Image: Mia Wennerstrand & Melanie Jame Wolf, WOMAN/DEATH: an augury. Pori Art Museum, Pori
Mia Wennerstrand and Melanie Jame Wolf will present ‘WOMAN/DEATH: an augury’, a new commissioned play developed for the exhibition ‘De Se Attitude’, at Pori Art Museum in Finland on 30 August 2026. The performance is scheduled for 3pm at the museum’s Eteläranta site in Pori, with admission included in the museum’s entrance fee. Students and children can attend free of charge.
The work centres on the uneasy relationship between its two protagonists, Woman and Death. According to the museum, Wennerstrand and Wolf use that relationship to examine womanhood and dying, as well as the possibilities of writing and understanding both subjects differently. The performance forms part of the museum’s final day of ‘De Se Attitude’, which is scheduled to run from 28 March through 30 August 2026 in the museum’s Wing.
‘WOMAN/DEATH: an augury’ takes its cue from the work of French feminist writer Hélène Cixous, particularly the question of what écriture féminine might mean in 2026. Cixous introduced the term in 1975 in discussions of writing by women. The museum describes the new play as an experimental investigation into feminist collaborative writing practices, reflecting the artists’ shared authorship and the work’s movement between theatrical and visual-art contexts.
Wennerstrand’s practice has focused on intimacy for the past 15 years, according to her museum biography. Her work includes single-channel videos, poems and residency reports, diary-like exhibitions, essays and solo performances. Her work has been shown at institutions and venues in Finland and internationally, including Babycastles in New York, FACT in Liverpool and Assembly Point in London, as well as online through Rhizome and NTS Radio. The museum also notes that her practice received support from Finland’s Arts Promotion Centre from 2023 to 2025 and that she received the Finnish State Media Art Award in 2022.
Wolf is a self-taught artist who has lived and worked in Berlin since 2011. Her practice includes solo works and interdisciplinary projects made with friends, addressing power, flows of capital and the phenomenon of show business. Working across multiple media and forms, Wolf approaches performance, repetition and subjectivity as constructed conditions, while using humour as a strategy for extending the critical potential of her work. Her work has been presented at KW Institute of Contemporary Art, Künstlerhaus Bethanien, the Institute of Modern Art in Brisbane, Kunstmuseum Basel, HAU—Hebbel am Ufer and the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma. She received the Berlin Art Prize in 2022.
The performance is one of several events accompanying the closing week of Pori Art Museum’s summer exhibitions, held from 25 to 30 August. The museum is also showing ‘Contra Conservatio’ and ‘Maire Gullichsen and the Turning Points of Modernism’, both scheduled to close on 30 August. Pori Art Museum is open Tuesday to Friday from 11am to 6pm and on weekends from 10am to 5pm; it is closed on Mondays. ‘WOMAN/DEATH: an augury’ takes place at Eteläranta, 28100 Pori, on 30 August at 3pm.
