Art keeps my brains out of overdrive. It keeps my heart in silence and peace. It keeps my family as a unit. Peace and Love and Anarchy. All this living inside me, fight against fight, truth for truth and strength to trust. Finally it is just being what matters.

Suvi Parrilla (1974) is an interdisciplinary artist (MA) who works mainly with performance art and photography. The central theme of her work is the construction of identity. She explores the social status between the different layers of human culture. Identity is indefinable for her. It is defining itself over and over again.
In her work she does not only represent the identities of person or nations. She also introduces visual semiotics. In her performances she pushes the borders of the representation of things.

Adios Pluto – We love Grigory Perelman! (2006) is a performance in which Parrilla is making sense of a piece astro-mathematical news in 2006. She builds up her own solar system where the ex-planet Pluto is roughly kicked away and respect Russian genius Perelman who refused million euro mathematics prize Fields Metal in Madrid August 2006. The work was done for the Jámon-Kinkkua! Festival of Helsinki and Madrid 2006.

Flight into Egypt (2006) This photograph triptych is a representation of a religious theme concerning a sacred family escaping the order of King Herod to execute all baby boys in his kingdom under 2 years of age. The reality of historical fact continues today. People are still fleeing their homes. There are several reasons ranging from political persecution to the terror of war. Traditionally, Flight to Egypt has been the theme of the landscape that defines European identity through orientalism. In paintings, you? can see a typical Central European upper class group looking a like sacred family adventuring in an oriental landscape. In this piece Suvi Parrilla explores the identity of the monogamous European family today. She tries to break the presumed looks and identity of sacred people, a sacred family. She has chosen an unusual perspective to represent the subject of biblical art work. She tries to remind the spectator of the reasons fore the streams of refugees during the last hundred years. A 2000-year-old subject can still be current. The work was seen in the 4th Student Triennial of Marmara University, Istanbul, Turkey, Faces festival in Karjaa, Finland and Gallery Alkovi in Helsinki 2006.

Professional Teenagers (2001-2002) This photography project was done with Leena Kela. It documents the everyday expressions of youth cultures; love bites, skin drawings, piercing and ways to cut and hurt oneself. Initiation rites are missing from Western culture. Are these marks made on one’s skin to bind teenagers in a way that tribal rituals used to do? The images reveal something that is hidden from the adult world, but definitely something which is also part of it. The body and the mind are in change, being a teenager means being between two stages in life where exaggerations are acceptable and also very visible in the outbursts of feelings.
The imagery in the photographs is carefully framed. The photographs try to avoid set ups and the documentation of the models is as authentic as possible. Because of the personal and delicate nature of the photographs, the models are anonymous.
Different venues have been the contexts for showing the project, ranging from galleries to the backyards of squatted houses and car parks. The photographs have been in different city art exhibitions in Finland, such as the ANTI Festival in Kuopio, the Selleri event in Lahti and The Last Escape Festival in Turku. In galleries they have also been seen at Myymälä2, Helsinki.