For Sandro Masai, a painting need not begin when a brush meets a quiet canvas. It can begin when a body starts to move, a musician answers that movement and a public space becomes part of the work. In Dance for Oshun, Masai sings, dances and paints within the same performance. The resulting image carries the record of an event, but the event is not merely a demonstration of how the image was made. It is the art.
Masai describes himself as an Afro-Brazilian multimedia artist who works with Afrofuturism, decolonisation, ancestry, spirituality and empathy. He has lived in Denmark since 2007 and has built a practice around performance, participation and interactive installation. Across those forms, movement leaves marks, spectators take part and inherited cosmologies remain active in contemporary Danish art spaces.
The question of the future here is not confined to an image of advanced machinery. Masai’s account of Afrofuturism sits alongside works dedicated to the orishas, figures in Yoruba traditions carried across the Atlantic and kept alive in Brazil. He uses digital tools as well as paint, bodies, sound and conversation. The combination is specific. A performance in Aalborg need not pretend to be an untouched ritual transported from another place. It can acknowledge the movement of traditions through time and geography, and build something new from that encounter.
In the artist’s description of Dance for Oshun #3, a performance at Kunsten Museum of Modern Art Aalborg in October 2022, the work produces music, dance, painting, video and photographs. The number matters: this was one part of a developing series, not a solitary spectacle. Masai identifies Oshun with rivers and waterfalls, feminine power, fertility, prosperity and beauty, and with gold and yellow. He explains that music, dance and colour carry particular relations to orishas within Yoruba traditions. His performance draws on those relations while also naming his guest collaborator, the Danish artist and musician Jens Bugay-Hougaard.
The gallery is only one of the places in which the project existed. A Kunsthal Nord exhibition announcement describes five action-painting performances in public spaces around Aalborg during 2022, with an exhibition at the Turbine Gallery opening during the sequence. It notes that Masai worked with guest musicians, photographers and videographers to make large paintings. The paintings could then be encountered after the action that created them. In that shift from event to exhibition, the viewer meets two kinds of time: the time of the moving body and the time in which its trace remains available for another person to study.
A trace is not a substitute
Calling the canvases traces does not diminish them. A trace can make an absent action perceptible without pretending to contain everything that happened. Masai’s work resists the choice between performance as an irrecoverable moment and painting as a permanent object. He makes each medium disclose the limits of the other. The painting has a surface one can inspect; the performance had duration, music, bodies and an audience. Photographs and video add further records, each with its own framing.
The earlier Dance Traces project makes that problem explicit in its title. Masai’s chronology records action-painting performances and an exhibition in Aalborg in 2021, after production work in a studio at Nordjyllands Kunstnerværksted. The series moved through venues and gatherings rather than belonging to one room. That circulation matters to the form. A performance can be remade for another place and another group of people. Its painted residue can travel afterward, but no two audiences have shared the same event.
Masai’s work can look deceptively simple when reduced to the phrase action painting. Twentieth-century art histories often use that phrase to concentrate on a single maker’s gesture and the canvas that receives it. In Masai’s descriptions, the action is social and sonic. A musician is present, an orisha is named, an audience may witness or take part, and the site gives the work a particular setting. The work is not explained by the proposition that expressive movement makes expressive marks. The more difficult proposition is that a body’s relation to history, place and other bodies can become part of a picture’s making.
The Dance for Oshun paintings grew from public actions involving singing and dancing within Yoruba-derived practices, as the Kunsthal Nord exhibition account explains. A mark left during such an action carries the time of the body that made it, while the finished canvas gives another viewer time to return to it. The work shifts between these two encounters: one shared in a room, the other possible after its performers have gone.
In a Nordic context, that relationship can unsettle the familiar division between imported culture and local culture. Masai’s works were made in Aalborg, with collaborators and audiences there, by an artist who has lived in Denmark for many years. Their connections to Afro-Brazilian traditions do not make them less Danish as contemporary events. Nor does their Danish location absorb or erase the histories that the artist explicitly brings into the room. The work occupies both conditions at once. Its movement across spaces makes the idea of a single cultural address feel too small.
Design, dance and the invitation to take part
Masai trained in art and technology at Aalborg University and in interaction design at Design School Kolding. These studies are not incidental credentials. His earlier My Body, Your Room investigated how an installation and performance might change the relation between performer, audience and space. On the artist’s work page, he describes it as practice-based research into corporeal empathy. A wireless heart-rate monitor and microphone fed a computer that amplified breath and heartbeat and made the room’s light blink with the performer’s pulse. Computer programming is credited to Sune Petersen. Masai records several presentations of the work between 2014 and 2016.
The question was not simply whether a device could produce an impressive effect. Masai asked whether a monitored pulse and voice, responding within an environment, could help people form empathic bonds. Interactive art can invite a spectator to press a button and stop there. In his account, interaction is a relationship that has to be investigated, not assumed. The person who enters the work changes its conditions; Masai hoped the encounter would also change how that person felt toward others. Even when a later project uses paint more visibly than sensors, this concern with the participant remains in the background.
