Events

MARET SARAPU
FREE AND HELD
08.02.–04.03.2023
Draakoni gallery 
 
Curators: Kaisa Maasik and Berit Kaschan
Graphic design: Pamela Sume

On Tuesday, 7 February at 18.00 Maret Sarapu opens her solo exhibition Free and Held at Draakoni gallery. The exhibition is open until 4 March.

Maret Sarapu’s seventh solo exhibition looks at the question of how to be free and held. Through five artworks, the artist maps quotidian rituals and symbols, activities and stories that help to ensure our mental sharpness, emotional well-being and a sense of safety in everyday life. That is, focal points that help us make sense of life, prevent crises and find strength in the everyday.

The conceptual centre of the exhibition is simultaneously poetic and practical – on the one side, it allows the viewer to make their own everyday life more poetic and start consciously and playfully mapping out activities, events and ideas that provide support and strength. On the other side, this kind of poetisation has a thoroughly practical effect – conceptualisation and structuring of our routines grounds us and plays a significant role in achieving emotional well-being and maintaining our joie de vivre.

At the exhibition, the artist displays installations and objects: wall panels with nature motifs, mosaic trophies, glass “breaths” and sand boxes reminiscent of Japanese gardens on walls and around the exhibition space. Alongside these objects, the exhibition includes a set of postcards, inviting the viewer to discover their own everyday and internal landscapes through exercises of creative writing.

As part of Free and Held three thematic creative writing workshops led by Berit Kaschan will take place at Draakoni gallery. The workshops will be held on three consecutive Tuesdays – on 14, 21 and 28 February from 18.00 to 20.00.

Pre-registration is required.
Please register to the workshop no later than 12 February: kaisamaasik@gmail.com.

Participation fee: 10€.
Size of the group: 10 participants.
The workshop will be conducted in Estonian.

The exhibition is supported by the Estonian Ministry of Culture, the Cultural Endowment of Estonia and Liviko AS.

Thank you: Karel Koplimets, Maarin Ektermann and Prologue School, Sven Sapelson, Tiina Sarapu, Kairi Orgusaar, Kaie Vakepea

Maret Sarapu (1978) is an artist based in Tallinn. She has graduated from the Department of Glass Art at the Estonian Academy of Arts (BA 2002, MA 2005) and taken part in numerous courses and art residencies both in Estonia and abroad. In her work, Sarapu is mostly inspired by everyday life and often uses nature motifs and repetition. Recently, her experiments with form and concept have led her towards methods like automatic and stream of consciousness writing. Often, the aim is to achieve mental well-being and find harmony between intelligence and emotions. Her alternating process (thinking, writing, working in the studio) and collaboration with material lead to results that give both the artist and the viewer a possibility to make conclusions and generalisations.

Group exhibition ‘The Weak Fins of My Few Skills’

Pärnu City Gallery
Uus tn 4, Pärnu
2.–25.02.2023

The opening of the group exhibition ‘The Weak Fins of My Few Skills’ will take place on Wednesday, February 1st at 18.00 at Pärnu City Gallery.

The group exhibition ‘The Weak Fins of My Few Skills’ doesn’t seek to give an exhaustive answer to the question of how to live. Rather, it tries its best not to sink while exercising empathy towards its favorite subject – the “water”. According to David Foster Wallace’s famous speech ‘This Is Water’, the “water” in the parable above means nothing more than the most obvious and important realities of our existence, which are nonetheless the hardest to see and talk about. To avoid becoming a living corpse in the daily grind, one must manage the hard-wired human setting of seeing oneself as the center of the world and actively choose to think differently. To choose to look at the “water” anew.

Participating artists: Laura De Jaeger, Joosep Kivimäe, Johannes Luik, Kaisa Maasik, Tiiu Maasik, Eva Mustonen and Mathias Väärsi
Project manager: Elo Meier
Graphic design: Pamela Sume

Supporters: Eesti Kultuurkapitali kujutava ja rakenduskunsti sihtkapital ja Pärnumaa ekspertgrupp, Jaanihanso Siidrivabrik, PERI AS, Pizzakiosk, Pärnu Linn

We thank: Estonia Medical Spa & Hotel, Karel Koplimets, Kusja, Mariel Värk, Nienke Fransen, Pärnu Jahtklubi, Villa Wesset

EKA’s Sensorial Design Research group is organizing a design research event at the Estonian Academy of Arts (EKA) aiming to bring knowledge of international researchers to students, researchers, and educators of EKA on the 21st of February 2023.

