August 2025

Jenna Sutela interviews Hertta Kiiski

Jenna Sutela: I take it the title of the show, Fever Dream, refers to a surreal or really strange experience? Something chaotic. I feel like both of us are professionals in embracing chaos, hehe. This applies not only to the content of our work – for example, I often embed chance elements in mine – but also to an artistic process that includes a lot of serendipity. A process that's interwoven with all kinds of life around it. Parenthood contributes to this. I really admire the way you practice art and life. And I’ve learned so much from it, too.


Hertta Kiiski: Thank you. I’ve also been admiring the way you move through the world. I’m glad we have found each other in the messy brilliance of making things and raising two daughters. Yes, Fever Dream absolutely speaks to that surreal, chaotic space where things feel unsettled yet alive with possibility. It describes a state of unrest where reality blurs and becomes unstable – much like the unfolding eco-crisis and the ruins of democracy and civilization that we're witnessing. It’s both a reckoning with collapse and an imagining of new possibilities beyond the ruins. Like everyday life, really – haha.


JS: Yeah, contemporary reality with all its social and environmental catastrophes mostly feels like a nightmare come true. Do you think dreams and visions can help us navigate the present crises, rather than just offering an escape from them? Like, expanding the sense of what’s possible. I mean, radical, revolutionary projects start with imagining something different from what we have now.


HK: Totally – dreams can be more than a getaway. They can be a way of sketching the blueprint for what doesn’t exist yet. Most radical change starts with someone imagining something better and refusing to treat it as impossible. In that sense, visions aren’t just escapes, they’re fuel.


JS: On another, somewhat related note, someone recently pointed out to me how the invention of quantum mechanics and the publication of the surrealist manifesto by André Breton are events not very far apart in history. People started questioning the nature of reality in both science and art.


HK: It feels like the world is loosening at the seams – unsettling, but also full of openings. A hundred years ago, surrealists were exploring the strange and impossible, showing that reality doesn’t have to behave like it’s “supposed” to. Maybe now it’s our turn to dream freely and let that imagination guide what comes next.


JS: What are you dreaming of?


HK: I’m dreaming of a world where we finally pause long enough to hear the more-than-human animals – not as background noise, not as part of our story, but as creatures with their own secret lives. It’s like realizing the conversation we thought was only ours has been going on all along with others who don’t speak our language. I dream of stepping back, loosening our hold, and letting them be wild, beautiful equals.


JS: We both work collaboratively in different ways, with all kinds of entities, human and nonhuman. Working like this brings unpredictability and that “aliveness with possibility” you mentioned before into the process. How has collaborating with your daughters changed as they’ve gotten older? I’ve had the pleasure and privilege of witnessing this since the beginning.


HK: There’s a certain joy in giving space for random experimentation, letting the work unfold in ways we couldn’t anticipate. This sense of openness carries into working with my daughters too. In the very beginning, they were more like models – staying where I asked, holding still while I worked with medium-format film. Everything was quiet and deliberate. But when we moved into video, something shifted. They could move around, improvise, and surprise me. The work became less about placing them in a frame and more about following their own narratives as they improvised with the space. It was like they slipped out of stillness. Suddenly, they had that same unpredictability and playfulness you get from a living, responsive partner. The most interesting work happens when you leave room for the unexpected.


JS: The rose also breaks out of stillness in Nox Rosae, your collaborative film with Janne Punkari. The film is like a dream. Even its length is 17 minutes according to the average duration of a REM sleep cycle. The protagonist of the film is a rose, the flower. It’s a dreaming subject. I love the delirious part where the rose gets all dressed up. Like Gertrude Stein’s rose, that rose in the film is different from all other roses. It’s not only a symbol or a representation of something else but its own particular thing and presence. On the other hand, another video as part of the show is called Not not a metaphor. Can you talk a bit about the role of language and poetics in your work?


HK: Objects like this rose become sites where chaos and order, chance and intention meet. They carry emotional and social weight beyond their surface, acting as vessels for stories that blur the line between what’s real and what’s imagined. In Nox Rosae, the rose isn’t just a metaphor. It has its own personality. It dresses up, moves, and inhabits the space between collapse and continuity, weaving chaos into form, holding stillness and motion at once. There’s no verbal narrative in the film; I’ve always liked letting the images, gestures, and textures speak for themselves. But in Fever Dream, I began letting poetry and words sneak in, appearing in the film Not not a metaphor and even in the titles. It feels exciting, like giving the work a new voice that whispers beside the images, sometimes nudging them, sometimes contradicting them, sometimes just humming along. It’s not about explaining anything. It’s about letting language join the dance, adding its own little heartbeat without trying to take over.


JS: I know you practice a kind of a flea market dérive, or dance. Found objects play an important part in your work. There are many quite particular rose objects to be found here at your studio, like tin roses and rose-shaped candles.


HK: Found objects have a significant place in both my individual practice and my collaborative work. Janne and I enjoy working with simple, overlooked things. Kitsch symbols that quietly hold everyday magic. Take roses, for example: they’re symbols of love and beauty, yet also of control. They’re cultivated, hybridized, frozen in time. The rose objects we’ve collected in my studio – tin roses, rose-shaped candles – carry that same entangled, fragile beauty, alive with contradictions that are both captivating and impossible to fully untangle. For Fever Dream, I’ve extended that language to dolphins, the Acropolis, and a jester – each an emblem in its own right: the dolphin for play and intelligence, the Acropolis for history and human ambition, the jester for chaos and subversion. I’m obsessed with jesters. In courts, they delivered truths wrapped in humor, catching people off guard while making them think. At their best, artists do something similar in society, using creativity, surprise, and a bit of mischief to challenge norms and offer fresh perspectives.


JS: I just looked up "jester character" and it said they "provide comic relief while maintaining deeper wisdom." At first glance, I misread it as "cosmic relief," which I thought was quite fitting for your work. Cosmic relief feels relevant.

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Hertta Kiiski’s exhibition Fever Dream is on view at NOON Projects, Los Angeles, through August 30, 2025


Jenna Sutela and her studio work with open biological and computational systems to create living sculptures, images, and sound. Based in Berlin, Sutela's work has been presented internationally, including at Castello di Rivoli, Turin (2025); Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève (2024); Swiss Institute, New York (2023); Helsinki Biennale (2023); Haus der Kunst, Munich (2022); Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki (2022); Shanghai Biennial (2021); Liverpool Biennial (2021); Kunsthall Trondheim (2020); Serpentine Galleries, London (2019); and Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2019). She has been a visiting artist at La Becque, MIT, Somerset House Studios, and Callie’s Berlin. Her publications include the exhibition catalog NO NO NSE NSE (Ed. Hessler, Koenig Books 2020), the nimiia vibié LP (PAN 2019), and the artist's book Orgs (Garret Publications 2017). Sutela will represent Finland at 61st Venice Biennale in 2026.