EKA Grad Show TASE ‘26

The EKA Graduation Show Festival TASE ’26 opens on May 27, 2026 at 17:00.

At the graduation festival, the faculties of architecture, design, art culture, and fine arts will present this year’s final projects.

TASE ’26 will take place on the EKA campus in Kalamaja – in the EKA main building (Põhja pst 7 / Kotzebue 1), as well as in the buildings at Kotzebue 4 and 10, and on the Kotzebue 2 plot.

At the opening event, the Young Artist, Young Applied Artist, and Young Designer awards will be presented to bachelor’s and master’s level students.

The TASE ’26 exhibition will remain open from May 28 to June 19, daily from 13:00 to 19:00.

TASE chief organizer:
Kaisa Maasik-Koplimets, kaisa.maasik@artun.ee

The peer-review of PhD student Maria Erikson’s exhibition “Imprint of Vulnearbility” will take place on Friday, April 17th, 11:30–13:00, at EKA Printmaking Studio (B409) and via Zoom. The event is in English.

The exhibition is a creative project of Erikson’s practice-based artistic research Matrix, Trace, and Feminist Possibilities: Reimagining Printmaking as a Space of Material Agency and Embodied Knowledge.

Reviewers: Dr. Daina Pupkevičiūtė (Lithuania) and Sveta Grigorjeva
Supervisors: Dr. Elo-Hanna Seljamaa (University of Tartu) and Jaana Kokko (PhD candidate Aalto University, Helsinki, Finland)

“Every heart is broken!” writes Rick Dolphijn, framing the wound not as something to be healed but lived. Maria Erikson’s first artistic component, Imprint of Vulnerability, explores the wounding inherent in printmaking processes while drawing connections between the female body and geological endurance in the context of the matrixial sphere.

Focusing on female experience and the human condition, Erikson’s practice explores contact and materiality between human and non-human bodies through methodology of print and process-driven inquiry. Working across printmaking, sculpture, and installation, she explores emergence of material knowledge through their agentic capacities and bodiliness. Materials such as stone, gum arabic, and cheesecloth are no longer merely tools but carriers of meaning, enacting imprinting, pressure, and separation.

Imprint of Vulnerability is a duo exhibition with Mari Männa, curated by Madli Ljutjuk (Tallinn Art Hall), and is on view at Tallinn City Gallery until April 12th, 2026.

We are excited to invite you to our performance “∞Eight∞”.

The performance is created by Chia-Ling from EKA MA Animation, Mayu from Accademia Dimitri in Switzerland and Rikuo based in Berlin. We met in Prague last year and developed this piece together. Now we are very happy to share with you our performance on 09.04 in EKA!

This performance brings together a dancer, Mayu Shirai (Japan), a live painter, Chia-ling (Taiwan), and a musician, Rikuo Toyono (Japan).

Each collaborator explores IKIIKI—a Japanese term meaning a state of being fully alive in the present—through their own medium by only using a simple, universally accessible motif of the figure-8, seeking a balance between autonomy and coexistence. 

Their collaboration is rooted in improvisation and relational exchange, where each practice continuously influences the others. Beyond technical skill, the performers are chosen for their character, humor, and sensitivity to shared space.

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Performance will be on:
09.04 Thursday 
at 4p.m. 
A-100.1 (Trepid, Stairs next to Café) in EKA

Duration:
60mins+ 20mins talk!

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It’s free of charge and family child friendly!
Welcome to join with your friends, families and share your feelings with us!

ARS Project Space 24.04.–16.05.2026

Opening 23.04.2026 from 6 PM

In May 2025, Jaanika visited the Alps. The landscape dictated the artist to keep her balance, which didn’t allow her to see further than the next slope. It was the low season for tourism, so no ski lifts were operating to ease her journey upward. Jaanika was alone with the mountain, as she continued her way forward. The glacier at the foot of the mountain had melted and in order to come into contact with the ice and snow, she had to climb even higher. This was her first direct encounter with glaciers: until that moment, she had only experienced them through the sounds, videos, literature and photographic material of other authors. All of these contained descriptions of glacial ice, its essence and foreseeable fate. The expansive, solid and mountainous landscape made her feel small. Yet the desire to reach what seemed unattainable remained.

The glacier is considered unpredictable, even dangerous both in real life and as a symbol. It might be seen as the historic archive of atmosphere, giving us hints of past climates and exposing the ways we are all connected to our ancestors and the generations that follow us. We are bound together by a shared destiny and responsibility. We use scientific methods to describe and interpret the mountain, but the actual experience of it might feel sublime and ordinary at the same time.

The glaciologist Jemma Wadham perceives glaciers as characters who have their own personalities and destinies. René Daumal has written about an imaginary expedition to an imaginary mountain, inviting us to interpret it as a symbolic and spiritual journey. Reaching for the sublime is a universal human desire. The mountain climber is not simply a hiker or an adventurer, but a truth seeker whose journey seems almost predestined. In the current exhibition, the mundane is brought together with the divine, the scientific with the sublime.

