Eesti Kunstiakadeemia, A202
Start Date:
12.05.2026
Start Time:
13:30
End Date:
12.05.2026
Date: Tuesday, 12 May 2026, 13:30–15:00
Venue: Estonian Academy of Arts, Room A202
Admission: free and open to the public
The MAKK&MACA programme (Master of Contemporary Arts) at the Estonian Academy of Arts invites students, artists, educators, and the wider public to an open lecture by contemporary artist, performance maker, and curator Pankaj Tiwari on Tuesday, 12 May 2026.
In the lecture, Tiwari will introduce TENT: A School of Performative Practices — not as a proposal, but as an intervention. TENT is a nomadic, collective, and deliberately unfinished institution that refuses permanence, refuses neutrality, and refuses to wait for permission. Emerging from lived experience and structural exclusion, TENT is built from the ground up: without fixed walls, without inherited authority, and without the illusion that change can happen from within the same frameworks that produced the problem.
“Contemporary art institutions speak the language of inclusion, while their structures remain largely unchanged,” says Tiwari. “This is not a conversation about reform. It is an attempt at construction.”
The lecture moves between dream and reality, critique and action, asking a simple but urgent question: if institutions cannot change, what does it take to build new ones — and who gets to build them?
TENT operates as a temporary, mobile space of mutual learning and collective imagination. It uses interactive formats such as talks, residencies, dinners, and temporal togetherness at host institutions for specific durations to engage with their politics and practice. It is a space for imagining, thinking, listening, and responding to social injustices.
TENT at Kumu Art Museum and Rehearsals for Solidarity
In May 2026, to mark Kumu Art Museum’s 20th anniversary, TENT is erected in the museum’s inner courtyard. Around it, a twelve-day programme titled Rehearsals for Solidarity runs from 9–20 May 2026. The programme responds to a growing need to find common ground at a time when wars and geopolitical and ecological crises are deepening. The challenges affecting our shared lives have grown so large that they demand collaboration — yet we face an increasingly polarised society that undermines our very capacity to cooperate. Rehearsals for Solidarity tackles exactly this: practising the skill of finding common ground in an era when doing so feels ever more difficult. The programme encompasses performances, workshops, reading circles, lectures, communal meals, and more.
Rehearsals for Solidarity is organised collaboratively by Pankaj Tiwari, Kumu Art Museum, Kumu Youth Club, Lasnaidee, and students of the Estonian Academy of Arts’ MA Contemporary Art programme, and is curated by Frederik Klanberg. The initiative is supported by the City of Tallinn.
TENTative Practices — A Satellite Programme by EKA Students
As part of Rehearsals for Solidarity, students of the Estonian Academy of Arts have devised their own satellite programme, TENTative Practices, which unfolds across several days within and around the tent.
On Monday, 11 May, TENTative Practices opens with a communal pillow-making workshop. Instructions, materials, and tools are provided on site; the finished pillows will furnish a cosy reading nook inside the tent, complete with a small library that remains open for the duration of the programme — a space for quiet encounters and playful exploration. That afternoon, artist Ming Zhu presents the performance OOOcarina, an invitation to slow down, attune to one’s breathing, body, and the ground beneath, and to enter a shared space of resonance.
On Wednesday, 13 May, the programme turns to mending and washing — an activation of the tent’s surroundings and the museum’s “backyard” through communal care. The result is a temporary clothesline exhibition to which visitors are invited to contribute their own everyday garments, becoming co-authors of an evolving collective composition. The evening closes with an adapted game of football on the hill beside the museum courtyard — a team-building exercise with the shared goal of getting the ball uphill.
On Monday, 18 May, a new week brings a new format: TENT Radio, featuring interviews, experimental sound works, radio theatre, essays, and more. Local and international artists discuss the relationship between artist and institution live on air. TENT Radio can be listened to at https://oh.eka-gd-ma.ee/.
On Tuesday, 19 May, the programme gathers the texts, drawings, and photographs produced over the preceding days into a collectively made zine — a document of all that has been shared during Rehearsals for Solidarity. The day continues with communal cooking: each participant chops one onion, one carrot, and one clove of garlic, and everything goes into the pot. Many small contributions make one shared meal, enjoyed together.
The full programme is available at https://kumu.ekm.ee/en/syndmus/pankaj-tiwari-tent-school-rehearsals-for-solidarity/.
About Pankaj Tiwari
Pankaj Tiwari is a contemporary artist, performance maker, writer, and curator from Balrampur, India. Currently based in Amsterdam, he holds a Master’s degree in Theatre & Curation from DAS Theatre Amsterdam. Since 2026, he has been working as a trajectory artist with the international arts centre CAMPO in Ghent.
His works bring Eastern perspectives into Western discourse on socio-political issues. Tiwari is the winner of the 3Package Deal Award (2021–2022) from Amsterdam Funds for the Arts and served as a curator for Gessnerallee Zurich from 2020 to 2024. He is currently the artistic director of Stichting Studio Current in Amsterdam.
Tiwari’s work has been invited and supported by numerous international festivals and production houses, including Thalia Theatre Hamburg, Romaeuropa Rome, Steirischer Herbst Graz, MC93 Bobigny, Theater Rotterdam, Frascati Theatre Amsterdam, Kaaitheater Brussels, DE SINGEL Antwerp, Grand Theatre Groningen, SpielArt Munich, Holland Festival Amsterdam, Zürcher Theaterspektakel Zurich, University of Minnesota Minneapolis, Radialsystem Berlin, Santarcangelo Festival Italy, and performingborderslive UK, among others.
