While waiting for next year’s Venice Biennale to open, artist Jenna Sutela’s works can be seen this Autumn in several exhibitions in Europe and the US.
Jenna Sutela: Ave bossa, bow ole
Stroom Den Haag, The Hague
4 October 2025 – 9 January 2026
This Autumn, Stroom Den Haag presents Ave bossa, bow ole, the first solo exhibition of Jenna Sutela in the Netherlands. The exhibition revolves around systems open to the wider environment — a world made of brains. It challenges the narrow understandings of consciousness that scaffold an anthropocentric logic of value and meaning, while considering interrelationships at all scales.
The starting point of the exhibition is the concept of ’tech povera’, a makeshift genre that Sutela coined to describe her approach to technology in the context of art. It refers to the 20th-century art historical movement Arte Povera, which saw art as a living process rather than a fixed object and materials as meaning. Vermi-Cell (2023), a work presented underground at Stroom den Haag, serves as an example of this approach. An earth battery-powered sound piece, staged inside and around heaps of worm compost with metals and wire emerging from them, uses energy from the organic, decomposing matter to present a work and as a work.
The exhibition is supported by Frame, the Mondriaan Fund, the Creative Industries Fund NL, the Finnish Cultural Institute for the Benelux, and the Municipality of The Hague.
‘Vermi-Cell’ (2023) on view at Jenna Sutela’s solo exhibition ‘Ave bossa, bow ole’ at Stroom den Haag 2025. Photo: Studio Uittenbogaart, Courtesy Stroom Den Haag.
Ouverture 2024
Castello di Rivoli, Turin
19 December 2024 – 18 December 2025
Jenna Sutela’s work Pond Brain (2022) is on view at the group exhibition Ouverture 2024, celebrating 40 years of activity of Castello di Rivoli in Turin, Italy. The exhibition presents works from the institution’s collection, into which Pond Brain was acquired in 2024. According to Castello di Rivoli, the exhibition gathers voices that have deeply influenced the artistic discourse and is inspired by principles of inclusion, social and cultural participation.
Pond Brain is an instrument and a fountain: a bowl of rainwater made out of bronze that can be played or activated by touch. The instrument invites the viewer to rub it to make it ‘sing’. When played, it interacts with sound produced using machine learning technology to create an ever-emerging soundscape based on signals from the wider environment, including sounds from outer space and under the sea.
Pond Brain was originally presented and co-produced by Helsinki Biennial 2023 and Copenhagen Contemporary.
Pond Brain, Bronze sculpture, water, reflections, four-channel sound installation 79 x 76 x 22 cm. Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Rivoli-Torino. On loan from Fondazione per l’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea CRT
New Humans: Memories of the Future
New Museum, New York City
Dates to be announced
Jenna Sutela’s work will be on view as part of New Humans: Memories of the Future, inaugurating the New Museum’s expanded building in New York City. The exhibition explores artists’ enduring preoccupation with what it means to be human in the face of sweeping technological changes. New Humans will trace a diagonal history of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries through the work of more than 150 international artists, writers, scientists, architects, and filmmakers, highlighting key moments when dramatic technological and social changes spurred new conceptions of humanity and new visions for its possible futures.
‘Vermi-Sibyl’ (2023) as part of ‘Spora’ at Swiss Institute, New York. Photo: Daniel Pérez
Jenna Sutela
Jenna Sutela is a Finnish artist based in Berlin. Sutela’s work has been presented internationally, including at the Castello di Rivoli, Turin (2025); Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève (2024); Swiss Institute, New York (2023); Helsinki Biennale (2023); Haus der Kunst, Munich (2022); Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki (2022); Shanghai Biennial (2021); Liverpool Biennial (2021); Kunsthall Trondheim (2020); Serpentine Galleries, London (2019); and Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2019). Sutela has been a visiting artist at La Becque, MIT, and Callie’s Berlin.
Jenna Sutela’s exhibition at the Pavilion of Finland in the 2026 Venice Biennale is curated by Stefanie Hessler. Read more about the exhibition.
Jenna Sutela. Photo: Matteo de Mayda