Jenna Sutela: Ave bossa, bow ole

Stroom Den Haag presents Ave bossa, bow ole, the first solo exhibition by Finnish artist Jenna Sutela in the Netherlands. The title poetically reinterprets “As Above, So Below,” a principle from the esoteric philosophical tradition of hermeticism. It refers to the effects of celestial bodies on earthly mechanisms: the sun guides the seasons, the moon affects the tides, and the microcosm of a creature follows the movements of the cosmos itself. This principle is echoed in the exhibition: across two floors, two distinct spatial systems create environments that interlock with one another.  

Spanning the subterranean level of Stroom is Vermi-Cell (2023-2025). This living and live installation presents a series of vermicompost heaps hosting an earth battery-powered sound system. Produced in collaboration with local gardens, hundreds of worms are composting cuttings from the waste of organic flowers inside. Strobes illuminate the installation while a regular flow of water fog keeps it moist. Powered by the earth battery, a sound piece consists of a spiralling saxophone that responds to movements in the soil: the more electricity produced, the more echo can be heard. Fed and watered daily, Vermi Cell is a site-specific and circular work, which will return to local gardens after the exhibition.  

The top floor of Stroom features an installation comprised of multiple new works: Sweet Energy Poem (2023-25), an edible piece of writing; First Contact (Sugar Prints) (2025), a new series of six unique contact prints; and Strange Loupe (2025), a series of five hand-blown glass spheres incorporating the artist’s portrait. In this constellation of works, mundane house flies, solutions used in microscopy, and visitors’ metabolisms form a strange macrocosm operating as a portal to another world. 

Central to the exhibition at Stroom Den Haag is the concept of “tech povera,” a makeshift genre that Sutela coined to describe her approach to raw, experimental, and living technology. The term references the 20th century art historical movement Arte Povera, which considered art as a living process rather than a fixed object, and found meaning in materials themselves. Tech povera proposes to rethink the technological object as a porous entity distributed across networks of human and nonhuman relations. Rather than a fixed object or solution, Ave bossa, bow ole considers tech as entangled with social and environmental systems across scales. Here, biology and computation mutually question and reinforce each other. 

The exhibition is accompanied by an extensive public program of tours and talks. This includes a film screening program on October 11, on the occasion of Museum Night The Hague, as well as a collaborative public programme with Permacomputing clubs from London, Rotterdam, and Berlin, on November 28. 

Jenna Sutela and her studio work on living sculptures, images, and sound that explore open systems in biology, computation, and language. The works include chance elements and evolving structures, being both live and alive.