Laura Kuusk – How to Move as a Slime Mold?

Laura Kuusk on March 5 – 16 April in Kanal Gallery, Võru.

The first solo exhibition of Laura Kuusk in Võru consists of two of her recent works, with which the artist wishes to create a dialogue with people who are interested in food, clothes, technology and who ask questions about the origin and ways of being of the matter in our environment. She also puts the emphasis on the ways of composing by the nature and by the human. 

The installation “How to Move as a Slime Mold” (2021) is built up as a sound cocoon created by a female voice and an ambient sound, walking the visitor through his/her/ their bodies to suggest an experience of becoming an other-than-human organism. The participants are asked to find a comfortable way of interacting with the installation and build their personal experience through spatial and auditory elements. The installation emphasises the idea of reuse and growing through change, not accumulation.

The photo series “Some Notes on Things Around and In” (2019) is taking everyday things and situations as the departure point for the series of still-lives. The main question the artist is asking herself is how to relate to the things and the environment around us at the current situation. How to relate our bodies to the materials that travel with, within or through our bodies? The artist wishes to comment and organise these thoughts visually through an essay in the still life genre. She would like to make the objects speak about the moment in time in which we live now. The idea that everything seems to be reachable within a few clicks is creating an alienation from real objects and the physical environment.

Laura Kuusk (b. 1982) lives and works in Tallinn. She studied semiotics and culture theory at the Tartu University in Estonia (BA in 2005), photography at the Estonian Academy of Arts (MA in 2008) and fine arts at the Annecy Higher School of Art, France (postgraduate diploma in 2014). Kuusk works as the Associate Professor at the Estonian Academy of Arts, in the Department of Photography. Kuusk’s fields of interest are the visual and cinematic grammar and the potentials of narrative, she often recycles anthropological visual (found) materials. Kuusk is interested in the decision-making mechanisms within the collective consciousness. Over the last years, she has worked with the experience of the human body in the surrounding environment – in homes, in clothes, in relation to technology. Kuusk mainly uses photography, video and installation mediums in her work. 

Graphic designer Henri Kutsar.

Thanks: Estonian Cultural Endowment, Säsi Pruulikoda, Anderson’s Craft Beer, Camille Laurelli, Renzo van Steenbergen, Madis Kurss, Sigrid Liira, Agur Seim, Indrek Kits, Eleriin Seim, Kristel Onno, Janika Solmann, Edina Csüllög, Ago Paabusk, Tiina Mõttus, Robert Kähr, Contemporary Art Museum of Estonia, Estonian Academy of Arts Photography Department.

KANAL GALLERY
Liiva 11a, Võru city, Estonia
Thu–Sat 12–18
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