Curator Names: Anna Jensen & Eliisa Suvanto
Residency Dates: February 2024
Born: 1978 | 1983
Hometown: Espoo, Finland | Säkylä, Finland
Lives & Works: Helsinki, Finland
URL: https://porinkulttuurisaato.org/ | Instagram: @annacarolinajensen & @eliisasuvanto
Education:
Jensen: 2014 – 2023 | Doctor of Arts, Aalto University School of Arts
Suvanto: 2010 – 2014 | MA in Visual Culture, Design and Architecture, Aalto University School of Arts
Bio/Statement:
Finnish curators Anna Jensen & Eliisa Suvanto are members of Porin kulttuurisäätö—a collective reimagining and renewing both the practices and mediating of contemporary art. The collective is motivated by research-based and site-specific approaches, collaborative work, already existing resources, and activism. In addition to exhibition making, the group’s activities take many forms from expert work to written statements, teaching, studio visits and political lobbying.
Anna Jensen is a curator, researcher, writer, artist, and feminist whose practice is site-specific and embodied and it is based on collectivity, friendship, and joy. The aim is to create ecologically and ethically sustainable practices and reconsider notions of local and global, curating, canon, and politics. Jensen’s projects are usually founded on a research question and then explored together with a working group and later with the public. Documentation and mediation are an essential part of each project. Jensen’s dissertation “Encyclopedia of In-Betweenness. An Exploration of a Collective Artistic Research Practice” presents art as a phenomenon that is always in the state of becoming, was published Fall 2023.
Curator-producer Eliisa Suvanto is the former Program Manager of PUBLICS, a curatorial agency with a dedicated library, event space and reading room in Helsinki Finland. Previously Eliisa has worked as the director of an artist-led contemporary art space Titanik (Turku, Finland), during which she launched the still ongoing series of Titanik’s offsite events including the critically acclaimed exhibition ‘Valtio+’ and ‘Parantola’ in the famous Paimio Sanatorium. In 2022, Eliisa was invited to join the EXPO Chicago Curatorial Exchange Program and was the visiting curator of HIAP – Helsinki International Artist Program. Currently she is the chair of ‘Taide’ magazine, the oldest published art journal in Finland.
Jensen and Suvanto also run Space Invaders, an interdisciplinary project occupying empty or partly used spaces, since 2013.
Support: Anna Jensen and Eliisa Suvanto’s residencies are made possible with support from the Finnish Cultural Institute in New York (FCINY).
