Sissel Marie Tonn

Sissel Marie Tonn is a Danish artist based in The Hague, The Netherlands. In her practice she explores the complex ways humans perceive, act upon and are entangled with their environments. Her work always returns to the question at the core of ecological thought: Where do we perceive our bodies to end, and the environment to begin?

Tonn has a bachelor’s in Film and Media studies from University of Copenhagen. She completed a master’s in Artistic Research at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague in 2015. In 2016 she was the recipient of the Theodora Niemeijer prize for emerging female artists, resulting in her first solo show at the Eye in Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven. She was a resident at the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht in 2017 – 2018. In 2019 she received the talent development grant from Stimuleringsfonds NL, and in 2020 she was the recipient of the BAD (Bio Art and Design) Award, together with scientists Heather Leslie and Juan J. Garcia Vallejo for their project “Becoming A Sentinel Species”. Her work is frequently exhibited in The Netherlands and internationally, most recently in Istanbul Design Biennial (2018), Ballroom Marfa (2018) and Kikk Festival in Namur (2019).

Tonn also works as an arts and community organiser, with a focus on creating new modes of non-institutional learning and gathering through artistic research. Along with Jonathan Reus and Flora Reznik she is the co-founder of the artist initiative Platform for Thought in Motion, whose principal series The Reading Room was hosted at STROOM Den Haag before going nomadic in 2019. She is also one half of Sensory Cartographies, an artistic project that speculates on new forms of mapping through wearable technologies, techniques of observation and augmented attention.

Tonn will be presenting Plastic Hypersea in the online exhibition Toxicity’s Reach as part of AND Festival 2021. Enter: toxicitysrea.ch