Helsinki based artists Tellervo Kalleinen and Oliver Kochta-Kalleinen initiated the Complaints Choir project, which invites people to sing about their complaints together. The first Complaints Choir was organized in Birmingham (UK) in 2005. After the event became a surprise success, Kalleinen and Kochta-Kalleinen have been invited to initiate complaints choirs all around the globe. Soon thereafter they initiated the Complaints Choir of Helsinki, the Complaints Choir of St. Petersburg and the Complaints Choir of Hamburg-Wilhelmsburg.
Prior to the collaboration of Lisa Steele and Kim Tomczak, both were known as prolific and industrious artists. Steele launched her artistic career in 1974 with the video Birthday Suit - with scars and defects, which has become a seminal video in the canon of works dealing with body art. Steele’s work in the 1980s moved from highly personal and intimate videos towards lengthier works dealing with contemporary social issues such as The Gloria Tapes (1980), in which Steele herself intelligently and sympathetically portrays a pregnant woman who learns how to affect change in her own life whilst navigating troubling familial problems and difficult social service bureaucracies. Tomczak worked as a photo/video artist in Vancouver at the artist-run centre Pumps and first collaborated with Steele on the 1983 video In the Dark.
