Aeolian Suite by Jenna Sutela, curated by Stefanie Hessler, is a multisensory environment that transforms the Pavilion of Finland into a windscape of sound and movement. The composition uses meteorological data, musical instruments including wind machines, alto, basset and contrabass recorders, a children’s woodwind orchestra and recordings of winds from Venice, Helsinki and beyond that feature a singing bridge, clotheslines, sailing boat masts and poplar trees. Fuzzy sonic-kinetic sculptures installed in a circle, like a wind rose diagram, resemble microphone wind muffs.
In this elemental drama, five Venetian winds (Tramontana, two Boras, Scirocco and Garbin) become protagonists, singing the weather while acting as guides for deep listening. The characters evoke classic tropes from the travelling theatre tradition of commedia dell’arte. By personifying the atmospheric forces that shape Venice and the ways the global climate is becoming increasingly volatile – ecologically, socially and politically – the work addresses environmental questions from the mundane to the existential.
The scenography by Celeste Burlina reflects the itinerant spirit of the commedia as well as Alvar and Elissa Aalto’s 1956 pavilion (originally conceived as a mobile structure), the acqua alta in Venice and the perpetual movement of wind. The sculptural, sonic characters draw on grammelot, the theatrical technique of speaking without words, and communicate through rhythm, tone and gesture, echoing the wind’s own language: rich in content yet at the edge of comprehensibility.
The exhibition engages with wind’s unpredictability and its fundamentally relational nature. Whereas wind is often seen as noise to be cancelled, or a key variable in weather prediction, here its presence calls attention to the relationship between the world and the sensing mechanisms used to perceive it. Built on energy-intensive technologies and extractive economies, algorithmic forecasts contribute to warming the planet – destabilising the weather they seek to know. The wind is a source of true randomness; it may be analysable, yet it is ultimately incomputable. It is a carrier of particles, microbes, seeds and messages, including those that evade capture or that are largely ignored and increasingly censored. Wind sounds are produced through contact: we can only hear wind as it blows into, out of, or against trees, alleys, flutes and wings.
Letting wind take over the microphone and the recording is a way of staying porous to the world, of recognising registers beyond human experience that we nonetheless shape. Perhaps the answer has always been blowin’ in the wind.
The presentation coincides with the Pavilion of Finland’s 70th anniversary in 2026. It will be accompanied by a publication edited by Stefanie Hessler, with newly commissioned texts by Hessler, Jenna Sutela, Elvia Wilk, and Gary Zhexi Zhang, and a vinyl record, co-published by Mousse Publishing, PAN, and Frame.
The exhibition at Finland’s Aalto Pavilion is commissioned and produced by Frame Contemporary Art Finland.
Oulu2026 European Capital of Culture is the main partner of the exhibition. Aeolian Suite by Jenna Sutela will travel to Oulu Art Museum in Spring 2027.
The Finnish Ministry of Education and Culture is the main supporter of the exhibition. Other supporters and partners are Jane and Aatos Erkko Foundation, Genelec, Kvadrat, Schering Stiftung, Saastamoinen Foundation, EMMA – Espoo Museum of Modern Art, Finnish Embassy in Rome, FUTUARTS, and Pavilion of Finland Patrons. Event partners are Finnland-Institut in Berlin, TBA21–Academy’s Ocean Space, and Swiss Institute (SI) New York.
For a full list of credits and collaborators, please see the digital exhibition brochure.
Notes to Editors
International Press
Julia Debski, Sutton Communications
julia@suttoncomms.com
Finnish Press
Rosa Kuosmanen, Head of Communications at Frame
rosa.kuosmanen@frame-finland.fi
Press Kit
For more information, please see the press kit