Consider the participatory performance BallonHead Horse. Masai says the audience helps build a temporary image based on Andrea Galvani’s photograph Death of an Image #5, then documents the process with mobile phones. A photograph becomes a communal reconstruction; the reconstruction produces further photographs and social media posts. No single object exhausts the work. Its material is partly the coordination among people who agree, for a while, to make something together.
It would be too easy to call this participation democratic simply because more than one person takes part. The conditions of invitation still matter. Who is in the audience? Who feels comfortable entering a performance? What does a participant have to know before joining? Masai’s work does not answer all of those questions on its own. It makes them tangible. The audience is asked to do more than consume the result, and the artist’s role changes from sole maker to the person who composes the circumstances in which others can act.
His dance background brings another layer to that composition. In his work and teaching record, Masai describes training in modern dance, theatre and Japanese butoh. The 2016 piece NINA, Young, Gifted and Black was presented as a butoh dance performance and homage to Nina Simone, according to the Contemporary Performance almanac and Masai’s own chronology. A Black Brazilian performer choosing butoh to honour an African American musician brings distinct artistic histories into the same choreographic space. The meeting among them is a choice of form and address: the dance honours Simone through Masai's body and through a movement practice he studied.
Masai’s later action paintings make that decision visible in a different medium. He is present as a performer, but the body does not remain confined to dance’s stage. It helps produce a painted surface, meets musicians and contributes to photographs and video. The artwork grows through translation among forms. Translation can lose texture, and it can create new texture. Masai’s practice keeps both possibilities in view.
The digital does not cancel the ancestral
The title Digital Dance for Eshu might suggest a move away from the body. Masai’s description of the 2023 work places it within the same larger project of performances and paintings dedicated to orishas. He describes Eshu as a messenger and figure of communication, and says the project brings together performance, painting and artist talks. The page also credits technical support by Anderson Oliveira. The digital component belongs to a collaborative and material practice; it is not a substitute for the histories on which the work draws.
That is one way to understand why Afrofuturism can be an apt term here without reducing it to screens and projections. Masai explicitly uses the term for his practice. The work connects technologies of interaction with older knowledge carried across the African diaspora. Neither side is presented as a fossil. The orishas are described by the artist as present in living practices, while digital systems are used in a present made by historical movement. A future can emerge from their encounter rather than from the fantasy that one must erase the other.
The artist’s account of his own ancestry gives this argument weight. He identifies as Afro-Brazilian and names the persistence of Yoruba-derived traditions in Brazil. Their presence there is inseparable from the violence of the transatlantic slave trade, but his performances do not leave the story at loss. They take up music, movement, colour and naming as active means of making. The paintings do not repair that history by themselves. They refuse the suggestion that history ended when people were dispersed.
His published agenda lists a sixth Dance for Oshun action in 2025 alongside Orishas pop-up performances, research and teaching in Denmark. The continuing sequence gives the earlier canvases a different temporal shape. They are moments in an investigation that returns to the relation among dance, music, paint and place with different collaborators.
An action painting may ultimately be listed under Masai’s name, yet his documentation gives guest performers, musicians and technical supporters roles in individual projects. He convenes people and establishes a structure for their contributions. Their music, movement and technical decisions shape what the audience encounters. The artwork bears his concept, but its production has many hands.
Krull has explored the relation between contemporary dance and its audience in its account of The Audience Club and STHLM DANS. Masai has made works in which spectators can enter an event or help document it. Their presence changes what the work becomes and what remains after it ends.
What a painting keeps open
There is no need to force Masai’s many works into one developmental line, as if performance led inevitably to painting and painting to digital art. His own project pages show overlap. Dance, design research, interactive installation, ritual reference and the production of images coexist. The point is not that he has found one final medium capable of expressing them all. It is that each medium changes the question posed by another. A digital trace can circulate beyond a venue. A canvas can hold marks made during an event. A live participant can interrupt a plan that seemed fixed.
The Oshun and Eshu projects bring diasporic cosmology into contemporary performance and technology. My Body, Your Room asks how connected environments can shape empathy. BallonHead Horse lets a public remake and redistribute an image. In each case, the future concerns relationships: between histories, between people and tools, between a maker and those invited into the making.
The works are not interchangeable examples of a thesis. Dance for Oshun anchors one in a river figure, song, colour and painting. Digital Dance for Eshu turns toward communication and a technical layer. My Body, Your Room begins from an interaction design question. BallonHead Horse depends on a public act of collective reconstruction. Their differences make Masai’s practice legible. The same artist can return to participation without asking every work to do the same job.
The paintings in Dance for Oshun remain after the singers and dancers have left the place where they were made. They invite attention to colour and mark, but also to what a still image cannot retain: the tempo of a gesture, the work of a musician, the response of a crowd. Masai’s art makes that incompleteness productive. A viewer looking at a canvas encounters evidence of a performance and an invitation to imagine the human relations around it. The painting is an object. It is also a reminder that an event can extend into other people’s futures.