Timo Tuhkanen (b. 1983) is a multidisciplinary artist, curator, and researcher, whose work intersects between contemporary art, music, institutions, instruments, and research into the cultural and historical aspects of touch.
Timo’s artistic work ties experimental materiality to storytelling and mixed-modal experiences to include sound, sculpture, text, performance, algorithms, institutions, interventions, and installations that come together to tell a coherent story. Their work deals with trauma, touch, memory and experimental materiality and the subject matters often adapt inside an occupied environments of urban landscapes, digital platforms, and social-spaces. Timo like’s to describe their work as lived-through narrative fiction, or mythopoetics, where life, storytelling, learning, and art become intertwined and entangled through sensorial experiences. Timo was born in Muscat, Oman and grew up in Jordan, Palestine, Israel, and also lived in France, England, Italy and finally in Finland. Their artworks try to go beyond nation states, individualism, religion, and colonial hegemonic and patriarchal practices to find queer, fluid non-European objects, conditions, and spaces for experimenting with the real.
They received their BA and MMus from Brunel University of West London where their work focused on algorithmic music, opera, and conducting. They received their PhD from the University of Leeds where their research focused on the aesthetics of touch in the philosophy and practice of music. From 2022 to 2025 Timo directed the Microtonal Music Studios, a three year project supported by Kone Foundation, which enables artists and creates resources for non-western, post-national musical systems and thinking and posited musical practices as a resource problem that could be developed through relational art. They are also a post-doctoral Research Affiliate at the Department of Musicology at the University of Turku, an artistic researcher in the ATLAS Project in Angewandte University of Applied Arts Vienna led by curator Dr Basak Senova, and have been a visiting researcher at the STMS Sound Music Movement Interaction Lab at IRCAM Paris, and the Luigi Nono Foundation in Venice.
Their work as a composer and artist have been featured in galleries, museums, biennale's and festivals such as Manifesta12 (5×5×5 program), MINU Festival for Expanded Music, BAM – Biennale Arcipelago Mediterraneo, 3éme Biennale di l’Art Contemporain Casablanca, XXV Mänttä Art Festival, Kohta Kunsthalle, Kunsthalle Exnergasse WUK Vienna, Museo delle Trame Mediterranee, European Mediterranean Art Association, Emma Museum of Modern Art, FILE Electronic Language Festival, Kallion New Music Days, Alvar Aalto -museum, Dimitria Festival, Time of Music Festival, AAVE-Festival, Musica Nova Festival, Canterbury Jazz Festival, and the Royal Festival Hall in London.
Timo’s artistic work ties experimental materiality to storytelling and mixed-modal experiences to include sound, sculpture, text, performance, algorithms, institutions, interventions, and installations that come together to tell a coherent story. Their work deals with trauma, touch, memory and experimental materiality and the subject matters often adapt inside an occupied environments of urban landscapes, digital platforms, and social-spaces. Timo like’s to describe their work as lived-through narrative fiction, or mythopoetics, where life, storytelling, learning, and art become intertwined and entangled through sensorial experiences. Timo was born in Muscat, Oman and grew up in Jordan, Palestine, Israel, and also lived in France, England, Italy and finally in Finland. Their artworks try to go beyond nation states, individualism, religion, and colonial hegemonic and patriarchal practices to find queer, fluid non-European objects, conditions, and spaces for experimenting with the real.
They received their BA and MMus from Brunel University of West London where their work focused on algorithmic music, opera, and conducting. They received their PhD from the University of Leeds where their research focused on the aesthetics of touch in the philosophy and practice of music. From 2022 to 2025 Timo directed the Microtonal Music Studios, a three year project supported by Kone Foundation, which enables artists and creates resources for non-western, post-national musical systems and thinking and posited musical practices as a resource problem that could be developed through relational art. They are also a post-doctoral Research Affiliate at the Department of Musicology at the University of Turku, an artistic researcher in the ATLAS Project in Angewandte University of Applied Arts Vienna led by curator Dr Basak Senova, and have been a visiting researcher at the STMS Sound Music Movement Interaction Lab at IRCAM Paris, and the Luigi Nono Foundation in Venice.
Their work as a composer and artist have been featured in galleries, museums, biennale's and festivals such as Manifesta12 (5×5×5 program), MINU Festival for Expanded Music, BAM – Biennale Arcipelago Mediterraneo, 3éme Biennale di l’Art Contemporain Casablanca, XXV Mänttä Art Festival, Kohta Kunsthalle, Kunsthalle Exnergasse WUK Vienna, Museo delle Trame Mediterranee, European Mediterranean Art Association, Emma Museum of Modern Art, FILE Electronic Language Festival, Kallion New Music Days, Alvar Aalto -museum, Dimitria Festival, Time of Music Festival, AAVE-Festival, Musica Nova Festival, Canterbury Jazz Festival, and the Royal Festival Hall in London.