The exhibition features a large-scale installation, melting ice, ink works on wax paper and a meditative space imbued with John Grzinich’s soundscape. The artist has also inspired students from the Sally Studio Art School located within the ARS Art Factory: under the guidance of Annely Köster six artworks in dialogue with the exhibition were created and will be displayed as a satellite project in the courtyard windows of the Sally Studio Art School. In the framework of the public programme, an artist talk with Jaanika Peerna and the sound artist John Grzinich will take place on 15 May at 5:00 PM, followed by their joint performance at 6:00 PM.

Jaanika Peerna is an Estonian-born artist who lives and works in Estonia, Portugal and New York. For more than a decade, she has dedicated herself to the study of glaciers, working through a vast amount of material about the lifespan and condition of glaciers, while associating it with travelling, philosophy and spiritual ideas. In her artistic practice, she has woven these themes into drawings, installations, videos and performance art. Her performances often engage with the audience, inviting them to reflect upon the ongoing global warming. Peerna’s practice stems from the physical human experience and strives towards a greater awareness of the fragility, interconnectedness and uniqueness of all living things.

She has exhibited her works and given performances around the world. Her last solo exhibition was held in Seoul, Korea. Her works can be found in numerous private collections in Europe and the USA, as well as in public collections, such as the French National Foundation for Contemporary Art.

Curator

Liisi Kõuhkna is a curator and project manager who graduated with a master’s degree in health sciences from the Tallinn University and has also studied in MA programme of curatorial studies at the Estonian Academy of Arts. She has curated contemporary art exhibitions in various galleries in Estonia and abroad. Since March of this year, she works as the gallery assistant for the Estonian Artists’ Association.

Exhibition information

Location: ARS Project Space, Pärnu mnt. 154, Tallinn

Artist talk and performance together with sound artist John Grzinich: 15.05, respectively from 5 PM and from 6 PM

Open for visitors: 24.04.–16.05.2026, Mon–Fri 12–18, Sat 12–16

Curator: Liisi Kõuhkna

Graphic design: Cristopher Siniväli

Photo documentation: Roman-Sten Tõnissoo

Sound design: John Grzinich

Technical support: Aksel Haagensen, Mattias Veller

Special thanks to: Cultural Endowment of Estonia, ARS Art Factory, Estonian Artists’ Association, Merike Hallik, Sandra Sirp, Liis Tedre, Gunnar Kalmet, Agu Peerna, Hannes Egger, Mari Volens, Sally Studio ja Annely Köster

On Thursday, 9 April at 6:00 PM, a duo exhibition On the Verge of Completion by contemporary artists Gerda Hansen and Rebecca Norman will be opened at the Hobusepea Gallery.

The end is actually an unspeakably bleak place where no clear way forward presents itself and nothing no longer seems to lie ahead. The duo exhibition by Gerda Hansen and Rebecca Norman invites the viewer to experience art not only as something definitive, but as a way of becoming. The exhibition reveals the stages of artistic practice that usually remain hidden, offering a chance to step into the moment where a work is born and where meanings have not yet settled.

The exhibition examines the boundaries between completion and incompletion, approaching finality not as a destination, but as a state in which the forward movement is temporarily suspended. The creative process, often shaped by uncertainty, experimentation and internal tension, is usually resolved when the artist decides to declare a work complete. In this exhibition however, the viewer comes into contact with the process rather than the finalised work. The presented works do not conceal their unfinished state. Instead, they emphasise its value. On these canvases, thoughts remain dispersed, forms and tones are still taking shape, and meanings remain open. It is a moment where possibilities remain unended and the potential of the work is still unfolding.

Perhaps completing a work is a merely provisional decision, a pause within an ongoing process? The artist appears here as a practitioner of continuous choices and interruptions, guided by an intuitive and often sensitive self-reflection. Imperfection, repetition and error are not deviations, but integral to the organic nature of making. As Gilles Deleuze suggests, artworks are not defined by what they appear to be at a given moment, but by what they might become. The exhibition offers an insight into the concealed layers of artistic production, presenting the artwork as something that unfolds over time.

In Hansen’s works, layered structures strive toward presence and transparency. Repeating forms and interruptions create a rhythm that does not lead to a solution but instead exposes different stages of the creative process. She is interested in the moment when a work of art dissolves and comes into being at the same time. In Norman’s practice, the notion of completion is examined through its various permutations including the use of unstable colour pigments. For her, the apparent incompleteness of a work is not a deficiency, and the abundance of potential is realised through the material itself. The tension between continuation and completion becomes a deliberately sustained condition, in which the work does not close, but remains in an active and meaningful state of breathing.

