Opening ceremony of the 2026/27 academic year

On Friday, August 28th, starting at 12:00, the opening ceremony of the 2026/27 academic year will be held. The ceremony takes place in the main hall (A101) and lasts approximately 1.5 hours.

“The Island of Girls”
EKA Gallery 22.08.–6.09.2026
Open Tue–Sat 12–6 pm Sun 12–4 pm
Opening: Friday, August 21 at 6 pm

What if there was a utopian island? A place where fragility, kindness, vulnerability, and care were not seen as weaknesses, but as forms of resistance and escape.

“The Island of Girls” is a feminist group exhibition and storytelling project that imagines a fictional island inhabited by girls alongside flowers and nature. Here, there is no war and no grief. Flowers and plants become symbols of resistance, while tenderness, imagination, and care become ways of surviving and creating another reality.

The project grows from Ukrainian artist Daria Titova’s lived experience of war and explores childhood, grief, home, and the need to create spaces where imagination can offer refuge. The “girls” of the island are not a restriction upon gender, but rather a symbol of openness, curiosity, sincerity, and the belief that the world can be different. Anyone is welcome here.

The exhibition features Titova’s visual works alongside Mariia Chudna’s ceramics and Helena Atkin’s original music. Natalia Stojkova and Kornélia Nemcová present their film “A Woman’s War”, adding another perspective on women’s experiences of war.

During the exhibition, the island will also become a space for shared meals and storytelling. Communal dinners planned by Aly Sparkling Beveridge will take place on August 22 and 24, bringing visitors together around food, conversation, and shared stories. On September 2, artist and designer Katya Lesiv will have an artist talk and lead a tea ceremony.

Programme:
The number of participants is limited, please sign up in advance!

• On Saturday, August 22 at 6–9 pm communal dinner and embroidery workshop. Register here
• On Monday, August 24 at 6–9 pm communal dinner and embroidery workshop. Register here
• Wednesday, September 2, 4–6 pm artist talk & tea ceremony with Katya Lesiv. Register here

Participating artists: Helena Atkin, Aly Sparkling Beveridge, Mariia Chudna, Natalia Stojkova & Kornélia Nemcová, Daria Titova
Project initiator: Daria Titova
Graphic design: Teele Kiisk
Technical support: Eugenio Marini
The exhibition is supported by the Cultural Endowment of Estonia, Tallinn City and Sadolin Estonia.
Opening drinks from mirai™ and Põhjala Brewery.

11.07.2026–25.10.2026

From 11 July, Tartu Art Museum’s project space will present Kaisa Maasik’s solo exhibition The Lightness of Being as part of the Young Tartu exhibition series.

Kaisa Maasik’s solo exhibition The Lightness of Being focuses on ordinary yet beautiful moments that are easy to overlook. These may be a fleeting smile between two strangers, the first day after a long winter when you can finally swap your boots for sneakers, or the sound of rain tapping on a windowsill that briefly wakes you in the night before lulling you back to sleep. Maasik’s works are rooted in observation and attentiveness, bringing together collected moments and everyday observations shared by different people. Against the backdrop of rapid information flows and constant competition for our attention in digital environments, the exhibition invites visitors to slow down and notice what usually remains in the background – situations that could happen to any of us and that remind us that life is largely made up of such small, genuine moments.

The Young Tartu exhibition series was launched in 2017 with the aim of promoting and supporting the work of emerging artists connected to Tartu. Previous participants in the programme have included Sten Eltermaa, Keiu Maasik, Mirjam Hinn, Siiri Jüris, Nele Marie Tiidelepp, Tõnis Jürgens and Viktoria Berezina.

Kaisa Maasik’s exhibition will take place in the project space on the third floor of the Tartu Art Museum from 11 July to 25 October 2026.

