Academic Calendar

While care has been a staple in feminist theory, activism and policy, its translation into critical architectural practice and theory is quite recent. Only in the past few years have architects, curators, and scholars of architecture started to engage seriously with the implications of care as a design principle, an ethical stance, and a mode of practice. Drawing on a range of examples from the recent past, including architectural projects, legal changes, policy interventions, and urban practices, this lecture situates its analysis within contemporary contexts to highlight complexities and conflicts in the relationship between architecture, care, and justice. The aim is to demonstrate that architecture has the potential to support the right to care and advance care justice, while also critically interrogating its complicity in care violence and the undermining of care sovereignty

Elke Krasny is a Professor for Art and Education and Head of the Program Art and Education at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. She is a feminist cultural theorist, urban researcher, curator, and author. Her scholarship addresses ecological and social justice at the globaal present with a focus on caring practices in architecture, urbanism, curatorial work and contemporary art. Together with Urska Jurman, she initiated Ecologies of Care. The 2019 exhibition and edited volume Critical Care. Architecture and Urbanism for a Broken Planet, curated and edited together with Angelika Fitz, was published by MIT Press and introduces a care perspective in architecture addressing the anthropogenic conditions of the global present.  Together with Angelika Fitz and Marvi Mazhar, she edited the book Yasmeen Lari. Architecture for the Future (MIT Press, 2023) Her book Living with an Infected Planet.  Covid-19, Feminism and the Global Frontline of Care introduces feminist worry and feminist hope in order then to develop a feminist cultural theory on pandemic frontline ontologies and feminist recovery plans.

2025/2026 open lecture series in held in collaboration of the Faculty of Architecture and the Institute of Art History and Visual Culture.

The Lecture series is supported by:

On Friday, August 29th, starting at 12:00, the opening ceremony of the 2025/26 academic year will be held. The ceremony takes place in the main hall (A101) and lasts approximately 1.5 hours.

Estonian Academy of Arts Science Cafe is hosting a roundtable talk on the changing roles of religious and industrial buildings in contemporary Europe on the 4th of September from 1 to 3 pm at the Narva Art Residency (NART, Joala 18) as part of the Station Narva festival.

The event will be held both onsite and online from HERE.

Estonian Academy of Arts Science Cafe focuses on the shifting roles of religious and industrial buildings in contemporary Europe. As congregations shrink and industries relocate, churches and factories alike are increasingly left vacant, raising complex questions about reuse, heritage, and identity. The discussion will address how these spaces are being reimagined—as museums, cultural centres, or residential developments—and what this reveals about broader societal transformations in both secular and post-industrial contexts.

The discussion will feature musicologist and journalist Brigitta Davidjants, associate professor of social innovation at the University of Tartu Marko Uibu, Auxiliary Bishop of the Patriarchate of Lisbon (Portugal) and Associate Professor at the Portuguese Catholic University – Faculty of Theology Alexandre Palma. The talk will be moderated by art historian and semiotician Gregor Taul. 

The event requires pre-registration by August 29. A free bus service is provided from Tallinn to Narva and back, departing from EKA. More information is available upon pre-registration.

After the Science Café, you are welcome to attend the Station Narva opening concert featuring Estonian Voices at 5:30 PM in the Rugodivi Culture House, Grand Hall. Admission is free, and doors open at 5:00 PM.

More information: triin.kao@artun.ee
Facebook event.

The event will take place under the auspices of the Transform4Europe Alliance — a collaborative network of 11 European universities focused on climate change, digitalisation, and social challenges — and is co-funded by the Erasmus+ Programme of the European Union.

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The English saying “keep the church in the village” means “do not cause an uproar.” There are similar sayings in German, French and many other European languages. With some differences, they denote that the church forms the centre of community, the basis of identity, but also, in a figurative sense, the embodiment of common sense. Despite the geographical scope and cultural differences in Catholic, Orthodox and Lutheran countries this has been the case in all of Europe. However, recent times have brought changes. Industrialisation, secular modernisation and large-scale urban planning schemes have shifted the principles of how communities are formed. This was especially so in the fundamentally atheist Soviet Union. For example in Soviet Estonia only a few religious edifices were erected between 1944 and 1991. 

