Jenna Sutela (b. 1983, Turku, Finland) works with living organisms such as bacteria and slime mold as well as with sound and language. In her audiovisual works, sculptures, and performances, the artist creates connections between biological entities and technologies. Her particular interest is in the productive interaction between human and non-human organisms. In her work “nimiia cétii,” for example, she created a novel written language whose machine-generated characters are based on capturing and copying the movements of Bacillus subtilis nattō. In 2019/20, Sutela was a visiting artist at the MIT Center for Art, Science & Technology. Sutela’s works have been shown at Castello di Rivoli (2022), Liverpool Biennial (2021), Kunsthall Trondheim (2020), ZKM Karlsruhe (2020), Serpentine Galleries (2019), Kiasma, Helsinki (2017), and others.

Sissel Tolaas has been working on odor research since 1990, pursuing an interdisciplinary approach that combines forensic chemistry, chemical communication, sensory ecology, linguistics and visual arts. She founded the SMELL RE_searchLab Berlin in 2004 and has developed groundbreaking projects for the identification and reproduction of odors worldwide. Her work has been exhibited in renowned museums such as the MOMA in New York and the Tate Modern in London. Tolaas has collaborated with leading universities such as MIT and Oxford and has created 55 odor profiles (SmellScapes). She is currently working on smell-molecule preservation/conservation archives of the world’s oceans and forests and on smell artefacts and a smell heritage archive for the Pompeii Ruins. Tolaas’s collections of smell molecules and smell structures include 15,000 smell samples and formulas.

 

Sarah Johanna Theurer is a curator and writer focusing on time-based art practices and techno-social entanglements. She works as curator at Haus der Kunst, Munich where she has co-curated a major retrospective of Fujiko Nakaya, commissioned performances with artists like Isabel Lewis and Christelle Oyiri and new works by Carsten Nicolai and Jenna Sutela. Together with Andrea Lissoni she co-curated a major retrospective on Fujiko Nakaya and is the co-editor of the forthcoming publication on the artist. Aside from Haus der Kunst, she hosted the radio show Portals on Cashmere Radio, regularly writes on music and art, and acts as a dramaturg with performance groups.

Christina Landbrecht is the director of the art program at the Schering Stiftung. Born in Munich, she moved to Berlin to study art history and business administration at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. She subsequently worked as curatorial assistant at the Berlinische Galerie – Museum of Modern Art, where she later took the position of assistant to the director, Dr. Thomas Köhler. When the excellence cluster “Bild Wissen Gestaltung” (Image Knowledge Gestaltung) was established at Humboldt-Universität, she returned there as a research associate and to write her dissertation. Entitled “The Problem and Potential of Artistic Research,” the PhD-thesis deals with the relationship between the natural sciences and the visual arts since the 1990s. She puts this knowledge to good use for the Foundation, bringing together the expertise of both artists and scientists in productive ways and inspiring interdisciplinary dialogues and projects.