During this event, two Art and Design PhD students of EKA, Arife Dila Demir and Nesli Hazal Oktay, welcome their peer reviewers and external PhD supervisors to EKA as speakers. Four speakers present their design research work, inviting the audience to discussion. The event is open to the public with a requirement to register. 

It is possible to participate both on-site at EKA (room A101) and watch the broadcast http://tv.artun.ee/.

Schedule (All times are Estonian) 

10:30 – 10:45 – Coffee

10:45 – 11:00 – Welcoming words

11:00 – 11:30 – Hsuan-Hsiu Hung, Estonian Academy of Arts

11:30 – 12:00 – Verena Fuchsberger, University of Salzburg, Austria

12:00 – 12:30 – Panel discussion: Hsuan-Hsiu Hung & Verena Fuchsberger, Moderator: Nesli Hazal Oktay

12:30 – 14:00 – Break for Lunch

14:00 – 14:30 – Claudia Núñez-Pacheco, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden

14:30 – 15:00 – Nithikul Nimkulrat, OCAD University, Canada

15:00 – 15:30 – Panel discussion: Claudia Núñez-Pacheco & Nithikul Nimkulrat, Moderator: Arife Dila Demir

The presenters: 

Hsuan-Hsiu Hung is a movement and dance artist from Taiwan. Her creative practice weaves together Qigong, somatics, visual art, contemplative practices and contemporary dance. In her creative research, she has been exploring the unfolding experiences of self as well as relationships with others (including the environment) through improvisational movement and dance. Since 2020, she has been invited by Mind and Life Europe to organise European Summer Research Institute and co-facilitate contemplative movement practices with philosophers, neuroscientists, researchers and contemplative practitioners in the Buddhist tradition. Currently, she is also a research assistant at the Faculty of Design of the Estonian Academy of Arts.

️Verena Fuchsberger is a Postdoc at the Center for Human-Computer Interaction, University of Salzburg. She has completed her Master’s Degree in Educational Sciences and Psychology at the University of Innsbruck and finished her PhD in HCI at the University of Salzburg. Some of her recent publications include “Heterogeneity in making: Findings, approaches, and reflections on inclusivity in making and makerspaces” (with D. Smit, N. França, C. Gerdenitsch, O. Jaques, J. Kowolik, G. Regal, and E. Roodbergen in Frontiers in Human Dynamics, 2023).

️Claudia Núñez-Pacheco is an interaction design researcher and artist, currently working as a postdoctoral researcher at both the division of Media Technology and Interaction Design and Digital Futures at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden. She holds a PhD and a Master’s degree from the Sydney School of Design at the University of Sydney, in the area of interaction design. Her research investigates how bodily self-awareness can be used as a tool for human self-discovery as well as a generative crafting material for the design of aesthetic experiences.

️Nithikul Nimkulrat is a textile artist, designer, researcher, and educator originally from Bangkok, Thailand. Nithikul was educated as an industrial designer (BID) with knowledge of architectural design at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok. Having worked as a designer in the textile industry in Thailand for three years, she relocated to Helsinki to pursue studies at Aalto University School of Arts, Design and Architecture where she earned a Master of Arts in textile art and design in 2002 and a Doctor of Arts in design in 2009. Currently, she is the Acting Chair of the Material Art & Design program.