Kaisa Maasik (b. 1994) is an artist and curator based in Tallinn. She graduated from the Contemporary Art Programme at the Estonian Academy of Arts (MA, 2021) and from the Photography Department (BA, 2017). In 2019, she furthered her studies at the Academy of Fine Arts of the University of the Arts Helsinki in the Praxis curatorial master’s programme. Collaboration plays an important role in Maasik’s practice; she works both collectively and independently on projects that often take the form of spatial artworks. She focuses on the feelings and experiences of people she encounters, seeking to convey their stories through objects and memories. Collecting is central to Maasik’s methodology, drawing primarily on everyday life. She was a member of the Umbrella Group (2016–2017) and has been involved in the organising teams of the project space Vent Space (2018–2019) and the Tallinn Photomonth Biennial (2017 and 2019). In 2020, Maasik was awarded the Wiiralt Scholarship. In spring 2021, she participated in the FAIR residency at FABRIKKEN in Copenhagen. Maasik has been a member of the Estonian Union of Photography Artists since 2021 and of the Estonian Artists’ Association since 2022.

Artist: Kaisa Maasik
Curator: Stella Mõttus
Graphic designer: Kersti Heile
Supporters: Estonian Cultural Endowment, Ledzep OÜ
Exhibition team: Indrek Grigor, Joanna Hoffmann, Rene Kriisa, Katariina Leets, Katrin Lõoke, Anti Saar, Peeter Talvistu
Video clip credits: Arvi Anderson, Jana Arendi, Katariina Aule, Andrus Avarand, Yvette Bathgate, Marleen Eino, Alexei Gordin, Yiheng Gu, Viktor Gurov, Liisa-Lota Jõeleht, Erik Jürmann, Pirke Kaljula, Piret Klea-Velleste, Karel Koplimets, Nele Kurvits, Epp Kuslap, Kadri Lind, Maria Luiga, Mariel Luuk, Heiki Maasik, Katariin Mudist, Stella Mõttus, Reigo Nahksepp, Urmet Piiling, Evelyn Raudsepp, Mari-Liis Rebane, Yiyang Sun, Maryliis Teinfeldt-Grins, Annika Toots, Tõnu Tunnel, Simona Tätte, Lotte Ugandi, Ruudu Ulas, Pille-Riin Valk, Eliisabet Valmas, Sten Vendik, Helen Västrik

The duo exhibition “Something That Should Be Felt” by artists Hilla Kurki & Taavi Rekkaro opened at the FOKU Gallery.

In the exhibition, the artists engage in a shared exploration about memory, personal history, touch, and how we relate to images. Both artists are searching for new ways within their practices, moving perhaps towards a greater spatiality and material presence. Together, the works create a dialogue between distance and intimacy, presence and remembrance.

In the series Clay Diaries, Hilla Kurki approaches memory through her family’s history, seeking alternative modes of relating with tradition and heritage. In Kurki’s images human form is shown together with plants and creatures, things that are reborn every season seemingly unchanged. By inviting a range of fellow artists to visit her great-grandparents’ house she creates a living archive through shared moments where friendship can become the main outcome of the work, not just its subject.

Taavi Rekkaro presents photos and objects that rethink photography as something to be touched, where closeness becomes part of the experience. The images capture fleeting moments, inner uncertainties, and attempts to understand oneself and one’s relationships with others. Exploring the connections between memory, body and self-perception, the artist asks: how can we be sure that we were truly there, that these moments really happened? On the gallery wall unfolds a melting moment composed of works created since 2023. Rather than telling a single, fixed story, the works invite viewers to slow down and build their own narratives.

The exhibition will remain open until 26 September 2026.

Hilla Kurki (FI, b. 1985) has exhibited in various international venues and art fairs since 2016. Her first book Almost All the Flowers in My Mother’s Garden was published in 2022 (Khaos Publishing), and has two sold out editions. Exhibition adaptations of the book have been shown recently in for example the Institut finlandais in Paris, Foto Arsenal Wien and in the Centre de la Photographie Genève. Kurki was one of the headliners of the Copenhagen Photo Festival in 2023. Her work was selected for Elles X Paris Photo in 2018, showcasing the history and future of female photographers. She was awarded the Still Life Prize in the 34th edition of Festival d´Hyeres in 2019. She is a part of the FUTURES Photography Platform.
Kurki has graduated with a Master’s in Art from the Aalto University School of Art, Design and Architecture in 2018. She lives and works in Helsinki, Finland.
https://www.hillakurki.com/

Taavi Rekkaro (EE, b. 1988) is a mixed media artist whose work reflects an intuitive dialogue between visual art and photography. Combining images with physical materials, he seeks to capture the energy of fleeting moments, blurring the lines between memory and self-discovery. Rekkaro has shown his work internationally both at exhibitions and artfairs, and his work has been published in international publications.
https://taavirekkaro.com/

FOKU Gallery is a gallery-showroom focused on contemporary lens-based art. FOKU Gallery is run by the Estonian Union of Photography Artists (FOKU).

