Field Trip to Ida-Viru County: Exhibitions, (Industrial) Heritage, Concert

We invite everyone to Ida-Viru County on Saturday, 29 August, for the finissage of the exhibition “Field Trip”.

The day begins at 1:30 PM at the outdoor exhibition “How to Reframe Monuments: The Past as Artistic Material” in Kohtla-Järve’s central square. The exhibition explores the possibilities of contemporary art in addressing Soviet heritage and the memory conflicts associated with it. We will also make a brief detour to the nearby miners’ monument “Glory to Labour!” (1967, by Olavi Männi and Udo Ivask).

From the central square, we will head to an industrial landscape on the outskirts of Kohtla-Järve, home to the legendary “phenol swamp”. Its formation is linked to decades of activity by the oil shale industry: contaminated water seeped down from mounds of semi-coke and industrial waste into the lower-lying wetland. The environmental condition of the area has improved significantly by now, but it is still officially listed as a site of residual pollution. Ainar Varinurm, Director of the Kohtla-Järve Museum of Oil Shale, will introduce the history of the phenol swamp.

At 3:00 PM, guided tours will follow at the Stalker Museum’s exhibition “Field Trip” and the EKA exhibition “Image is for Illustrative Purposes Only II: Monumental Painting in an Industrial Landscape”, held in the Stalinist-era club building in Kukruse (10a Lehe St). The group exhibition brings together industrial heritage, the history of Ida-Viru County, and contemporary art. It features works by Peeter Laurits, Arne Maasik, Raoul Kurvitz, Ernst Hallop and others, as well as intervening artworks by Anna Škodenko, Hanna Piksarv, Jevgeni Zolotko, Kati Saarits and Sigrid Viir into the Socialist Realist monumental paintings of Tallinn Airport. The guided tours will be followed by a walk around the Kukruse settlement led by Ainar Varinurm.

Afterwards, everyone will have the opportunity to enjoy Kukruse Café Day (please bring cash).

At 5:00 PM, Ants1, a punk band with roots at the Estonian Academy of Arts, will round off the day with a performance at the club building.

Transport from Tallinn (NB! €5, registration required in advance).
Follow the link here.

A bus will depart from the Estonian Academy of Arts (Põhja pst 7) in Tallinn at 11:00 AM, taking participants to Ida-Viru County. The return journey to Tallinn will depart at 6:30 PM from the Kukruse club building (10a Lehe St).

The exhibitions and works on display are part of “How to Reframe Monuments” (2024–2026), a joint research project of the Estonian Academy of Arts and Tallinn University, funded by the Estonian Ministry of Culture. The project aims to develop new approaches to reframing and reinterpreting monuments and other forms of dissonant heritage by bringing together knowledge and expertise from different fields and involving diverse stakeholder groups and communities.