Alena Tereshko, Finland
Artist statement
My practice has moved between performance, video, drawing, and painting, yet the medium has never been my primary concern. Instead, I am interested in how knowledge is constructed, transmitted, and embodied, and in the ways historical frameworks continue to shape contemporary perception. Rather than treating history as a source of references or visual quotations, I approach it as an active framework through which present-day questions can be examined. Working across visual research, installation, and archival material, I trace connections between scientific thought, philosophy, and cultural narratives.
My early performances emerged from an attempt to navigate conflicting cultural and personal realities — the gap between what I inherited and what I lived. Growing up between patriarchal traditions and contemporary urban culture, religious imagery and critical theory, I became interested not only in these contradictions themselves but in the structures that produce them. Over time, this shifted my focus from autobiographical narratives toward broader questions of representation, authority, and the production of knowledge.
Painting remains central to my work, not as a return to tradition but as a critical tool. The discipline of academic painting, together with my experience of church decoration, is embedded in my body through years of training. I often work with canonical images, established visual conventions, and historical narratives, recontextualising them through feminist perspectives, contemporary experience, and interdisciplinary research. My projects frequently combine historical sources, visual analysis, and speculative narratives to create dialogues between different periods, systems of thought, and modes of seeing.
My current research focuses on changing conceptions of the relationship between humans, climate, and the cosmos, from the Enlightenment to the present. I am interested in how scientific models become cultural imaginaries, and how artistic practice can translate complex systems of knowledge into spatial and visual experience.
Across my work, I seek to activate the past rather than reconstruct it: to treat it as material that stays open to question, to reinterpretation, and to being seen differently from where we now stand.
Working plan
The research residency at Björkö Konstnod supported by an Oskar Öflunds Stiftelse grant
Drawing on live data platforms, diverse concepts of time, and the tradition of astronomical clocks, I aim to create a contemporary version: Ecological Clock—an installation that communicates time and climate while placing local environmental conditions in a global context.
The acceleration of time—driven by the internet, rapid information exchange, and increasingly by AI—is widely discussed today and closely linked to the ecological crisis. In this project, I explore different perceptions of time and construct contrasting images of possible planetary futures, combining warning and hope in the form of the Ecological Clock.
The project draws on the tradition of astronomical clocks—public instruments that once synchronized social life by displaying time alongside celestial and environmental cycles. I encountered one inside the Cathedral of Saint-Pierre in Beauvais. In this clock, the Earthly City—all the time-related and astronomical knowledge known at the time—is crowned by the Celestial City, a mechanical puppet theatre that enacts the Last Judgment daily.The performance begins with a rooster that steps forward, flaps its wooden wings, and crows in a chilling, trumpet-like organ sound.
My idea for Ecological Clock is to use live data platforms—tracking flights, vessels, traffic, climate, satellites, air pollution, solar activity, and more—together with research into diverse temporal concepts to create a contemporary astronomical clock that communicates time and climate. I imagine it as an installation warning of possible global environmental catastrophe, echoing how the Beauvais clock reminded people of the Last Judgment.
