ABOUT
Suvi Tuominen is a performance artist, dancer, and theoretical archaeologist currently working as a Doctoral Researcher at the University of the Arts Helsinki. In her artistic practice, she examines the relationship between body, technology, and time. Operating within frameworks of artistic research, her methodology explores how performance-choreographies as archaeologically (sub)conscious narratives can actively speculate and recontextualize spaces and artifacts. Her aim is to bridge creative practice with rigorous archaeological theory, developing new epistemological tools for future archaeologies.
CONTACT
suvi.tuominen@uniarts.fi
+358409683663 (whatsapp or signal)
FRAGMENTS OF A LANDSCAPE
installation Fragment of a Landscape is based on the history of landscape paintings from the Vyborg Historical Museum that were destroyed during the bombings of the Second World War. Some of the works were transferred in time to the collections of, among others, the museums in Lahti and Lappeenranta, but of others only catalogue entries remain, in which the works are recorded by size or subject - no images of these paintings exist.
The installation examines the ways in which landscape is attempted to be preserved. Composed of archival fragments, the artwork plays with absence: the landscape is not present as images or spatial elements. The installation is constructed from Stone Age axes found in the Karelian Isthmus that survived the bombings, the Guide catalogue of the Vyborg Museum from 1909, and landscape paintings owned by Tuominen’s Vyborg-born grandmother’s family. The installation is complemented by a performance by Tuominen that takes place during the exhibition.
photos: Tuure Leppänen
Future Past in Linnaniemi
Future Past in Linnaniemi (2023) is a site-specific live performance and installation by Suvi Tuominen, created for the New Performance Turku Biennale 2023 to respond directly to the rapid urban transformation of the Linnaniemi port area and the development of the upcoming Museum of History and the Future in Turku, Finland. Engaging deeply with the maritime landscape and historical port district surrounding Turku Castle, the work questions the linear posture of thinking that assumes the past smoothly transforms into the future. By employing radically ultra-slow movements, Tuominen actively disrupts digital pacing and resists contemporary "presentism"—the constant state of urgency and instantaneity imposed by technological advancement—as well as "chronowashing," a deceptive practice where institutions use superficial long-term planning and monumental museum horizons, or temporal marketing to obscure immediate socio-political inequities. Through this physical disruption, the performance successfully punctures these sanitized institutional timelines, ultimately proposing non-linear, extended forms of experiencing time and space.
photos: Jesper Dolgov