Supporters:
Cultural Endowment of Estonia, Finnish Cultural Foundation’s Kymeenlaakso regional fund, Artproof

Opening drinks provided by:
Nudist Drinks, Põhjala Brewery

Technical support:
Karmo Migur, Paul Kobert

Calligraphy:
Adèle Zabé

Thank you:
Albane, Alexis, Anne, Artproof team, Celine, Daniel, EKA Gallery, Elio, Ferdinand, Hikari, Hubert, Jack, Joosep, Kaisa Maasik, Margot, Mari-Leen Kiipli, Olari, Olivia, Oscar, Raphaël, Rasmus, Risako, Sheung, Thomas, Tor, Valter, Viivi, Woosung

FOKU Gallery
Väike-Karja 10, Tallinn
Thu–Sat 12–18
Free entrance

Karl Joonas Alamaa & Cian-Ti Wang
Near enough 
02.08–30.08 @ KESKPUUR

Bringing together two artists from different cultural backgrounds, the exhibition is united by a shared interest in themes of home, departure, memory, and hope. For Taiwanese artist Cian-Ti Wang, this marks the first exhibition in Estonia. The practices of Alamaa and Wang converge around questions of belonging, memory, movement, everyday experience, and the ways in which people create and sustain connections with places, objects, and one another.

At the heart of the exhibition are shared and personal spaces, places where people’s paths intersect and where habits, relationships, and memories take shape. These can be environments that carry both individual and collective stories. 

The exhibition explores how memory and belonging continually move between the personal, the shared, and the institutional. Rather than treating them as fixed or clearly defined conditions, it presents memory as an ongoing process of transformation, asking how we carry places with us and how those places, in turn, shape our understanding of where, and with whom, we belong.
…

Cian-Ti Wang’s artistic practice explores food, eating, and familiar objects as ways through which people form connections with home, identity, and one another. Their work intertwines personal experiences with broader social questions, addressing language, religion, history, and social relationships. Wang frequently employs familiar objects, environments, and ritual forms to create installation-based and performative situations that invite viewers into a multilayered emotional landscape. Living in Belgium while originating from Taiwan, their practice is often informed by questions of longing and the search for community.

Karl Joonas Alamaa’s (he/they) practice explores the intersections of personal memory and public space, examining the relationships between power, history, and the individual. He is interested in how people carry memories, everyday traces, and personal meanings with them, and how public spaces and ideologically charged environments shape our understanding of belonging and home. His works weave together intimate and collective perspectives, drawing attention to the threshold between the visible and the overlooked.

On 21 August at 13:00 the public peer-review of the exhibition project, part of the doctoral research of Cultural Heritage and Conservation doctoral candidate Triin Reidla will take place at the Museum of Estonian Architecture (Ahtri 2), first floor.

Supervisors: Ingrid Ruudi, PhD (Estonian Academy of Arts) and Maris Mändel, PhD (Estonian Academy of Arts)
Reviewers: prof Andres Kurg (Estonian Academy of Arts) and Jutta Tynkkunen, PhD (Museum of Finnish Architecture and Design, Helsinki)
The event will be held in English.
To get the most out of the discussion, visitors are encouraged to see the exhibition before attending the peer-review event.

The exhibition “Architect Miia Masso. In Five Acts”, the second project of the practice-based doctoral research, draws on Masso’s personal archive and presents highlights from her more than fifty-year architectural career. Divided into five thematic acts, the exhibition explores Masso’s work from both the Soviet period and the years following the restoration of Estonia’s independence. It features apartment buildings, summer houses, private residences, public buildings, urban plans and commercial buildings characteristic of both periods. From the personal archive, a number of distinctive original works and documents are presented alongside copies that the architect regarded as an essential part of her portfolio.
The exhibition is open until 23 August.

