Pia Lindman

Pia Lindman is an artist and educator who works primarily in video, drawing, and performance. Lindman takes the site-specific art tradition as a point of departure.  Her work evolves around the themes of social context and space, as well as the performative aspect of making and experiencing art.  By engineered social contexts like the Hybrid Sauna at M.I.T. in 1999 and Public Sauna at P.S.1 in 2000, Lindman aims to provoke members of the audience to perform and experience a particular social practice, forcing a re-evaluation of notions of corporeality and public sphere. Lindman’s approach to drawing is informed by the tradition of performance art.  After videotaping herself re-enacting gestures of mourning captured in photographs in the New York Times, she traced these gestures from video stills with pencil. By exhibiting both the tracings and the enactments, she tries to illuminate some of the relationships between a photograph, its mediation, and the idea of original content, in this instance human emotional reaction to terrorism.

She is Professor of Environmental Art at Aalto University, Finland. Focusing on Beings and Things at the MA Program for Visual Culture and Contemporary Art, Lindman provides a platform for the students for investigations into how we might rethink and reshape our connections to the living and non-living world. At MIT, Lindman was a CAVS Fellow from 2006–07 and an artist-in-residence at CSAIL, the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Prior to that she taught as a visiting faculty in the Visual Arts Program (2004–05). She graduated with a Master of Science in Visual Studies in 1999.