Artists                                   

Gerda Hansen (b. 1994) is a contemporary Estonian-based artist whose practice explores the intersections of painting and digital image-making. She holds a BA in painting (2022) and an MA in contemporary art (2025) from the Estonian Academy of Arts. In the current exhibition, Hansen brings together manual processes with AI-based generative systems. Her works emerge through a visual dialogue with the machine in which images remain intentionally ambiguous and leave the attribution of meaning to the viewer. Hansen has exhibited both in Estonia and internationally and is the recipient of the 2023 Adamson-Eric Young Artist Scholarship.

Rebecca Norman (b. 2001) graduated in painting from the Estonian Academy of Arts (2025), while also supplementing her studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague (2024). Her practice addresses the convergence and misalignment between the author and the material and the resulting dissonant outcomes. Her works often engage with seemingly insignificant moments that call for new forms of categorisation through sustained attention. She is drawn to utilitarian objects that have irreversibly lost their function and various forms of apparent nonsense that mimic purposefulness. Norman has participated in several group exhibitions and received the Endover Prize for her 2025 graduation work Loaded Vacuity.

Curator

Liisi Kõuhkna is a curator and project manager who graduated with a master’s degree in health sciences from the Tallinn University and has also an MA from curatorial studies and a BA in jewellery and blacksmithing from the Estonian Academy of Arts. She has curated contemporary art exhibitions in various galleries in Estonia and abroad. Since March of this year, she works as the gallery assistant for the Estonian Artists’ Association.

Exhibition information

Location: Hobusepea Gallery, Hobusepea 2, Tallinn

Opening: 9.04.2026 from 18:00

Open for visitors: 10.04–10.05.2026,Wed, Fri–Sun 12–18, Thu 12–19

Curator: Liisi Kõuhkna

Graphic design: Helena Pass

Photo documentation: Kail Timusk

Special thanks to: Estonian Artists’ Association, Cultural Endowment of Estonia, Hans-Otto Ojaste, Mari Volens, Märt Vaidla, Paul Aadam Mikson, Jaana Kormašov, family members of the artists, Põhjala Pruulikoda, Nudist Drinks

“I leave
With tears in my throat
To where
The roads are wrapped in mist
Riga, my love remains behind.”
— Vennaskond

Join us on Friday, April 3 at 19:00 for the premiere of Karolina Peterson’s graduation film at Roosikrantsi 8b Gallery.

The film will be screened daily from April 3–13 at: 12:00 · 13:45 · 15:30 · 17:15 · 19:00 · 20:45.

Karolina Peterson (aka Kara Popicon) is a Latvian artist from an Estonian-Russian background who spent the past five years studying in Tallinn. Returning to Riga after a long time away, she found herself feeling like a stranger in her own home.

Her solo exhibition “Riga, My Love” explores this sense of distance through film – capturing the city both as it lives in memory and as it exists today.

The work is also shaped by her participation in a series of protests in Riga advocating for women’s and migrants’ rights, where she created a new artistic action each time. These experiences brought a political dimension into her practice.

This new video piece traces the evolution of that politicization, interwoven with personal reflections on loss, identity, and the emotional disconnection from home.
Supervisor: Anita Kremm

Film duration: 96 minutes
Language: English

Exhibition is supported by the Faculty of Fine Arts, Estonian Academy of Arts.

“A prairie dog town refers to the vast underground networks of tunnels and chambers constructed by prairie dogs across the grasslands. At the surface, these colonies appear as little more than a dispersed field of cone-shaped mounds. Beneath this modest topography, however, lies an extensive and highly organized architecture: a labyrinth of tunnels connecting nesting chambers, waste disposals, listening bays, nurseries, and bolt holes, before branching into distinct wards and family burrows.

Prairie Dog Town takes this subterranean architecture as both structure and allegory. The exhibition turns toward other underground networks—such as those operating within the logic of cartoons—where the burrow becomes a conceptual passage. Moving below the visible surface, tunnels open onto chambers of a more devious nature: spaces where  logics conceal themselves, circulate, and multiply.” – H.D.

“Prairie Dog Town” is Hayden Daughtry’s inaugural show in Estonia. Originally from South Carolina, entering the European art scene through the Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam, Hayden lets the uncanny constructs of the outside seep into the gallery, places where it might not otherwise allow. Sometimes a playful veneer might be a scratchcard  with an inverse prize. His work takes shape to its surroundings.

