Baba Yaga

The performance Baba Yaga is an exploration of motherhood and mental health. The ambiguous Slavic folklore character Baba Yaga functions as a method for the artist to break down the norms of a conventional mother since she inherits the paradox of good and evil.
In the performance, Rodin uses a personal and fragmented letter written to Baba Yaga, to her previous lover, to her sons and to herself. Rodin positions herself in a circle of eggs like a fence. This plays on descriptions of Baba Yaga’s house standing on chicken legs and spinning round and round. During the performance, the eggs are offered to the audience as a manifestation of change. The artist acts like Baba Yaga and with a ritualistic dance, she manifests her identity as the witch of the forest, of both good and evil.

Baba Yaga was performed at Vi Lever på Polsk in Copenhagen 2022.

Music by: Wojciech Wilk
Supported by The Danish Art Foundation
Photos: Morza Studio

The wise and the mad

The Wise and the Mad at The National Gallery of Denmark 2022

The Wise and the Mad encapsulates personal traumas experienced whilst growing up within a religious cult. It has never been easy to express the struggle of emancipating myself. Throughout my practice I have worked with digital media and computers, but the GTP-3 was a necessary new prism through which I could address these themes.
A childhood inside of a religious cult is a constant confrontation with an absolute patriarch authority who interprets everything in the world as either good or evil. Leaving a cult is also about entering the void of no rules, a world in which you are alone and unprotected. GTP-3 provided a new set of guidelines that were less absolute.

Curated by artist and PhD researcher (Human-Centered Computing & AI Ethics) Mirabelle Jones

Ebb and Flow

Ebb and Flow is a site specific performance and performance workshop made for Magma UNESCO Global Geopark in Norway.
The project is curated by Ida Højgaard.

Partners:
- Dalane Folkemuseum / Jøssingfjord Vitensmuseum
- Velferden Sokndals Scene for Samtidskunst
- Eigersund Næring og Havn
- Eigersund Kommune
- Magma UNESCO Global Geopark
- KAKE - Katalysator for kultur i Egersund

The program is supported by:
- KORO
- Nordisk Kulturfond
- Nordisk Kulturkontakt - Mobility Funding
- Norsk Kulturråd
- Rogalands Fylkeskommune
- Eigersund Kommune
- Eigersund Næring og Havn

Ebb and flow
performance workshop

The wise and the mad

The Wise and the Mad at Overgaden .
The performance is also part of the digital exhibition Embodying the algorithm, curated by Mirabelle Jones in 2021.

GPT-3 performances /Embodying the Algorithm
The Wise and the Mad
Box

Embodying the Algorithm documents the works of a group of interdisciplinary performers from around the world working with artificial intelligence technology to produce unique performance-based artworks that challenge, complicate, and obfuscate the boundaries of human-computer creative practices. By working with the largest natural language processing model in existence OpenAI’s GPT-3, Embodying the Algorithm presents a body of works that are unprecedented explorations at the nexus of human creativity and machine learning, exploring and traversing the barrier between human and nonhuman consciousnesses to investigate questions of embodiment, expression, human-machine collaboration and creativity.

A4 drawings from the series What a Mistake 2020 – 2021

EVE, LOT’S WIFE & DELILAH (2020)

With her series on the women of the bible, Rodin explores a common past, perception and history of women and its interconnectivities with that of her own.
Working through the medium of photography, Rodin explores and challenges the mythology of biblical women through the prism of Eve, Lot’s wife and Delilah. Here, she questions the blame for the fall of man put on women, the shaming of female agency and the emasculatory powers bestowed to them. Through their stories a narrative that has naturalized and mythologized the dangers of women reveals itself. One that shows an incessant need to negate the power of creation inherent in women and subjugates the supernaturality of them. These biblical women can bring about the creation or the fall of a family, can usher in the total loss of strength in men and with a single bite demand the fall from grace for all humankind.
The series highlights that for all the shame, disgrace and destruction put on these women, there is very little power of choice in how they are portrayed. Lot’s wife – though her power, though her influence – is not even afforded a name.
Rodin places her own body in that of each woman, looks you directly in the eyes and demands that the story of these women be looked at through a new lens.

Text: Sasha Carlson