Tuhmat ⎜Finnish cultural foundation (Finland)

Bio

Tuhmat is a multidisciplinary artist collective from Finland working with multisensory art and nature experiences from a neurodiverse perspective within the fields of visual arts, media art, performance, installations and sound art.

They embrace soft spaces for radical rest and non-binary bodies, decolonizing and queering the landscape through performances and temporary interventions, changing perceptions of places and creating site-specific collective memories. 

Artist, wilderness guide, designer Susse Seppälä (they/them) and sound artist, architect Joonas Parviainen (they/them) developed concepts for multisensory spaces at Narva Art Residency in Estonia. Through listening, sensing, experimenting and exploring they research multisensory art experiences as tools for resilience, recovery and accessibility.

Project

Their research in Narva involved traveling around Ida-Virumaa and Narva. Learning from the landscapes and nature on the border zone. Their practice questions all borders and binaries in society and within. Conversations and reflections with local people and visiting artists worked as a main source for unwritten knowledge. 

Tuhmat created a prototype for a multisensory piece inside the new greenhouse. Winter Garden was a temporary installation of a near future where ecocatastrophe visually reaches our lives.

Kreenholm Ceremonies art happening was organized together with other residency artists. Tuhmat executed their experimental sound performance Kreenholm 1856–2010 followed by Silence. In the performance Tuhmat played the abandoned factory building with found objects. Through an universal ritual, ceremony of sound, life returned momentarily to Kreenholm.

Tuhmat continued their exploration and experimentation with multiple medias. They created sculptures, paintings, video art and installations. They collected field recordings and analog photographs that are still waiting for development. Tuhmat also performed at the Finno-Ugric capital closing ceremony with a piece combined piano transformed into a kantele with collected Karelian winter spells. 

Their long-exposure-photography project continues in Narva until the next midsummer. Inspiration for their projects rose from the abandoned spaces, Finno-Ugric culture, local nature and the border zone thematic. 

This residency at NART was supported by The Finnish Cultural Foundation (Suomen Kulttuurirahasto).