The number of church-goers has also declined. As a result some churches have lost their congregations. This has raised the question of how to treat the disused churches? The situation resembles that of the post-industrial shift. Starting from the 1970s European manufacturers have left the continent in search of cheaper labour and thus the abandoned factories have made way for the birth of ‘creative cities’ – we have seen empty factories first used as squats and informal project spaces, then as gentrified creative quarters and eventually becoming expensive lofts. As for the repurposed religious buildings there are more thought-provoking examples where former religious buildings have been turned into museums, bookshops, concert halls or even swimming pools. As adaptive reuse of spaces and materials is becoming a legislative requirement in Europe, we will see more such examples in the near future. 

At the backdrop of a contemporary music festival, Narva’s fabled industrial legacy and the crossroads of divergent (religious) identities this roundtable will look at both historic case studies and current disputes concerning religious and industrial heritage in Europe.

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Brigitta Davidjants is a journalist and researcher at Estonian Academy of Music and Theatre, Estonia. In her academic research, she looks at national identity constructions and the marginalities of subcultures.

Marko Uibu is an Estonian social scientist and Associate Professor of Social Innovation at the Institute of Social Studies, University of Tartu. His 2016 doctoral dissertation in University of Tartu was called “Religiosity as Cultural Toolbox: a Study of Estonian New Spirituality”.

Alexandre Palma is a theologian, Auxiliary Bishop and university professor. He is an assistant professor at the Catholic University (courses: Mystery of God; Christology; and Theology of Religions) and a researcher at the CITER – Research Center for Theology and Religion Studies. He also serves as Auxiliary Bishop of the Patriarchate of Lisbon (Portugal) and is a member of the European Society for Catholic Theology and of the Seminar of young scientists of the Lisbon Academy of Sciences.

Gregor Taul is a teacher, critic, and curator based in Tallinn, working as an associate professor in the Departments of Interior Architecture and General Theory Classes at the Estonian Academy of Arts. In his academic research, he focuses on art in public space, with a particular interest in Soviet-era monuments and murals as well as contemporary public art commissions.

The 2025 graduation ceremonies will be held on Thursday, June 19th in the EKA Assembly Hall (room A101, Põhja puiestee 7).

• At 11:00 AM, the ceremony will begin for graduates of the Faculty of Design and the Faculty of Art Culture, as well as for doctoral school graduates
• At 3:00 PM, the ceremony will begin for graduates of the Faculty of Architecture and the Faculty of Fine Arts, as well as for doctoral school graduates

Dear graduates, please arrive 15 minutes early to the EKA Gallery, where you will be seated in designated seats. Guests can sit in the Assembly Hall, watch the ceremony on screens in the foyer, or follow it online via EKA TV.

More info:
Elisabeth Kuusik
elisabeth.kuusik@artun.ee

In December, studio work reviews of the architecture and urban planning curriculum will take place:

Wed, Thu, 11. – 12.12 at 9.00–16.00 room A-400
Interim reviews of master’s studios.

Mon, 16.12 at 10.00-18.00 room A-400
2nd/3rd year “Hotel”.

Instructors Leonard Ma, Tuomas Toivonen, Markus Lähteenmäki (theory and history course).

Tue, 17.12 at 10.00-18.00 room A-400
4th year of Architecture and Urban Planning and 2nd year of Urban Studies MA “(Sub)urban Planning Futures along the Rail – VOL 2: Rail Baltica”.
Instructors Milla Kallio, Efe Ogbeide, Andres Ojari, Sean Tyler, Jonathan Woodroffe.

Wed, 18.12 at 10:00-18:00 room A-400
2nd/3rd year “Shrinking Schools”.
Instructors Kertu Johanna Jõeste, Tristan Krevald, Ra Martin Puhkan, Siim Tanel Tõnisson.

Thu, 19.12 at 10:00-18:00 room A-400
1st year “Shelter”.
Instructors Helena Rummo, Elina Liiva. Graphics section co-instructors Paco Ulman, Madli Kaljuste.

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Friday, 20.12 evening will end with the traditional LONG TABLE PARTY taking place in room C400 from 19:00-02:00!
Registration and ticket information is here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScMN60trsa00Et57n7yEcEpsnf5GHJtG-X1WU6urqBbiae3nQ/viewform

Rahul Sharma is currently working as a junior-researcher doctoral student in the Department of Art History and Visual Culture at Estonian Academy of Arts. His research is focused on identities in film, migration as well as gallery films. The seminar is a presentation of certain key aspects derived from his upcoming book titled The Phantasmagorical and Ethnographic World of Amit Dutta.

