Jenna Sutela is a 2025–2027 Jane Lombard Fellow, nominated by Suzanne Livingston for the Jane Lombard Prize for Art and Social Justice Prize as part of the Vera List Center for Art and Politics’ Matter of Intelligence Focus Theme.

Jenna Sutela’s image and sound works and “living sculptures” explore open systems from biology to computation and language. Based in Berlin, Sutela has exhibited internationally, including in the Finnish Pavilion at the 61st Venice Biennale (2026); Nicoletta Fiorucci Foundation, London (2026); Castello di Rivoli, Turin (2025); Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève (2024, 2023 & 2020); Swiss Institute, New York (2023); Helsinki Biennale (2023); Haus der Kunst, Munich (2022); Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki (2022 & 2017); Shanghai Biennial (2021); Liverpool Biennial (2021); Kunsthall Trondheim (2020); Serpentine Galleries, London (2019); and Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2019). She has been a visiting artist at La Becque, MIT, Somerset House Studios, and Callie’s Berlin, and a Jane Lombard Fellow/David Randolph Artist-in-Residence at the Vera List Center for Art and Politics, The New School. Her publications include the exhibition catalogs Aeolian Suite (Mousse Publishing & PAN 2026) and NO NO NSE NSE (Koenig Books 2020), the LPs Pond Brain (PAN 2026) and nimiia vibié (PAN 2019), and the artist’s book Orgs (Garret Publications 2017).

nimiia cétïï is an audiovisual artwork created in collaboration with Memo Akten and Damien Henry that shows a computer that channels interspecies communication between a neural network, audio recordings of early Martian language, and footage of the movements of extremophilic bacteria. It can also be understood as an alien of their own creation. The audio recordings of the Martian language were first voiced in the 19th century by Swiss-French spirit medium Hélène Smith and now voiced by Sutela. The project aims to make visible the impalpable lifeforms that surround us, highlight the embodied intelligence of bacteria, aliens, and our neural networks, and explore what communication between species and intelligences could look like.

“[Sutela] taps into worlds with the care of a scientist but the vision of an artist, and with a powerful mission—to challenge the species hierarchy and invite us to experience kinship with species and realms far different from our own. […] In this sense, Sutela’s work explores social justice in the most holistic and planetary terms. It points towards an equality for all groups but just as importantly, all species and asks us to tune in, outside of ourselves, to find empathy with everything that makes our own life possible.”

—Suzanne Livingston, Jane Lombard Prize Council