Saara Tuominen (finland )

// BIO

Saara Tuominen is 27-year-old photographic artist from Tampere, Finland. Her background is in photojournalism, and she uses it as a base for her artistic work. Her main form is photo series, and she work with a combination of selfportraits, objects and archives. Her art combines lived life and personal stories with an air of fiction, creating a world of its own. For the last year She has been working on a long term project about her Ingrian Finnish heritage titled The tree of knowledge is not that of life. In this project she combines her photography with satellite images and Google Street View photos of the old Ingrian land to bring a distance and to imitate lost memories. She is applying for NART residency to finish this project, with plans of collaborating and building connections with the local Ingrian community.
Prior to this She has exhibited her work in Helsinki Photo Festival (Nordic Village Winner), as PH museum Story of the Week and as part of a State of Emergency 2020 -collective project, as well as part of group exhibitions.

// PROJECT

In Narva she wants to continue and finish her photographic project about her Ingrian Finnish heritage and her feeling of disconnect. Her grandfather’s family escaped the massacre of the Ingrian Finns in the Soviet Union in the 1940’s, and came to Finland, and so started the decades long period of exile and process of forgetting.
She has been working on this project since 2021. Apart from photography, her project uses experimental techniques to showcase the past. Since it is not safe to travel to Russia at the moment, she went to find a different way of showing the old Ingrian land and ended up finding the perfect, hazy, partly censored landscapes of Google Street View.

During this residency she will bring the project together, ready to be turned into a dummy and an exhibition. The residency would allow her the space and time to enter the world of her project and bring it together the best way possible, as well as photograph the last photos needed. NART would be the perfect residency for her because of its location: themes of separation, borders and being buried in history are key themes in her project. To top it off, the residency would give her an amazing opportunity to build connections with the local Ingrian community. She would be honored to showcase her work to them in some form, and create something together with them.