Opening March 27th at 18:00, then to be visited 28.03 – 05.04

M-T By appointment

F-S 14:00 – 18:00

Asmus Soodla
“Tool Room, Gallery”
EKA Gallery 4.–26.04.2026
Open Tue–Sat 12–6 pm Sun 12–4 pm, free entry (NB! EKA Gallery is closed on Good Friday, April 3 and Easter Sunday, April 5!)
Opening: Thursday, April 2 at 6 pm
Guided tours: Fri, April 10 at 1 pm (est) / Sun, April 12 at 2.30 pm (est) / Sun, April 12 at 3.30 pm (eng)

Asmus Soodla’s exhibition “Tool Room, Gallery” focuses on the art gallery as an ecosystem, where value-based distinction between the result and the process doesn’t exist. The conceptual starting point of the project is the internal conditions and work processes of the gallery as an institution, as well as its spatial logic. The exhibition focuses on activities that are usually hidden from the visitor’s gaze, but which play a decisive role in how the artwork and the viewer meet.

The project includes a spatial intervention that occupies the entire gallery, highlighting the spaces of EKA Gallery and its contents. The conceptual framework also includes the group exhibition “Field Notes from Immediate Proximity”, the curation of which Soodla entrusted to artist Riin Maide. This role-playing gesture treats the form of collaboration as a separate artwork.

Asmus Soodla (b. 2003) is a Tallinn-based artist and art technician. Soodla’s practice is conceptual and spatially sensitive, often employing sculpture, text, and photography. His work is primarily inspired by the existing environment and objects, unraveling their operational logic and history. Through his installative interventions, invisible systems and traces of human thought are brought into focus. Soodla earned a Bachelor’s degree in Installation and Sculpture (2025) from the Estonian Academy of Arts and completed a preparatory course in architecture and interior design (2022) at the EKA Open Academy. Additionally, he has furthered his studies at artist Simon Starling’s studio in Copenhagen.

Technical support: Mattias Veller
Graphic design: Sunny Lei
The exhibition is supported by the Cultural Endowment of Estonia, Tallinn City and Sadolin Estonia.
Opening drinks from mirai™ and Põhjala Brewery.

FIELD NOTES FROM IMMEDIATE PROXIMITY
EKA Gallery storage room 4.–26.04.2026
Open Tue–Sat 12–6 pm Sun 12–4 pm, free entry (NB! EKA Gallery is closed on Good Friday, April 3 and Easter Sunday, April 5!)
Opening: Thursday, April 2 at 6 pm
Guided tours: Fri, April 10 at 1 pm (est) / Sun, April 12 at 2.30 pm (est) / Sun, April 12 at 3.30 pm (eng)

The exhibition “Field Notes from Immediate Proximity” provides an insight into artists’ work and creative spaces. In addition to documenting the studios and homes of six creators, they also become windows into their inner world.

Postcards, tools, potted plants and piles of books that have been captured on the artist’s canvas or photograph, reveal moments from the artists’ everyday lives, from the spaces where the artist spends the most time doing their work – on the one hand, it is an opportunity to see inside the creative processes of contemporary artists, into their different practices, on the other hand, these works are simply interpretations of personal space, ways of seeing everyday life.

The narrow and cramped architecture of EKA Gallery’s storage space brings the viewer closer to the works and their details. Together with the unusual exhibition space, the works form a new spatial whole in which different visual languages ​​and perspectives can meet and merge.

The exhibition was initiated within the conceptual framework of Asmus Soodla’s solo exhibition “Tool Room, Gallery”.

Riin Maide (b. 1997) is an artist and scenographer based in Tallinn, Estonia. Maides practice centers around the connection and comparison of two- and three-dimensional media and creation of staged environments. Maide Maide has obtained a MA degree in scenography (2025) and BA in Graphic Art in the department of graphic art at the Estonian Academy of Arts. In addition, she has studied at the Department of Alternative and Puppet Theater at DAMU in Prague and in the Performative Arts class of Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. She has received several scholarships and awards, including the Wiiralt scholarship in 2023 and Young Artist award of Estonian Academy of Arts in 2020.

Artists: Kristi Kongi, Joosep Kivimäe, Ann Pajuväli, Anu Vahtra and Lieven Lahaye, Mattias Veller
Curated by: Riin Maide
Technical support: Mattias Veller
Graphic design: Sunny Lei
The exhibition is supported by the Cultural Endowment of Estonia, Tallinn City and Sadolin Estonia.
Opening drinks from mirai™ and Põhjala Brewery.

On 17 April at 5 PM, the exhibition “Big Hall, Small Town: Postmodernist Cultural Centres in Estonia” will open in the ground-floor foyer of the Paide Music and Theatre House. The exhibition is part of the bachelor’s thesis of Anete Raabe, a student of cultural heritage and conservation at the Estonian Academy of Arts.

The exhibition presents the architecture of 1980s cultural centres and their role in local communities. It focuses on three outstanding examples from the period — the cultural centres in Paide, Põlva, and Lihula — while also examining smaller cultural centres across Estonia that reflect the ideas of the same era.

The exhibition invites visitors to notice these buildings in the urban landscape, appreciate their distinct character, and reflect on their role as focal points of local life.

The exhibition will remain open until 15 May 2026.