Filmmaker
Eeva Siivonen’s experimental moving image practice engages with strategies of documentary, essay, and found footage filmmaking. She employs these strategies to construct affective and immersive installations and single-channel works that speak to a fractured relationship to language and place, and the loss of identity and belonging. By excavating both personal and collective memory, and the artist's embodied experience, her practice traces the deep yet precarious connections between human and nonhuman bodies and ecosystems; connections that are constantly both found and severed. In her multifaceted work, she resists the separation between self and other, interior and exterior, human and nonhuman, and living and nonliving, reimagining hegemonic and anthropocentric notions of humanness, subjectivity, and identity. Haunted by themes of personal and collective loss, her practice embraces the impossibility of gaining definite knowledge of ourselves and others—and our place in the world—and seeks to create space for empathy and reverence.
Siivonen exhibits her work internationally at film festivals and gallery exhibitions. Recent screenings of her single-channel works include Antimatter [Media Art] in Victoria, BC, MicroActs in London, UK, San Francisco Cinematheque’s Crossroads festival, DOBRA International Festival of Experimental Cinema, Transient Visions Festival of Moving Image, Barcelona International Short Film and Video Festival, Bideodromo International Experimental Film Festival and Black Maria Film Festival, among others. She has received MFA degrees in Video Art from Syracuse University, where she studied as a Fulbright scholar, and Documentary Film Directing from Aalto University in Helsinki, Finland. In 2022, she also received a studio-based Ph.D. in Art and Visual Culture from Western University in Ontario, Canada. She is originally from Helsinki and is currently residing in London, Ontario.
Contact: eevaleenasiivonen@gmail.com
