EKA New Media students’ exhibition “I’m not playing games, I swear” at RaRa

Students of EVA Lab, the Experimental Video Games in Art laboratory of the Estonian Academy of Arts New Media Department, present their exhibition in a new gallery space inside the National Library of Estonia. Although the National Library or RaRa building itself will only reopen to the general public in 2027, this exhibition offers an early glimpse into a yet unnamed art space that has not previously existed and is being opened temporarily for this occasion.

*Important! Visits are only possible with a guide. Gathering takes place at the main entrance of RARA at the following times:

17.12 at 17:00, 17:30, 18:00 and 18:30

During the autumn semester, EVA Lab students explore video game and interactive art theory, engaged in conversations with artists and game makers, and were given an optional workshop for learning a game engine to support their development. Through these encounters, students were questioning how video games occupy an enormous role in global popular culture, yet discussions of “games” can still meet a complicated reception within the field of visual arts.

Within art education, students are expected to devote themselves to understanding and critically navigating visual culture. Meanwhile, their personal experiences with gaming often belong to the realms of leisure, hobbies, and everyday play. Activities not always granted the same artistic legitimacy. This tension informs the exhibition’s title, “I’m not playing games, I swear”, a statement that is both slightly defensive and quietly humorous, acknowledging how the vocabulary of games can feel out of place in certain art discourse.

For this exhibition, the supervisors invited students to articulate their own relationships with gaming and game culture. The works on display, spanning interactive and non-interactive formats, transform personal memories, play habits, aesthetic intuitions, and critical reflections into artistic responses that reimagine what games can mean within contemporary art. From introspective narratives to speculative systems, the exhibition presents a variery of approaches to thinking through games as more than pastime.

Rather than insisting that we are not playing, the exhibition asks what becomes possible when play, experimentation, and game culture are allowed to enter artistic practice on their own terms.

Participating artists: Lotta Karoliina Räsänen, Maria Cecilie Wrang-Rasmussen, Irmak Semiz, Sarah Riley, Robert Kapanen, Kimathi Agbanu, Filémon Aufort, Paul Rannik, Triin Mänd, Edward Mcgeorge Allport-Bryson, Rover Indigo Bertels

Supervisors: Camille Laurelli, Sten Saarits

Exhibition is supported by RaRa, EKA, EVA Lab, LVLup! Museum