The first solo exhibition of Finnish artist Jenna Sutela in the Netherlands, ave bossa, bow ole is a world made of brains.

The exhibition’s title is a poetic reinterpretation of “As Above, So Below,”a principle from ancient hermeticism – an esoteric philosophical tradition. 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 inave bossa, bow ole: across both floors, two distinct spatial systems create environments that interlock with one another.

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 technology in the context of art. Tech Povera is 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. Similarly, tech povera proposes to rethink the technological object as a porous entity distributed across networks of human and nonhuman relations. Not as fixed object or solution, but entangled with social and environmental systems at all scales.

Jenna Sutela is known for her extraordinary collaborative practice in which biology and computation mutually question and reinforce each other. The works include chance elements and evolving structures. Previous projects of Sutela were undertaken in collaboration with slime molds, extremophilic bacteria, Martian oracles, and machine learning lava.