as well as a rethinking of today's dances as the traditional dances of the future. Oscillating between the use of fiction and non-fiction, her work helps build new critical frameworks for engaging with dance practices. 

Her work has recently been exhibited at The Henry Moore Institute, Leeds; Aksioma, Ljubljana; FACT, Liverpool; Western Front, Vancouver; and Artspace, Sydney, and she has performed her work at venues such as Tate Britain, Somerset House and The Photographers Gallery in London. In 2021, she co-founded Future Artefacts FM, an artist-run program that showcases artists working with speculative fiction for broadcast, which she co-hosts with artist Niamh Schmidtke and curator Rebecca Edwards.

2girls1comp is a modding duo founded in 2023 by Marco De Mutiis and Alexandra Pfammatter. Their work changes the logic of video games as an act of creative counter-play, revealing the social and economic fabric in which they are immersed: from reclaiming global digital infrastructures to commenting on free labor within the capitalist ideologies of the gaming industry. 

Kaisa Karvinen is an architect, curator and researcher working with exhibitions, texts, and performances. She approaches architecture as a material archive of society’s latent structures, which she analyses via artistic-architectural collaborations. She is currently pursuing a doctoral degree at the University of Oulu. She has organised several LARPs as part of the Trojan Horse collective. Together with Ott Kagovere and Tommi Vasko, she co-edited Borrowing Positions: Role-Playing Design and Architecture (2019). She was the curator of Teo Ala-Ruona's exhibition Industry Muscle: Five Scores for Architecture (2025) for the Nordic Countries Pavilion at the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale and is currently working on the exhibition for the Finnish Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2027.

Jamie Sutcliffe is a writer, curator, and co-director of Strange Attractor Press. He is the editor of Documents of Contemporary Art: Magic, published by The Whitechapel Gallery and The MIT Press (2021), and Weeb Theory  (2023) published by Banner Repeater, and the author of Let Me Work!, a study of the cybernetic afterlives of images, forthcoming from Breakdown Press. His essays, reviews, and interviews have been published internationally by Art Monthly,  Art Review,  e-flux,  Frieze,  The White Review,  Rhizome,  The Quietus, and Bricks From The Kiln amongst others. He is Associate Lecturer in Fine Art at Chelsea College of Art, University of the Arts, London.

Accessibility information:

Zodiak: Kaapeliaukio 3, 00180 Helsinki, in the inner courtyard of the Cable Factory. You can find more info about how to arrive here from the Cable Factory's website, under Info > How to get here.

The auditorium and the foyer are accessible with a wheelchair, and can be reached via Kaapeliaukio 3 and Tallberginkatu 1. The accessible entrance is located between doors A and B in the inner courtyard. The foyer is accessible with a wheelchair, and can be reached using the lift located at door B. Please note that the door to the lift is heavy. The door is manual. A toilet accessible with a wheelchair is available opposite the lift on the same floor with the foyer.