Read more about Sensorial Design here 

REGISTER HERE

This event will bring together current research on writing Ukrainian art history of the 20th century from scratch, since an art historical canon has not yet been produced for this period. Focusing on the Soviet and post-soviet eras, art historians Lizaveta German, Olga Balashova and Svitlana Biedarieva will present their ongoing research and reflect on how museums, exhibitions and artists have conceptualized these periods in art history writing until now. How has the National Art Museum of Ukraine—which is currently closed due to war—written and presented 20th-century Ukrainian art history? What can we learn from histories of exhibitions? What could parallels with other former post-Soviet countries, such as the Baltic States, contribute to revisiting this period? How is Ukraine to rewrite its art history after the war? Artist and researcher Andrij Bojarov will act as a respondent and Margaret Tali will moderate.This hybrid event will be hosted by the Institute of Art History in the Estonian Academy of Arts.

(Not) permanent exhibition at the National Art Museum of Ukraine

Olga Balashova

At the time of the gallery’s closure, the exhibition on the second floor of the National Art Museum in Kyiv was dedicated to 20th-century Ukrainian art. In the absence of a written history of art, we were always referring to this second floor for an up-to-date understanding of this history. Despite this influential role, however, the second-floor exhibition responded to the influence of external contexts, with the core museum team changing it three times during the past 20 years. The first non-Soviet exhibition had a strong national idea behind it, with a central narrative built around the Ukrainian Academy of Art, created in 1917 in the Ukrainian People’s Republic, and artists who were looking for peculiarities of the “Ukrainian style.” In the second exhibition, created after the Revolution of Dignity in 2014, the narration was more open for international interpretation, with a central focus on the avant-garde. The most recent change took place in 2020, just months before Covid-19 hit, with the narration dedicated to the idea of Modernism. The exhibition contained not only positive storytelling but also critical views of historical events and related art movements. After the war, the second-floor exhibition should change again. So far, it is difficult to say in which direction it will unfold, but it needs to include expertise from previous exhibitions and to consider the new post-war context.

We learn what we exhibit what we learn: Looking at art history from the perspective of exhibitions

Lizaveta German

Offering another perspective on how a particular art historical narrative can be (re)written, this presentation will focus on exhibition history as a method and elaborate on cases from two periods in Ukraine: the 1960s and the 1990s. Based on long-term research on both periods, Lizaveta will discuss how one can navigate through gaps in knowledge and lack of physical material, as well as how (and if) apocrypha can stimulate an alternative view of art history.

From this perspective, the former period—namely, the unofficial art of the so-called Ukrainian Sixtiers generation—can be roughly described as a period known through works which could never have been exhibited under the political circumstances of their time. Nor could they have been acquired for museum collections or entered the private art market, which generally didn’t exist in the USSR. As a result, monographic collections of the works of a number of the generation’s key artists have been well preserved in family estates and can be accessed for research. Yet, they have never been seen as subjects of a shared public discourse and have never been viewed as particles of the same space of artistic thought and vision by an external audience. While a good number of artworks from the 1990s—the period inaugurating the recent history of state independence—have long been scattered across anonymous public collections inside and outside Ukraine, others have physically disappeared due to their ephemeral nature or have remained beyond public and scholarly physical reach. Yet, there are somewhat chaotic but curious private documentary archives that cover the first curatorial endeavors to exhibit 1990s art in various non-institutional contexts. Today, this period can be interpreted through the way the art was presented rather than through the actual works.

Documenting Russia’s war on Ukraine in art, 2014–2022

Svitlana Biedarieva

The tensions related to the political changes and the war in Ukraine have provided an important background for a shift towards documentary practices in Ukrainian art after 2014, including film, video work, reportage, artist’s diaries and photography. The presentation will focus on the processes of documentation and creation of artistic archives following the beginning of the war through the full-scale invasion of Ukraine by Russia from 2014. The presentation explores the changes in documentation practices with the recent escalation of violence and the simultaneous transformation of artists’ perspectives on war atrocities, historical memory, trauma and decoloniality. The presentation draws on the interdisciplinary approaches of the film researcher Erika Balsom, the curator Okwui Enwezor and the artist Hito Steyerl to analyze the transformative role of documentary art as a form that emerges in a state of war-related violence and mirrors the effects of the political and economic crisis. It is based on research conducted for the book Contemporary Ukrainian and Baltic Art: Political and Social Perspectives, 1991–2021, edited by Biedarieva (ibidem Press, 2021). This recently published text is the first comparative volume to focus on the reflections of postcolonial transformation, contested history and resistance in Ukraine and the Baltic states (Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania), examining how these topics have been documented and interpreted in the art of these countries.

