I push through a plexiglass door, bracing myself for an encounter with yet another gilded temple of consumerism. But Isomyyri Shopping Mall is unadorned: no glamorized labyrinthine arrangements of goods, no background music of cheerful artifice. I pass by a barbershop, its only customer draped in a British flag-colored cape, then some “ethnic” stores with dim fronts. Further—second-hand shops, a few rows of relinquished wooden pallets, and, at last, just one busy, bubbly room.

“Welcome to the second edition of One Day Stand,” Parsa Kamehkhosh addresses the audience as I make my way to a vacant spot on one of the benches. Tonight, Myyrmäki Mall is hosting a program featuring five performances curated by The Other Side—a Vantaa-based performance art platform co-founded by Kamehkhosh together with Aman Askarizad. “Please be cautious when standing up from the benches,” forewarns us Aman. “If you do so abruptly, the bench might tip, causing the person opposite you to fall.” The evening of performances begins.

In the center of the room are two metal shelves with an array of beer cans, from which two strips of recycled, greenish toilet paper are outstretched toward the wall, loosely marking a lane. Paria Mohajerani and Xiaole Wang, seated in the middle, open their Workshop: Art of Permanent Borrowing with a sequence of reflections and arguments that present stealing as a fairer way of living. Having made their case, they divide the audience into two groups, one of which, led by Wang, exits the space, while the rest of us stay inside to receive further guidance on practicing “permanent borrowing.” The anticipation for a seemingly impending hands-on experiment is building up. However, not long after the audience reunites, the performance ends. Playful, and aspiringly provocative, it remains confined to rhetoric. I am left wondering—what if the authors had ventured just a few steps further into the mall, situating their work in one of the functioning stores nearby? What if, with just a little more bravery, they had engaged with the real-world setting they are trying to emulate?

Raphaël Beau pierces through my thoughts with a loud, open-throated vocalization—a stringy "Ah." Then, he brings out a portable boombox. "I want to make a little station," he says after playing a fragment of a groovy, beat-driven track. This act of station-making becomes the structuring force behind Here For A Moment (Isomyyri), as Beau leads the audience through the mall, asking, “Is it okay to dance here?” His questions are provocative as much as permission-seeking. "Where in the mall can we dance?"

We find our answers amid the racks of second-hand clothes, in the dressing rooms, and near the Fida cashiers, moving together to the sound of all the same groovy track. By creating spontaneous collective dancing interventions, Raphäel Beau’s performance successfully confronts habitual pathways of circulation and plays with the perception of what is permissible in the public space, reaching not only the intentional audience but also the customers, sellers, and shop owners who constitute the locality but are otherwise absent at the event.

In opposition, Various Angles Of Exposed Reality by Aman Askarizad is situated in a curtained nook, invisible to all. 15 audience members are allowed to approach the place one after the other and take a picture of the performance by inserting the provided Polaroid camera into a narrow opening between the curtain and the wall. Then, they must bring the resulting photograph into the main room and place it on a central table for all to see. No one ever gets to watch his performance directly.

Askarizad takes a risk, but it pays off. The audience, just seconds ago engaged in conversations among themselves, is now eager to solve the mystery. Some people are lining up to take pictures, while others gather around the table to examine them. Anticipation heightens. Askarizad’s work unfolds in our minds as the photographs reveal what is behind the curtain: a small table, a tower assembled from wooden sticks, the performer’s arm, white walls. We never see the site fully, and instead, just like elsewhere in life, are left to imagine the present based only on the captured moments of recent history—misty, few, none lasting longer than 1/120th of a second.

The strength of Aman Askarizad’s work lies in the inconspicuous. He never actively demands our attention, and instead moves further away from view, covering his tracks by constructing obstacles and material delays; in the end, he destroys even those of the images taken with his permission on Polaroid. In return, he gets not just the audience’s careful attention, but their admiration, too: “Genious,” a person next to me whispers. I do not disagree.

The fourth performance, Help! I’m stuck! by Aeon Lux, is a critical take on the trope of damsel in distress. Throughout the work, Lux, wearing stilettos and a short skin-tight dress, is putting herself in several absurd situations, all of which involve her getting stuck: with a heel in a piece of artificial turf, between the legs of an audience member, in handcuffs she puts onto herself. In each of these situations, she is asking for help from the audience—to get her unstuck. The evident deliberateness of her actions, and the openness with which she is asking for a “hero who could save her,” create conditions that allow the audience to redefine who that hero could be. However, while the content of the performance is visibly critical of the trope of the “helpless woman,” structurally the work hardly achieves the same: the constructed situations only reenact the dynamic, without disrupting it. “God, let it not be another white man,” I think during one of such scenes, as we are waiting to see which audience member decides to come up and become the new hero. It wasn’t one at the end, but such is the vulnerability of the structure of this performance: whether it reinforces the “helpless woman – strong man” dynamic, or challenges it, is dependant entirely on chance and the constitution of the audience, rather than the performer’s intent.

The last work of the evening opens up with a formal invitation to approach the registration desk. In Contract Room, Anita Kremm, Dongbin Lee, and Karlotta Lainväe lead the audience through a highly procedural set of actions: we wait in lines, follow orders, sign contracts, and make statements on camera. The work is absurdly bureaucratic yet imbued with near-boundless care for its primary object of interest—air: “Try not to break the bubbles,” instructs Kremm as I stand on a layer of bubble wrap; to her right, Dongbin Lee is vacuum-sealing an air balloon. Extremely serious, and impossible to break out of character, the performers command respect; I do not dare to object to a single one of their instructions, and soon find myself outside, in the middle of a square, whirling around with a large plastic bag amid other participants—catching more of the air.

Through the ritualism of the absurd procedures, near-military choreography, and the performers’ fidelity to their cause, Contract Room constructs a journey through a world of its own, in which air is tangible, textured, and revered; until, at its end, we are back in the darkened room, where the aerated plastic balloons slowly, under the weight of our bodies, let the air out as an extended sigh. The second edition of One Day Stand is complete.