6.2. — 1.3.2026, MEDIABOX

A Flagellate Searching for Love, 2024
10 min. 33 sec., Digital video 4K
Slime mold, oatmeal, agar, time-lapse animation

A Flagellate Searching for Love captures slime mold moving along symbols of love, diagrams of reproductive cells and signs of genders. Themes are searching for love, relationships, sex and reproduction.

The film explores the mechanism of falling in love, and love and sexual attraction. It is thought that these areas of life occur at the cellular level. What really happens when a very charming cellular formation hits? Is love a biological process based on finding suitable cells?

Slime molds are macroscopic organisms living mostly on the surface of rotting trees. They are able to move even if they do not have muscles, brains, or the neurological system. Different types of slime molds are different colors and move in different ways and speeds.

The randomness and unfairness associated with love life, mating and emotions are things that an individual cannot fully control, and perhaps that is why they evoke such great feelings.

Slime molds reproduce sexually from swarming cells, i.e., flagellates. They are isogamic, so they have rather complicated gender relations. A sperm and an egg are needed for the birth of a human being, but the swarming cell of the slime mold must meet the opposite swarming cell, which has just a certain combination of genes. Breeding with others is not possible. For example, Physarum polycephalum slime mold has 720 of these different gene variants, thus sexes.

Leena Pukki (b. 1984) is a visual artist whose work explores interspecies relationships, history, alternative realities, colors and single-celled organisms. Her artistic techniques are diverse, ranging from media art and bio-art to large-scale mural paintings and installations.

Pukki holds a Master of Arts from Aalto University School of Arts, Design and Architecture (2015) and a Bachelor of Arts in Fine Arts from Lahti University of Applied Sciences (2007). She got Maecenas Guild Award from Kunsthalle Helsinki’s Young Artists 2019-exhibition. Her art piece In Search of Perfection is part of Finnish State Art Deposit Collection.

Pukki’s works have been shown at the Venice Biennale as part of Miracle Workers Collective, Kunsthalle Helsinki, Pori and Lappeenranta art museums, and at film festivals for example in Sweden, Norway, Germany, Indonesia, Canada, and Ukraine.

She is a founding member of the Route Couture artist group and a member of MUU ry, AV-Arkki, Bioart Society and Kuvasto. She lives and works between Cairo and Helsinki.