Olga Balashova is an art historian, curator and critic and the head of the Museum of Contemporary Art NGO in Kyiv.

Lizaveta German is a curator and art historian as well as a co-founder of The Naked Room, Kyiv, and co-curator of the Ukrainian Pavilion, 59th Venice Biennial.

Svitlana Biedarieva is an art historian with a focus on contemporary Ukrainian art, decoloniality and Russia’s war on Ukraine, and is the editor of Contemporary Ukrainian and Baltic Art: Political and Social Perspectives, 1991–2021(2021) and At the Front Line: Ukrainian Art, 2013–2019 (2020).

Andrij Bojarov is a Ukrainian Estonian visual artist, independent curator and researcher who has, from the early 2000s, focused on exploring neglected histories of avant-garde art in the central European context, expanding and blending artistic and curatorial work with research practices.

Margaret Tali is an art historian and co-initiator of the project Communicating Difficult Pasts, which has brought together scholars and artists to revisit the 20th-century past in the broader Baltic region.

Lizaveta German and Olga Balashova are currently visiting researchers at EKA with support of the Estonian Research Council.

Welcome to the presentation of two newly released Rooftop Press artists’ books with Jessie Bullivant and James Prevett. Please join us at the Estonian Academy of Arts, room A-501, on Tuesday 17.1. at 5-6.30pm for a conversation with the artists and publisher, Tuukka Kaila about the books and the processes behind them. The discussion will be in English, followed by a reading.

NB! Both books are available for purchase at the presentation (“Attached” 18 eur ja “Things for Homes/Homes for Things” 27 eur – cash only).

Attached by Jessie Bullivant

Attached is a collection of texts that document a diverse range of artworks made by Jessie Bullivant (AU/FI) over the past decade. By replacing the default photographic documentation with written accounts, the artist raises questions about how immaterial artworks are preserved, accessed and ultimately remembered, allowing space for nuances often lost in photographic documentation. As an incomplete survey of the artists’ work, the book blurs the boundaries between art and its documentation, between a conventional monograph and an experimental artist’s book. It gives an exciting glimpse into a committed artistic practice tackling a variety of issues from representation, power and access to subtle social interactions.

Contributing writers: Brendan Barnett, Yvonne Billimore, David Bullivant, Freja Bäckman, Christo Crocker, Mitchel Cumming, Eric Demetriou, Paul Doornbusch, Beau Emmet, Mark Friedlander, Max Hannus, Tim Holmes, Lou Hubbard, Anthony Johnson, Mikko Kuorinki, Katie Lenanton, Minna Miettilä, Even Minn, Paul Moses, Anna Parlane, James Prevett, Georgia Robenstone, Geoff Robinson, Ainslie Templeton.

Things for Homes / Homes for Things by James Prevett, co-published with TACO!

Can a sculpture survive in the home without being domesticated into just another object—a door stop or something you hang your hat on? What are the civic duties we assign to sculpture today, in comparison to the post-war nation-building and reassertion of civilisation? At the heart of Things for Homes / Homes for Things are conversations about our social relationship to objects and the spatial relations these depend on. Prevett’s enquiry is intimate and gentle, occurring as it does on a domestic scale in the homes of people who don’t own art, and perhaps have never cared for it that much before. Without the expectations and politics that grand publicness entails, it embraces instead the potential for social connection through making and giving of sculpture to strangers.

Contributors: Annie May Demozay, Mat Jenner, Jennifer Powell, Vidha Saumya, Eetu Viren, Vilma Pimenoff, Henni Alava, Sven Claes, Deborah Frimpong, Michael Pleasance, Paul Seymour, Dani Tagen, Riordan Tyson, Karstein Volle, Leena Ylä-Lyly

Jessie Bullivant (they/them) is a Helsinki-based artist, writer and cultural worker originally from so-called Australia. They make work with and about institutions and relationships. They completed a Master of Fine Arts at the Academy of Fine Arts, Helsinki in 2020, where their Master’s thesis work was a durational series of 26 emails, sent from their mother, excusing Jessie from presenting work in their graduate exhibition that day. Their current artistic research is funded by the Kone Foundation (2022-25).