On 14 August, from 13:00 to 14:30 (EEST), the public peer review of Art and Design doctoral student Sonya Isupova’s first solo exhibition, “Water, Usually in the Shape of a River,” will take place in EKA Gallery on the second floor and via zoom (Meeting ID: 664 5412 1094, Passcode: 028984).

Water, Usually in the Shape of a River folds in itself infrastructures, shapes perceptions, and registers transformations. A river exists simultaneously as a border, a defence mechanism, and a source of both life and death. Its water can become a resource, a weapon, or a memorial. The exhibition investigates Soviet infrastructural projects and their modes of representation, focusing on hydroelectric dams built along the Dnipro River in southern Ukraine, particularly the Kakhovka and Dnipro hydroelectric stations. Through film and archival research, juxtaposed with media art installation, Isupova examines how these projects reshaped both landscape and collective memory.
The exhibition forms part of her doctoral research on the effects of colonial infrastructure on the landscape.
At the centre of the exhibition is the essay film Water, Usually in the Shape of a River, which functions as a visual map of a memory of a landscape that is no longer there.

Reviewers: Dr. Raivo Kelomees (EKA) and Prof. Madina Tlostanova (Linkoping University, Sweden)

Supervisors: Dr. Epp Annus, Dr. Varvara Guljajeva

04.07-26.07 @ Keskpuur

The opening of LMEO artist duo’s first international exhibition will take place on July 4 at 13:00.
Drinks for the opening will be provided by Tuletorn & Vaat.

Keskpuur is pleased to announce Everything is Just Something to Get Through – the first international exhibition by the artist duo LMEO. Originally from Montréal and now based in Tallinn, LMEO brings together their individual practices through a collaborative approach rooted in sculpture, installation, and performance.

As temporary residents in Estonia, the artists have developed the exhibition through the observant gaze of newcomers. This exhibition challenges concepts of spectatorship and its relation to urban systems, drawing attention to the ways public infrastructures can function [or can be understood] as choreography.

The exhibition evokes a feeling of displacement or loneliness that blends into the anonymity of public space. Through flickering lights, industrial assemblages, and images of the mundane, Everything is Just Something to Get Through reflects on the banal structures that shape contemporary life and reimagines them as theatrical settings. LMEO invites viewers to encounter these environments with the heightened awareness of a visitor or outsider, while considering how spiritual presence and emotional connection might inhabit ordinary spaces as a means of communicating across distance and coping with grief and loss.

…

Lili Maud Dobell and Éric-Olivier Thériault have worked collaboratively since October 2022, after meeting while completing their BFAs at NSCAD University. After establishing an alternative gallery space in Halifax, Canada, the artists moved to Estonia to pursue graduate studies at the Estonian Academy of Arts in the Contemporary Art MA programme. The pair uses collaboration as a meeting ground for a shared artistic vision, resisting singular authorship.

The acronym LMEO stands for “Laughing My Ears Off” while also referencing the initials of their first names.

Both artists specialize in sculptural practices that invite or consider bodily interaction with materials. Their collaborative practice speaks in a tone they describe as “pathetic poetry”. Through their durational works, they coined the term Proof of Performance to describe the sculptural act of making through being.

Central to the pair’s joint practice is the gathering and assemblage of found objects, reflecting a commitment to a sustainable artistic language that considers the relevance and utility of the readymade within a context of climate and socio-political crisis. As a result, the seemingly mundane spaces where the reflection and the non-doing aspects of a sculptural practice are activated become the subject for the artwork itself.

Lili Maud and Éric-Olivier are currently developing Cycles, a performance piece that will be shown at the 61st Venice Biennale under the pavilion umbrella of Merike Estna’s House of Leaking Sky.

Lisette Lepik’s solo exhibition Flow State will open on 7th of July at 18:00 at Artovert Gallery.

7.07 – 7.08.2026

Tue – Sat 12:00 – 18:00, Sun – Mon closed
Exhibition opening on Tuesday 7th of July at 18:00.

Artrovert Gallery, Ristiku tn 10, 10612 Tallinn

Lisette Lepik’s solo exhibition Flow State focuses on the dialogue between painting as a non-linear medium and dance as a medium unfolding in time. The exhibition is guided by the question: how can movement that disappears in time be transformed into an image, and can painting convey the experience of movement?

