Canvas

The folk figure Juha does not belong to a single place or border, but rather, wanders across time through cultures and genres; his movements contingent on the needs of the storyteller. Juha is less a person and more an embodied structure. He (it) traverses tales from the humorous to the parable, functioning as an empty container that is continually filled with the jester, wise man, average citizen, conman and fall guy – his position is one of utility, a social critic that can never be fully assimilated. He is elusive, an open-source tabula rasa. “He takes a body for a moment and then leaves it,” remarks Shadi Habib Allah. “A mere temporary existence, it adapts itself or they adapt it, then it dissipates and someone else picks it up.”