ALENA TERESHKO
Alena Tereshko works with autobiography and humour, blending personal narratives with social critique. Grounded in feminist studies, her performance-based practice spans diverse forms of expression, including painting, video and installations. She graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts (MFA,Time and Space, Uniarts, Helsinki, 2026). Alena Tereshko is the recipient of the Johanna Ehrnrooth Prize, the University of the Arts Helsinki Foundation Award (2025), and the Sergey Kuryokhin Prize (2017) in the category of Best Media Object. Alena had solo-exhibition in the galleries and museums in Helsinki, Moscow and St. Petersburg. Her works were shown in many group exhibitions in Europe (Sweden, Italy, Swiss, England) and in the US. She participated in numerous residencies, including Cite des Arts, Iaspis, Nordland Kultursenter and others, and in such film festivals as Oberhausen Short Film Festival (2015, 2016, Germany) and The VIDEOFORMES (2021, France).
During the TEK.village pop up weekend, Alena will present her work The Hand-Raised Worm, part of a series Garden of Hands. With its many arms and eyes, it captures both the desire to communicate and the fear of rejection. Visitors can touch its hands, and the creature answers in gentle, half-human, half-mechanical sounds.
The Garden of Hands is a project presenting soft sculptures that appear as assemblages of hands and other parts of the human body — characters with personalities referring to unspeakable emotional states and tangled relationships with self and others. The characters form an outlandish yet welcoming playground that continues Tereshko's ongoing investigation of the body, femininity, and the role of stuffed animals and childhood objects in adult life.
ILLYANA & ELITH
Illiyana & Elith have been collaborating and playing music together for a few years. They are both part of Oulu-based PORTAALI collective.
Illyana's dark DJ sets collide unexpected elements into a unique musical universe. Besides djing, they also produce multidiscliplinary events, wearable art, soft sculptures and immersive installations. Material connections and dependencies, re-imagining and reusing, dreams and memories, synchronicities and parallel worlds inspire and mold their works that are often site-specific and multisensory: touchable, playable, wearable, habitable, simulations, meeting places.
Elith is a DJ and techno producer whose music is characterized by mystical soundscapes, detailed sound design and tangible textures.
Their experimental, ambient-leaning back to back DJ set for TEK.village will mix human and nonhuman voices, technology and nature, otherworldly sounds and contemporary issues. The audiovisual performance also includes an installation: a video work and a massive web made of old data cables that were harvested from a building bound for demolition. The piece comments on surveillance, power and the dominance and materiality of data.
soundcloud.com/illyana
soundcloud.com/elith
soundcloud.com/portaali
@illjana_
@eli1th
JULIAN OWUSU
Instagram: @xulu.202x
@julleowusu
Julian Owusu is a Ghanaian-Finnish interdisciplinary dance and spoken word artist and teacher born in Stockholm, whose artistic core lies in community building, Hip Hop, dance, spoken word poetry, pedagogy, decolonial practices and reimagining. Julian uses words to describe everything that movement cannot, and dances when words aren't enough. Julian has worked as dancer, choreographer, actor and facilitator with institutions like Zodiak – Centre for New Dance, Jojo – Oulu Dance Centre, the Oulu City Theatre, Yle Finland, UrbanApa and Taikabox ry. He teaches at the Theatre Academy of the Helsinki University of Arts and previously at the Oulu University of Applied science as well as in numerous commercial dance schools.
In addition to direct artistic work, Julian is a member of the leading group of the Hiphop in Finland research network, a board member of the Urban dance art support association (UTTry), the chairperson on the board of The Nordic House of Reykjavík as well as a member of the supervisory board of the Finnish Cultural Foundation. Julian Owusu worked as Regional Artist for Youth Culture at the Arts Promotion Centre of Finland (Taike) in Northern Ostrobothnia and Kainuu regions between 2016 and 2021. At the moment, Julian is working on several artistic works and projects, the most current of which are the short film In Continuity, which was recently published in the Tidskriften Kontradiktion online publication for experimental and digital poetry, and the Xulu202x project, which is part of the Oulu2026 European Capital of Culture programme.
During the TEK.Village weekend Julian will take you for a “Walk with HI (Human Imagination) glasses”.