Painting has traditionally been understood as a static, two-dimensional medium. Dance, by contrast, emerges through movement and duration. While the two mediums engage with time in different ways, both are shaped by gesture and bodily action. Movement in dance is experienced through time, whereas painting appears to suspend time, preserving traces of a process that has already passed.

Within both processes, there are moments when attention becomes fully absorbed in the act itself. As movement unfolds, awareness of the surrounding environment fades and the distinction between intention and action becomes less pronounced. Flow State draws on this shared condition, exploring how the fleeting presence of movement can leave traces that persist beyond the moment of its occurrence.

Flow State extends beyond the boundaries of painting into a carefully constructed spatial environment. Sound, light, and exhibition architecture become active participants in the work, gradually dissolving distinctions between image and atmosphere, observation and immersion. Together, these elements create a space where the exhibition’s central questions are experienced as much through the viewer’s movement and perception as through the paintings themselves.

Lisette Lepik (b. 1999, Tallinn, EE) is an artist working primarily with painting and installation. Her practice examines the body as a site where intimacy, memory, family structures, and social roles intersect. 

Lepik is currently pursuing a Master’s degree in Contemporary Art at the Estonian Academy of Arts, where she completed a Bachelor’s degree in Painting in 2022, and studied installation and sculpture at the Iceland University of the Arts in 2019. She has exhibited in Estonia, Iceland, Austria, and Lithuania, including duo exhibitions with Brenda Purtsak at Tartu Art House and Hobusepea Gallery (2024), and a collaborative exhibition with Kristina Kuzemko at Club Virgin, a strip club in Tallinn (2025). Her most recent solo exhibition took place at Haapsalu City Gallery (2025). She received the Estonian Academy of Arts’ “Õpi ja sära” scholarship in 2024 and the Helju Rossmann Scholarship in 2025.

Open: 7.07 – 7.08.2026

Tue – Sat 12:00 – 18:00, Sun – Mon closed

Artrovert Gallery, Ristiku tn 10, 10612 Tallinn

Curator: Nora Schmelter

Sound: Gregor Sirendi

Graphic Design: Villem Sarapuu

Technical Support: Siim Raie, Nora Schmelter, Mats Johan Soosaar

Special Thanks: Artrovert Gallery, Estonian Cultural Endowment, Estonian Academy of Arts Department of New Media, Punch Club, Bob Bicknell-Knight, Gerda Hansen, Mats Johan Soosaar

Sonya Isupova
“Water Usually in the Shape of a River. Hydroelectric Imaginaries of the Southern Ukrainian Landscape”
EKA Gallery 4.07.–16.08.2026 (NB! Closed during 20.07.–2.08.)
Open Tue–Sat 12–6 pm Sun 12–4 pm
Opening: Friday, July 3 at 6 pm

“Water Usually in the Shape of a River” is the first solo exhibition by Ukrainian artist and researcher Sonya Isupova. The exhibition explores Soviet infrastructural projects and their modes of representation, focusing on the hydroelectric dams built along the Dnipro River in southern Ukraine, particularly the Kakhovka and Dnipro hydroelectric stations. Through film and archival research, Isupova examines how these projects reshaped both landscape and collective memory.

The exhibition forms part of her doctoral research on the effects of colonial infrastructure on the landscape. She approaches Soviet films about infrastructure as “imaginary maps” that helped construct a unified Soviet space while simultaneously preserving visual records of territories before their transformation. Through these films, it becomes possible to trace the beginnings of ruination and reconstruct fragmented memories of landscapes submerged beneath the man-made seas of the Kakhovka and Dnipro reservoirs.

Positioned between monumentality and utility, Soviet hydroelectric projects generated a distinct visual language that presented nature as transformed by political power. Through archival artefacts and speculative reconstruction, the exhibition revisits these submerged landscapes and the histories embedded within them.

Events taking part of the finissage of the exhibition “Water, Usually in the Shape of a River” at EKA Gallery on Friday, August 14:
1–2.30 pm public peer preview
6–8 pm finissage: live musical performance by dijakritika and drinks from Põhjala Brewery

Events are free of charge.

Graphic design: Simon Janson
Technical support: Ats Kruusing
The exhibition is supported by the Cultural Endowment of Estonia and Sadolin Estonia.
Opening drinks from mirai™.