[7] Starting from 2018 she is working on a three-year grant from the Kone Foundation[8] on a project to explore the effects of climate change using different formats of moving image.
[13] Elana Näsänen lives and works in Helsinki, Finland and is married to the Finnish media artist Pekka Sassi.
She works with familiar elements of narrative film, deconstructing and reconstructing scenes to tell a new kind of story where the action often takes place outside the space or time depicted and is left for the viewer to fill in.
[1] Works involving narrative storytelling typically feature female characters often at a crossroads, faced with the challenge to choose, or reaching for a goal that seems far away.
In "The Spell" a group of people have fallen asleep in the middle of a party while “time ticks by slowly but surely, like the timeline of modern western society”.
This mystery may be contained by the Australian outback, the Chinese yellow mountains, or the Finnish landscape.”[19]Elena Näsänen’s works have been widely shown in Finland and internationally, lately at film festivals in France (2017),[27] Spain (2017),[28] Germany (2017),[29] Korea (2015)[30] and Turkey (2014),[31] in screenings of Finnish video art in Uruguay (2018),[32] United Kingdom (2016),[33] USA (2016),[34] Norway (2013)[35] and Brazil (2013),[36] in a group exhibition in Korea (2014)[37] and on a tour of five countries of the exhibition “Bodies, Borders, Crossings” (2011–2014).
[41] Her videos have also been broadcast by The Finnish Public Service Media Company Yle, on ARTE as well as on TV channels in Sweden and Spain.