Amit Dutta (b. 1977) is one of the most significant contemporary practitioners of avant-garde Indian cinema. Over the course of his oeuvre, he has created a large body of cinematic works, which number over sixty. With an inherent non-narrative structure, Several of Dutta’s films arguably fall under the category of gallery films and post-cinema. This seminar will begin by looking at the concepts of post-cinema and what has been broadly described as “gallery films” (Fowler, 2004), “new cinematic aesthetic in video” (Iles, 2003) or “cinema of the exhibition” (Royoux, 2000). In particular, it will analyse how Dutta’s cinematic works re-define the contemporary gallery space through his practices. His films such as Chitrashala (2015) and A Game of Shifting Mirrors (2021) look at gallery spaces in different ways. While Chitrashala lingers onto a spectatorless gallery space only to then let loose its depiction of pahari miniatures with animated techniques, Games of Shifting Mirrors (2021) questions the role of the gallery and brings to light the displacement of art over the time-space continuum. The seminar will also briefly discuss his four part 240-minute art-installation cum cinema project Finished/Unfinished (2015). The work circumambulates around the 8th century Shaivite Masrur complex located in Kangra Valley, Himachal Pradesh, much like an old Buddhist monk lost in a religious trance. The work lets the viewers engage in a thorough 360-degree survey of the complex: part-by-part, following each detail as it circumambulates the temple from the forest paths and roads up until the sacred womb.
Dutta’s film Nainsukh (2010), which was named as the Top 30 best-biopics ever made by the New Yorker, will also be a key focal point of the discussion, in how it enlivened recreations of miniature pahari paintings, endemic to the region of Himachal Pradesh in India. Dutta’s employment of the tableaux-vivant style as well as painterly approaches to cinematic techniques will be discussed.
The seminar will look at certain aspects of the aforementioned works in close detail.
Several of Dutta’s films are available online through paid-Vimeo services, while Nainsukh can be viewed for free on Museum Rietberg’s website.

On Friday, August 30th, starting at 12:00, the opening ceremony of the 2024/25 academic year will be held. The ceremony takes place in the main hall (A101) and lasts approximately 1.5 hours.

The 1980s and 1990s were marked by events around the world that radically changed the political order, people’s beliefs and attitudes, and the entire cultural and intellectual orientation of much of the globe. The fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the end of the Cold War stand out as the most important changes, in the shadow of which the events in Yugoslavia and important changes elsewhere are often overlooked by European commentators. These events, taken as a whole, have been seen as part of broader processes of democratization, even as, at the same time, this period was also marked by outbreaks of extreme nationalism and radical religious ferment.

The planned conference invites participants to reflect on the following questions:
– In what ways does democracy manifest itself in the culture of the transitional period of the 1990s?– What are the common features and differences of the transition period in different post-socialist countries?
– What different theoretical frameworks can be used to analyze the culture of this period?
– What are the new forms of cultural negotiation between different cultural traditions and elements?
– How might we describe the way cultural imaginaries and experiences of temporality have changed?
– Which transgressive tendencies arose to challenge the narrative of imaginary unity between different cultural spheres?
– How is one to describe the dynamic of the forces at play in the transition between the mentality of social collectivism and the new liberal individualism?
– How, if at all, has the Russian invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022 altered understandings of the transition period and its narratives?

Organizing Committee:
Virve Sarapik, Estonian Academy of Arts
Epp Annus, Tallinn University
Luule Epner, Tallinn University
Regina-Nino Mion, Estonian Academy of Arts
Jaak Tomberg, University of Tartu
Piret Viires, Tallinn University

The conference is being organized by the Research Group of Contemporary Estonian Culture, which unites scholars from the Estonian Academy of Arts, Tallinn University and the University of Tartu. The research is funded by the project PRG636 “Patterns of Development in Estonian Culture of the Transition Period (1986–1998).”

The conference was co-funded by:

On Friday, September 1, starting at 12:00, the opening ceremony of the 2023/24 academic year will be held. The ceremony lasts approximately 1.5 hours.