SUVI TUOMINEN

ABOUT

Suvi Tuominen (b.1989) 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 for black box theatres, galleries and heritage museums. She is also part of an experimental performance art duo 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)

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FRAGMENTS OF A LANDSCAPE (2026)

Concept / performance / installation: Suvi Tuominen
Curation: Riikka Thitz as part of the Waterways exhibition at Lappeenranta Art Museum
Photos: Tuure Leppänen
Support: Viipuri Säätiö (Vyborg Foundation)

Fragments of a Landscape was 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 remained. In these entries the landscape paintings were recorded by size or subject - no images of these paintings exist.

The installation examined the ways in which landscape(s) 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 was 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 was complemented by a dance and performance.

DOWN BEAT (2025)
by Mean Time Between Failures

Concept / performance / choreography: Dash Che & Suvi Tuominen
Sound design: Oula Rytkönen
Photos: Alena Tereshko & Karoliina Korvuo
Support: Kone Foundation, Wihuri Foundation, Moving in November, STUK (Leuven) within the frame of the European Network Life Long Burning - Futures Lost and Found, funded by Creative Europe 2023-2026

saliva production beat
acid released but nothing arrives down
direction gets sticky beat down
this chewing mass has no future
repeat until it is dull down beat

Full of pessimistic ambivalence and following the beat, two performers chew gum and offer the audience to join them in this everyday act. What comes out is messy, shape-shifting and unclear such as performance art making in the current times.

DOWN BEAT is a 1-hour playful and mildly offensive dance and performance work where two performers chew gum together with the audience and move to techno beats. It begins with a 25-min accelerating dance show that oscillates between being rigorous and sloppy and continues as a happening including audience participation.

The work is revisiting 1970s American artist Hannah Wilke’s artwork series S.O.S Starification where she also used chewing gum to criticize the instrumentalization of the female body, particularly in the male-dominated art world.

MTBF deconstructs and reimagines this work, in which they look at both the metaphorical and material relationship between chewing gum and the body. As performance artists—one a transmasc non-EU immigrant, the other a Finnish female-identified artist—we navigate the complexities of labor, identity, and consumption in a post-optimistic world. The ambiguity of the gum—its messiness, its refusal to be neatly controlled—echoes the anxiety of living in an era where resistance feels both necessary and futile, offering no tidy resolutions, only the uncomfortable persistence of failure.

DOWN BEAT re-thinks the use of chewing gum in relation to 21st century late capitalist ruins and queerness. Chewed gum, disposability, image production of the audience and soundscapes that draw from commercial tunes to heavy beats create a bizarre festive event: let’s dance and chew like there is no tomorrow… but wait, what?

In November 2024 DOWN BEAT was performed at Au JUS gallery, Brussels, BE and at Aterlier 2, STUK, Leuven, BE (as a part of the STUCK art residency).

DOWN BEAT returned to Helsinki on the 8th and 9th of Nov 2025 at Theater Museum as the part of Focus on the Local Landscape in Moving in November 2025 program.

ORGANS (2025)
by Mean Time Between Failures

Concept / performance / installation: Dash Che & Suvi Tuominen
Sound design: Oula Rytkönen
Supported by: Kone Foundation
Photos: Alaa Nyman (Drifts Festival) & Karoliina Korvuo (MAA-tila gallery)

ORGANS is a duo performance and installation concept which brings forth a familiar root vegetable, the potato. Potatoes became the staple food of many imperialist nations over the last several centuries. The performance plays with eerie movement vocabulary, nudity, swear words, language that draws from military communication, failed magic tricks and painted potatoes. By staging potatoes the performance gestures to the current geopolitical tensions and whiteness while also humoring and deconstructing them.

In the 40-min performance, two naked performers move through the space wearing only fake golden chains, neon-color socks, cheap Lidl shoes, glasses and hats. The performance begins with the bodies following cryptic commands that borderline military chatter, a strange post-apocalyptic dream and somatic exercises. The performers flex and weaken, collapse their muscular postures and start again occasionally synchronizing. Suddenly the work exits the ominous state into an awkward uplifting unison dance to continue as a fake Olympics circus piece turned into a naked performance lecture on potatoes colonial history and back into a dance piece. ORGANS, as many of our works, provokes, mixes and samples several aesthetic registers and genres, and explores a serious topic through humor.

ORGANS is in correspondence with the practice by performance artist William Pope L. who addresses subjects of nationalism, race, class and abjection by playing with unruly, decaying, corporeal and uncanny matters. The starting point for ORGANS was inspired by Trinket (2015), an exhibition by William Pope L. that staged hundreds of slowly decomposing red, blue and white onions posing in front of an unsettling background of a slightly altered US American flag. As an attempt to repurpose William Pope L.’s methods Mean Time Between Failures is staging potatoes. However, in the process of repurposing Mean Time Between Failures signals toward contexts and dynamics that we encounter both in our newsfeed and daily social engagements.

ORGANS was exhibited for the first time as a pop-up installation in MAA-tila gallery, Helsinki in March 2023 with the performance event on the opening day. Second time ORGANS was performed at Riga Performance Art Festival in June 2024. This time the work was presented solely as a performance in the concrete windowless former elephant stable space of the Riga Circus. Third time the performance was shown as a part of the Drifts Festival in the warehouse art space on Suomenlinna island in August 2024.

Dance, Here, There, Everywhere (2024)

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.

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 (2023)

Future Past in Linnaniemi (2023) was 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 (2023)

Fabrics of Life was a performance installation that played with the friction between lazy introvertism and hyper
accelerated 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.