This is an interactive art walk led by a narrative spoken word performance. In our time of fast-tempo technological advancements, which unfortunately occur with a stark disregard to the toll it takes on both the physical environment around us and the psychological world within, Owusu finds it interesting to reflect on the humanity that exists despite the storm. Technology alters the way how we see the world, and that is not in itself a negative thing. Forgetting how to view the world without the filter of technology, however, is.
LIINA HOLMES aka LIIAN
Liian is an Oulu based multidisciplinary artist and DJ, working across painting, video art, graphic design, audiovisual media and other ever-expanding mediums. Her numerous inspirations and influences are shaped by various cultures and geographical environments, and thus, so are her creative outlets.
Her work focuses on the melancholic, darker spectrum of emotions, and their aesthetic contrasts, moving between various forms of expression, exploring juxtapositions and polarities. Working mostly experimentally, focusing on the process rather than end result, her pieces are a reflection of a deeply personal inner world.
Music is and always has been a central part of both her personal growth and development, as well as her creative process and similar to her creative outlets, music has been a way to process and cope with life. She collects her vinyl records carefully, only adding to her collection the ones that speak to her. Liian enjoys going on journeys through music, so her sets are varied, colorful, and genre fluid.
For TEK.Village she will let her selection of electronic music channel her current thoughts and feelings emerging from being at the site and interacting with people. As we transition from the hectic pulse of summer and ease into the deeper, darker rhythm of autumn will emerge.
RŪTA SIMUTYTĖ
Rūta Simutytė is a is a textile sculptor, certified art educator, and community project facilitator based in the countryside near Kaunas, Lithuania. Her practice lies at the intersection of biomorphic textile art, light, and sensory environments, heavily inspired by environmental psychology, hygge, and wabi-sabi philosophies. She believes art is not merely to be observed, but physically experienced as a tool for connection, psychosocial well-being, and collective healing. Alongside her exhibition work, she has four years of experience leading interdisciplinary art education and participatory workshops across all age groups. Her pedagogical approach removes the pressure of technical perfection, focusing instead on empowering participants through project-based learning, upcycling, botanical printing, and hands-on making with sustainable materials. She specializes in cultivating cozy, safe, and collaborative atmospheres where participants explore their connection to nature, transforming natural elements (like leaves, flowers, tree bark, and pine needles) into collective tactile artworks.
Her connection to Oulu is deeply personal: during one month residency in the region, where she created the sculptural light installation FOOTPRINTS, inspired by the local northern ecosystem. This work was subsequently featured in both the LUMO Light Festival (2024) and the Frozen People Festival (2025).
During TEK.Village Pop-up exhibition, she will host a site-specific, experiential outdoor workshop Nature’s Imprints: Botanical Frottage and Community Activation that bridges art, ecology, and technology by inviting people to pause, reconnect, and engage in a tactile dialogue with the local landscape. Set up in the outdoor area, this living activation allows participants to decorate their own unneeded clothing or contribute to a large-scale collective textile artwork using local Oulu flora, such as flowers, leaves, pine needles, tree bark, and moss. The resulting community fabric becomes a living emotional map of Teknologiakylä combining human creative expression with the physical memory of the northern ecosystem.
KATJA JUHOLA
Katja Juhola, Doctor of Arts, is a visual artist and art researcher whose work examines socially engaged art as a site of collective inquiry in contested socio-ecological environments. Her doctoral research at the University of Lapland developed a practice-based framework for collaborative knowledge production across artistic and environmental research contexts. Juhola's work advances methodologies grounded in dialogical aesthetics, spatial practice, and ethics of care. As the founder and director of the International Socially Engaged Art Symposium (ISEAS), she developed the Conversational Art methodology, applied in international interdisciplinary collaborations addressing environmental conflict and public learning processes.
For TEK.village, Katja is creating a community artwork Sanctuary of the Technology Village, that consists of two interactive elements that reflect on our connection to both nature and the future:
The Tree of Wishes, unlike traditional wishing trees, the Tree of Wishes focuses on selflessness and caring for others. You can pause for a moment and write a wish for someone else on a fabric ribbon—for a friend, a pet, or even nature.
At the foot of the tree lies the Living Mandala, a shifting pattern made of natural materials, little mindfulness break and a moment of reset in the middle of a busy workday.
