Biography
Jenna Sutela works with words, sounds and living materials such as the bacterium Bacillus subtilis and the ‘many-headed’ slime mould Physarum polycephalum to create experimental installations and performances that bring together biology, technology and cosmology. Her audiovisual pieces, sculptures and performances seek to identify and react to precarious social and material moments, often in relation to technology. Sutela’s recent work explores interspecies communication, aspiring to connect with a world beyond our consciousness.
Sutela's work has been featured in a number of exhibitions, including NO NO NSE NSE, Kunsthall Trondheim, Norway (2020); Mud Muses – A Rant About Technology, Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2019); I Magma, Serpentine Gallery, London (2019); Architectural Effects, Guggenheim Bilbao, Spain (2018); Matter Fictions, Museu Coleção Berardo, Lisbon (2016); and TOKYO: Sensing the Cultural Magma of the Metropolis, Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo (2015).
Sutela is a Visiting Artist at The MIT Center for Art, Science & Technology, Cambridge, US (2019–2020), and she was the editor of Orgs: From Slime Mold to Silicon Valley and Beyond (Garret Publications, 2017).
She has participated in residencies at n-Dimensions, Google Arts & Culture’s artist-in-residence programme at Somerset House Studios, London (2018); SPACE Art + Technology, The White Building, London (2016); and the Helsinki International Artist Programme (2015).
Born in 1983 in Turku, Finland, Sutela currently lives and works in Berlin.
SAF participation:
Art in the Age of Anxiety (2020)