ABOUT
Suvi Tuominen is a performance artist, dancer, and theoretical archaeologist based in Helsinki, Finland. She is currently a Doctoral Researcher at the University of the Arts Helsinki. Her research and artistic practice explore the intersections of body, technology and time. Working within the framework of artistic research, she explores how performance-choreographies can produce archaeologically (sub)conscious narratives. By bridging creative practice with archaeological theory, her work seeks to develop new epistemological tools and methodologies for future archaeologies.
Suvi creates site- and situation responsive performances, as well as works created for black box theatres, galleries and heritage museums. She is also part of an experimental performance art collaboration called Mean Time Between Failures. In addition, Suvi has been teaching artistic practices, including dance and performance for over a decade.
You can find her CV here.
CONTACT
suvi.tuominen@uniarts.fi
+358409683663 (whatsapp or signal)
FRAGMENTS OF A LANDSCAPE (2026)
Fragments 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
Dance, Here, There, Everywhere
Choreography, concept, performance: Suvi Tuominen
Photos: Aleksandr M. Vinogradov (stills from video) / Hrafnkell Birgisson
The work was presented as part of Pas Si Fragile Festival 2024, Brussels.
Photos: Aleksandr M. Vinogradov (stills from video) / Hrafnkell Birgisson
The work was presented as part of Pas Si Fragile Festival 2024, Brussels.
Dance, Here, There, Everywhere was a 40-min long performance made for a black box space. The work was experimenting with various sources of light and their influence on the visibility, sense and intensity of dance. The work included elements such as full house light which faded slowly into complete darkness, a ring light, screen lights, counting dance’s time (1,2,3,4… 5,6,7,8) a complete dark scene with a voice over text.
In addition the performance ended in a video installation where three smart phone screens were looping various pre-recorded movements of the dancer and the audience could stay in the space and look at the performer from the screens even if the performer had herself already stopped performing.
The work studied how dance changes its temporality and meaning when movements leap into a seemingly endless feed of visual content. The viewer has control over how, when and where dance is consumed. The dancer has control on what is documented and what kind of body is made visible. Dance Here, There, Everywhere explored choreography, gaze and the politics of time in a world where dance is a fragment floating in a pool of digital mess.
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.
‘’..the performance seems to play on that difficulty, bending the logic of temporal dependencies. It
seems to question whether we can imagine the future based on the past and understand the past
based on the present. In the transparent tunnel, the performance makes time move back and forth
as the performer moves back and forth in repetition in a slightly different version of now. In this way
the future is stopped, postponed, too easily present, already over, and the past is too contemporary,
too much bound to the future… Tik Tok videos, on the backdrop of the visualisation of the future
Turku harbour, where the castle always takes the main spot and looks very, very clean and tidy and
exactly the same as right now, future Suvi asks visitors of the museum, which is their favourite toilet
around here.’’ -Karoliina Kucia in Kritiikin Uutiset 18.7.2024
‘’The boundaries of the performance stretches when Tuominen is interviewing the future museum
visitors. Are we seeing into the future or just imagining it? Are we moving in dystopia or utopia or in
some place else where these intersect. Same interviews can be experienced in @linnaniemifuture
TikTok channel’'. -Frida Maria Pessi in Turun Sanomat 9.9.2023
photos: Jesper Dolgov
Fabrics of Life
Fabrics of Life was a performance installation that played with the friction between lazy introvertism and hyperaccelerated social reality. During the process of accumulating the work Suvi followed production mechanisms
of late capitalist tourism in Iceland. She noticed that the fabrics of life have become about dense image flows
producing a fragmentation of forced smiles, landscapes, colors, lights and sounds. She produced both digital
images, an installation and a performance from the material.
‘’Fabrics of life depicts a parody of being present, namely the struggle to maintain connection to
reality while creating an online presence. Playing out the artist's presence and live collection of
visual data in its near surroundings, Tuominen questions the authenticity presented on social
media within travelling and tourism. The strained forced smile she wore was especially impactful,
creating a feeling of unease and emitting a sense of desperation as is so often the case among
tourists who storm the Icelandic ring road in a week's time, only to upload photos of it to social
media.’’ -Karina Hanney Marrero 31.1.2023, critique publish in Sím website
Performance photos: Inari Sandell
PERFORMANCE PROPOSALS ON CULTURAL HERITAGE (2021)
Concept, dramaturgy and performance: Suvi Tuominen
Co-performers: emeritus professor of archaeology Milton Nunes, dancer & performer Dash Che, media artist Sini Henttu, sound artist Oula Rytkönen, curator Riikka Thitz
The performance lasted between 90 and 120 minutes and unfolded in three parts, guiding the audience through different areas of the Finnish National Museum. The work began in the museum courtyard, where the audience gathered and was welcomed by the performers. The second part took place in the museum lobby, where Suvi Tuominen and Emeritus Professor of Archaeology Milton Nuñez engaged in a durational conversation addressing both the history of archaeology and Nuñez's personal experiences within the discipline. The third part occurred in the museum's prehistoric exhibition, located on the basement level.
The dramaturgy of the performance gradually led the audience towards an epistemological disruption of the museum environment. The conversation with Nuñez introduced one of the most significant recent transformations in archaeology: the emergence of ancient DNA research and its relationship to facial reconstruction technologies. Questions concerning computational history, scientific visualization, and data-driven interpretations of the past were intentionally left unresolved.
Following the discussion, the audience descended into the prehistoric exhibition and was invited to wander the space independently before the performers began to intervene in the exhibition environment. One intervention involved replacing videos displayed on the museum's media screens. Originally, these screens showed actors performing reconstructed scenes of Stone Age life. These videos were substituted with recordings of Tuominen performing TikTok dances. Another intervention involved extinguishing the exhibition lighting, leaving only the glow of the screens visible. As the archaeological artefacts receded into darkness, the TikTok videos became the most prominent visual presence within the gallery. Towards the conclusion of the performance, Tuominen appeared wearing a selfie mask or helmet, which initiated a final dance sequence.
Through these interventions, the work questioned how contemporary technologies shape understandings of the past and highlighted the tension between scientific reconstruction, digital self-representation, and embodied performance. The performance transformed the museum from a site of historical certainty into a space of speculation, prompting audiences to reconsider the ways archaeological knowledge is produced, mediated, and experienced.
Photos: Vincent Roumagnac, Matti Sten, Marko Marila
AUDACTIV (2020)
Photos: Marko Marila. Teresa Ribeiro
Curators: Doug Bailey & Sara Navarro
Audactiv is an experimental and durational live performance piece that was performed at Santo Tirso Museum of Contemporary Sculpture. Unlike traditional archaeological work centered on ancient stone or pottery, I approached the recent past. The primary physical media utilized in Audactiv were analog cassette tapes from the late 1980s and early 1990s. I treated these obsolete audio objects not merely as static historical tools to interpret, but as active "material bodies" with their own texture, voice, and presence. The work gave rise to what I began to call ‘’an archaeology of pre-digital bodies’’. The interaction with analog material through the body, created a speculative movement which aimed to portray what kind of soundscape possibly comes out from the cassette tapes that were being destroyed during the performance.