The pieces invites participants to share care, encounter one another, and experience the presence of nature through communal action.Participation is free and designed as a low-threshold encounter. Drop by during exhibition hours or make an appointment at katja.juhola@gmail.com. Come spend a brief moment—perhaps 20 minutes—and leave your mark on the shared artwork.
LUUMU TURSAS
Luumu Tursas is a multidisciplinary visual artist who works with installation, sculpture, and technology. Luumu Tursas’ work processes often begin through interest in different techniques and materials. Physical labour is important in their work, and it leans on body memory and intuition. Thematically their works have earlier spoken of nostalgia, power, feminism, queerness, forests, folklore and animal philosophy. Tursas is soon finishing their studies (MFA) in the Academy of Fine Arts Helsinki, and has exhibited their works in several joint and group exhibitions in Finland and in Germany.
Tursas examines the site-specific qualities of the Teknologiakylä area through localized materials and physical, locally conducted labour. Some of the collected materials are made by nature, some by human hands. Luumu Tursas' piece explores decay of matter and the relationship of human and nature. Their installation Splinter, SMASH, Shatter, Scatter will be constructed during the previous week of the exhibition with different methods of improvisation. Most of the materials used will be collected from the Teknologiakylä area.
SHIMA SALEHI
Shima Salehi is an activist and multidisciplinary visual artist, and founder of Shima Art Studio Company. Her work focuses on gender justice, environmental sustainability, and cultural awareness, often bringing traditional influences into dialog with contemporary artistic approaches. Working across painting, mixed media, installation, and conceptual art, she explores themes of identity, societal expectations, human relationship with the environment and technology, and the resilience of women. She seeks to challenge perceptions, create dialogue, and invite new way of seeing and experiencing familiar subjects.
For TEK.village, Shima is exploring technology as part of the environment we live in, and how our perception and experiences are shaped by technological infrastructures through 2 works:
Invisible Weight is a site-specific installation built around a small human figure placed among large stones. Thin threads connect the figure’s bent neck to selected stones, creating a tension between fragility and weight. The installation explores the visible and invisible weight carried through contemporary life considering how contemporary technologies have become intertwined with the body, influencing our posture, attention, behavior, and ways of moving through the world.
Entangled explores creates a fragmented field in which the viewer’s reflection, the surrounding landscape, and technological infrastructure coexist. Continuous movement between concealing and revealing turns the mirror into a threshold rather than a stable reflective surface. What we see depends on where we stand, what we look through, and
what is reflected back at us. The cables evoke the networks of communication, data, knowledge, energy, and memory that quietly structure contemporary life.
www.shimasalehi.my.canva.site
Instagram: @shimasalehi.art
DIMITRIJE ŠTIMAC
Instagram: @dimitrijesh
I draw, paint, think, write, question, dance through installation and performance, and dream through video as an extension of my breathing. I was raised in an esoteric family, surrounded by strange stories, examples of how nature dances and with space to be alone. In loneliness, I was never abandoned. Nature is my reflection, and from it I learn. Through form, I deliver space where everything can recognize itself.
Thinking of remoteness and specificity of Teknologiakylä the installation Connection was formed. Placed near the Välitä sculpture in a park built by the local community through collective effort. It is a place of unity, where the essence of connection lives. The word-sculpture created by Finnish sculptor Olavi Lanu stands for nurturing others, connecting, and exchange. My installation extends these meanings through its form, opening a space for reflection and quiet moments with ourselves by reconnecting us with nature through touch.
By placing a hand on the metal plate integrated into the word-sculpture, the audience can feel vibrations transmitted through the plate. Through this physical connection, they become aware of their surroundings and of processes that remain hidden from our perception.
We are part of nature. Through technology, we come to nature once again.
ITAN JAN KATUROV
Oh, how unfortunate, you will have to find out about Itan Jan Katurov through his work Isn’t It Sad That Peace Feels
Like It Must Be Earned?
As you walk through Elektroniikkatie you MEET YANCHE, a tiny alien creature who hasn’t even been on Earth for that long, and yet, they’re already faced with expectations they can’t meet. Or so they tell you. Yanche says that they overwork themselves and get no results for it. They’re clearly exhausted, and although you feel sympathy for them, is there really anything you can do? It’s not your duty to comfort every depressed stranger you meet, right?
