:::LA-BAS:::

Irma Optimisti

Mathematician Irma Optimist started doing performance art in 1989. Since then she has performed at dozens of festivals, museums and galleries all over the world. During the beginning of her career, she was famous for the ironic and parodying aspects of her performances. These were directed as criticism of the prevalent masculine concept of art. Many of the works were interactive and simultaneous, based on mathematical dynamics of chaos.

In most of her work, Irma Optimist has been very personal, discussing the conditions of identity, femininity, death. Gender, locality and nature have been her themes. The works themselves are transformations, in which the existence of the artist is connected to ritual and live installation.

Irma Optimist changed her studio to Studio Là-bas. After that, Là-bas also started to develop into a living structure for performance art and other forms of experimental art and culture. In the first ever event at Studio Là-bas in August 2000, her video of Private Pythagoras saw its premiere.

That crystallized the connection between her previous work and the events of the new millennium. That experimental art needed a bodily-mathematical space for its transformation was to be important to those events.

Là-bas has changed the ideal space of Euclidian geometry into jagged forms described by contemporary mathematics. Euclidian analysis does not penetrate the essence of irregular forms that have been found from mathematical space through fractal dimensions.