Aavar: Almost Someone Else

Wednesday, September 3rd at 8pm, ISSUE Project Room launches the Fall 2025 season in its 22 Boerum Pl. home theater with a program that pushes the boundaries of movement, sound, and perception. The evening features Ash Fure’s ANIMAL—a visceral performance that fuses psychoacoustic impact with spatial choreography—and work by the new artist duo Aavar, Almost Someone Else, a collaborative exploration of presence, privacy, and the poetics of public space. 

Co-created by Aavar, Almost Someone Else examines the everyday rituals of navigating public space. The duet merges movement and sound to study how individuals mediate visibility and invisibility, conformity and resistance, through subtle shifts in posture, speech, and gesture. Drawn from two concurrent solo projects—one evolving into a book and installation, the other into a group choreography—the performance uses the language of proxemics to interrogate how presence is constructed and constrained. Biret Haarla Pieski’s choreographic research investigates how public scrutiny can produce bodily restraint and distinct movement patterns; Hayden Dean explores how overheard public speech—though often meant to be private—forms a kind of ambient poetry, rich with patterns, gaps, and accidental meaning. Together, these elements form a duet that reflects on the silent negotiations we make to fit in, stand out, or simply pass through.

As the artist duo Aavar, Biret Haarla Pieski and Hayden Dean work at the intersection of sound, movement and performance, bringing together embodied research, indigenous knowledge systems and contemporary composition. Biret Haarla Pieski is a dancer and performance artist from Sápmi with a background in choreography and a practice rooted in land-based connection and collaborative making. Hayden Dean is a sound artist, performer and researcher whose work explores spatial perception, language, and sonic memory. Aavar's works have been presented internationally, including at Fridman Gallery (New York), Nordic Embassies (Berlin), and Vapaantaiteen Tila (Helsinki). Their individual practices span film, installation, performance, and contemporary dance, with works shown at the Venice Biennale, ZKM Center for Art and Media, Helsinki Biennale, Sundance Film Festival, British Film Institute (BFI), and Gera Museum of Applied Arts, among others. Biret is a P.A.R.T.S graduate and recipient of Riddu Riđđu’s Young Artist of the Year award. Hayden is a sonic arts researcher at Aalto University in association with Berlin University of the Arts.