Alena Tereshko ^{Emerging artist}

Artist's country of origin: Finland

Alena Tereshko (b. 1986, Siberia) works in her art practice with autobiography and humour, blending personal narratives with social critique. Grounded in feminist studies, her performance-based work spans diverse forms of expression, including painting, video and installations. Alena is particularly interested in how contemporary phenomena and tradition (folklore or traditional art) are intertwined in the arts.

The artist Alena Tereshko starts the itinerary of many of her works with self-observation. She creates the series of drawings, capturing herself without a mirror, depicting what comes to the sight: the breast, the abdomen, the feet (in a top down perspective), and different details of her body. In her video art “Just My Own”, the naked artist is dandling her right and left calves in turns, discovering their inherence and estrangement at the same time. The artist prefers to draw her attention to both high and lowbrow art canons and to social constructs that either produce or support them. The project “Why F” is one of the stages of her longstanding work on experiences of her own self-interactions with art works that nowadays have masterpiece status.

Alena Tereshko creates her own artist studio of fake forgeries alluding to academic practices of familiarization with “the classic works” through copying, she also refers to some of the gripping stories of art forgers, whose mercantile attention to artistic legacy can lead to appearance of the originals that have been falsely listed in catalogues.

Alena Tereshko is MFA student in department “Time and Space” in Helsinki Fine Art Academy (Kuva), 2024 – 2025, she also graduated from The Saint Petersburg Stieglitz State Academy of Art and Design (2013). Alena Tereshko is the winner of the Johanna Ehrnrooth Prize / The University of Arts Helsinki Foundation (2025) with her work “Roman Charity” and winner of the Sergey Kuryokhin Prize (2017) in “The Best Media Object” category with her work “in Repin’s Studio”. Alena got scholarship residency in Cite des Arts (Paris, 2024), Garage studios (Moscow, 2023), Iaspis (Umeå, Sweden, 2019), Nordland Kulturesenter (Bodø, Norway, 2015). Her video works twice participated in main competition in the Internationale Short film festival in Oberhausen (2015 and 2016), and she had solo-exhibitions in Helsinki and St. Petersburg and participated in numerous exhibitions and festivals in Europe.