…but what if you decide to help?
You’re invited to take Yanche from their box by scanning them and carry a digital copy of them on your phone as you continue your walk through Elektroniikkatie. Together, you will talk, and you just might both come out of this in a better mood than when you two first met. What you will experience is a site-specific hybrid AR installation centered entirely on empathy. Through its narrative, you will be given multiple choices that will shape your own unique story and relationship with Yanche.
Instagram: @tamdjen
RADOŠ MANIGODA
Radoš Manigoda is a 3rd year student, an artist that works with both music and visual art, often combining the two through improvisation and experimentation. He is interested in exploring different ways of working with sound and image, and in finding connections between them through the process of creating.
During the TEK.village weekend hours you are invited to experience a sense of belonging and collective participation. His sound piece Anthem of Dystopian Community is conceived as a participatory activation and listening experience. Rather than remaining passive listeners, participants become active performers whose individual actions contribute to the formation of the anthem itself as it can only be heard in its fullness through collaborative play of individual sound fragments.
Instagram: @_radoshh
SARA TRAJER
I started taking photographs when I realized how quickly time passes, and that I can’t hold on to every moment that happens in my life. I love looking through old family photo albums and remembering the times that have passed and the memories tied to different periods of my life. I know I can’t stop time, but I can at least “freeze” certain moments through art. I’ve always loved being surrounded by people - listening to how they think, how they see the world, and how they search for themselfs. That’s why I photograph mostly people. I am especially drawn to young people - my own Generation Z - as well as those who live on the margins of society, who live their own art of existence in contrast to what is suggested or expected. My work is rooted in the desire to understand people - and through them, to understand myself.
Continuing with that desire Sara tried to understand Teknologiakylä site. Exploring it through Google Earth and other remote tools she is offering her own insights into the site through an Interactive web-site artwork that uses Vibe coding as a way to explore contemporary technologies outset of Technology village.
Systems is an interactive exploration of Elektroniikkatie, Oulu, connecting local technology and nature. Through clues and location-based exploration, the work moves between screen and landscape, inviting visitors to question how technology shapes and measures our experience of nature.
Instagram: @4nety
TARA NIKOLIĆ
Tara Nikolić is a 3rd year student navigating her interest and art-making. Her approach to art begins with the belief that everything is interconnected. Small patterns carry the shape of a larger one and what happens on one level influences all others. She is drawn to threads, roots and connections that stay invisible until they’re broken or disturbed. In her work, she is interested in discovering world’s laws, such as rhythm, cause and effect and the balance between opposites and translating them into material, form, and process.
For TEK.village she will present a jute sculptural work Fragmented Relations, a series of small sculptural forms made out of jute rope threads scattered along the Elektroniikkatie.
What becomes visible when connections break? Infrastructure stays invisible until its path is traced, from effect back to source. Fragments of any infrastructure are the whole condensed into a smaller form and by merging, they simply become a larger one. No matter how we perceive them, they always have far greater impact than we recognize. Uneven, loose, branching forms spread along the edges of the road. Connecting, forming, breaking knots that hold histories, are swallowed by the landscape. The jute rope is hand-unraveled, bound and tight at one end, loosening into individual fibers at the other. Fragmented this way, it has no single center, and each thread depends on the one before it. Jute carries its own history of trade, forced labor, and handwork. As a natural material, its cyclical nature allows it to age and decay, then grow and be reborn again.
TEODORA MIRIĆ
In my opinion, the highest form of art is that which is benevolent and which, as its result, encourages a person to do a good deed, to reconsider his moral values or to renounce his weaknesses and bad habits. I believe that in art it is much more difficult, but therefore more valuable, to make a person stop and re-examine himself and his actions, than to just give him the opportunity to enjoy sensual pleasures and indulge in thinking about earthly and material things. Art that manages to change a person for the better, in my opinion, reaches its highest form.
Our futures are intertwined with the futures of trees. They too remember every touch, every drought, each soul resting in their shade, birds nesting, rain suiting and nurturing them. If only they could tell us their stories, maybe all would be different.
Forest Of The Future attempt to show flora in the future under the influence of man, whose action causes current "evolution. A living body changes its form into a waste, recyclable material, and it is up to the observer to decide how to interpret and treat this change.
Instagram: @istocnorimskocarstvo