Tuukka Kaila is a Helsinki-based artist operating in the expanded fields of photography and publishing. He is a co-founder of the artist-run publishing initiative Rooftop Press and founder of the nomadic artist’s book gathering Bookies. His works have been exhibited in museums and galleries across Europe, USA and China and belong to the public collections of the Finnish Museum of Contemporary Art (Kiasma), the National Libraries of Finland and Estonia and the Helsinki Art Museum (HAM) among others.

James Prevett makes things to gather around – objects, events, text, video, often combined together as sculpture. He is interested in sculpture as a means to explore the limits of minds and bodies, both personal and collective. He has exhibited widely, including in the UK, Finland, Thailand, USA, Austria and Brazil, and was part of a team that represented Great Britain at the Venice Biennale of Architecture 2006. In 2021 he was awarded the inaugural Linnamo Prize, by the Olga and Vilho Linnamo Foundation. His works are in the Kiasma Finnish National Gallery collection as well as numerous private collections. James lives and works in Helsinki, Finland, where he is a Sculpture Lecturer at the Academy of Fine Arts of Uniarts Helsinki.

EKA Contemporary Art MA program invites prospective students to join the Online Open House on Monday, January 30, 2023 at 18.00 EET (local Estonian time). This will be an opportunity to hear more about the program, to meet and ask questions directly from the faculty. 

The Online Open House will be hosted on Zoom, the link will be e-mailed to all registrants 2 hours before the start of the event.

Register HERE

EKA Doctoral School is hosting an online info session about doctoral studies at EKA on February 8, 2023, at 15:00 EET (local Estonian time) . 

Info session provides a good opportunity to hear more about doctoral studies at EKA, available programmes, admission requirements and procedure, etc; also meet and ask questions directly from people behind the Doctoral School and the programmes. The info session will be hosted online over Zoom.

RECORDING OF THE INFO SESSION HERE

The Estonian Academy of Arts offers following PhD level programmes for international applicants:

• Architecture and Urban Planning
• Art and Design
• Art History and Visual Culture
• Cultural Heritage and Conservation

Admission period for international PhD applicants for 2023/2024 starts on February 1st, 2023. Deadline for submitting application is March 31st, 2023.

Admission requirements for PhD programmes can be found HERE.

More information:
Irene Hütsi
Doctoral School coordinator
irene.hutsi@artun.ee

EKA Interaction Design MA programme invites prospective Master’s students to join the online info session on Friday, February 3, 2023 at 16:00 EET (local Estonian time).

Register HERE.

More information about the Interaction Design MA (IxD.ma) programme:

• https://www.ixd.ma
• https://www.artun.ee/ixd
• https://www.facebook.com/IxD.ma

Admissions period starts on the 1st of February 2023 and application deadline is 6th of March 2023.

https://artun.ee/admissions

“Art and the City” – a live action play in Telliskivi Creative City – is inviting you to come and enquire what art and creativity do in a modern capitalist city. How is creativity and art used to make cities of today, who is the creative class and how can one enter the creative city? 

Urban studies and architecture students of EKA address the questions revolving around the role of creativity in a city via an immersive role play, inviting the player to see Telliskivi Creative City through seven different characters’ eyes. How would a retired worker of the former factory see the place today, when the citadelle of a secret factory with its monotonous work has been opened up into a diverse creative village with no walls around? How is it to be an artist in a gallery that doesn’t any more represent the value of art space as a critical force or antithesis but rather acts as a tiny particle in a greater creative soup? Or how could a young designer who recently moved to Estonia enter the area as a creative workforce, not merely a consumer? Etc, etc.

If you’re ready to play, meet us in Telliskivi on Sunday, 18. December between 12 and 3 PM. Come and win with us: there will be wonderful prizes for the best players!