Events

PhD Vitamin is a first-time event at the Estonian Academy of Arts that consists of public lectures and individual consultations. Our goal is to bring together experts in artistic research with prospective PhD students with the intent of introducing the latter to the field of artistic research and to advise them in developing their own PhD research proposals.

1. Join the lectures: (please register beforehand)

Monday, 04.05. 4:00 pm – 5:00 pm
Liina Siib works mainly in photography, video and installation. The most prominent and recurring themes in Siib’s work include social spaces, marginalised groups and overlooked experiences. In her work Siib looks into how history gets written and the role of memory in shaping various groups in society, often using interviews, observation or archival materials as her method of working. (CCA)

Monday, 04.05. 5:30 pm – 6:30 pm
Dr. Varvara Guljajeva is an artist and researcher. Varvara holds a PhD from Estonian Academy of Arts, and M.Sc in digital media from University of Luebeck, and a bachelor’s degree in Information Technology from IT Collage (Tallinn University of Technology). Her practice-based doctoral thesis “From interaction to postparticipation: the disappearing role of the active participant” analyses and contextualises passive audience interaction through the lens of post-participation.

Tuesday, 05.05. 5:00 pm – 6:00 pm
Dr. Michael Schwab is a London-based artist and artistic researcher who investigates postconceptual uses of technology in a variety of media including photography, drawing, printmaking, and installation art. He holds a M.A. in philosophy (Hamburg University) and a PhD in photography (Royal College of Art, London) that focuses on post-conceptual post-photography and artistic research methodology. He is the founding Editor-in-Chief of the Journal for Artistic Research (JAR).

Wednesday, 06.05. 5:30 pm – 6:30 pm
Dr. Chris Hales has exhibited a variety of interactive film installations dating back to ARTEC’95 in Japan via Future Cinema at ZKM in 2003 to the Glucksman Gallery in Cork in 2019. Part of his enquiry is the use of novel or unusual interface technology including facial emotion recognition and brain-computer interfaces.

2. Join the consultations: (please also register beforehand)

In addition to the lectures, individual consultations take place within the framework of the PhD Vitamin from 6th to 8th of May. They offer the opportunity to talk about your artistic work and ideas for a doctoral thesis with an expert of your choice.

In addition to the experts who will give lectures in the first half of the event, it is possible to register for a consultation with artist Kristina Norman.

Kristina Norman is a freelance artist whose interdisciplinary work is characterized by an interest in the relationship between identity, memory and public space. One of her most internationally known works is the intervention in public space at the 10th Manifesta Biennale in St. Petersburg, when she installed a 14-meter iron Christmas tree frame – which has become a symbol of Euromaidan – in front of the Winter Palace. The action linked the tragic events in Kiev to the repressed memory of demonstrations at the Palace Square at various times. Norman’s newer research-based creation experiments with performative expressions.

To participate in the consultations, register HERE.

We encourage artists, alumni and graduates of the Estonian Academy of Arts and other universities working with creative research methods to register. Registration is open until 03.05.2020. The exact consultation times will be sent directly to the provided e-mail addresses. Be quick – the number of free spots for the consultations is limited!

The lectures and consultations will take place in digital environments. The event is funded by the European Regional Development Fund

Questions? Please contact madis.luik@artun.ee

You are invited to the opening of the exhibition “This is not a labyrinth” on 11 March at 5 PM at the EKA Billboard Gallery. The gallery is located outside on the EKA building on Kotzebue street. The exhibition will remain open until 8 April.

Walking through the cities, they change into something else: it’s impossible to walk along the same street twice, the shadows and light are growing and shrinking on their own. We are lost since morning. Don’t let go. Don’t get lost. This is not anymore the place you came to.
Like in “Invisible Cities” by Italo Calvino, we show one city we visited together, but more so one city, we visited in our imaginations. “This is not a labyrinth” is a photo album about on day in a foggy dreamy place.

Graphic Art 3rd year students: Mark Hiir, Hanneleele Kaldmaa, Brit Kikas, Maria Izabella Lehtsaar, Riin Maide, Liis-Marleen Verilaskja

Supervisor: Liina Siib

 

How would your smartphone apps look like if there was no touchscreen interface? Which senses would they need to stimulate in order for your interactions to be effective and purposeful? In a world saturated by visual and sounds, we decided to explore how we can interact with software while stimulating our “other” senses.

Taking a mindful approach to design, four teams accepted the challenge to re-think the way we interact with calendars, weather apps, mindfulness and room booking software.

The result is a pop up exhibition that will be in display for only one day in the Estonian Academy of Arts’s 1st floor atrium. There you will discover “off the screen” prototypes of apps, designed to bring people away from their phones and back into the real world.

Join us from 11:00 till 20:00 on Friday 6th to discuss Tangible Interactions, enjoy tangible welcome drinks at 19:00, and stay with us from 20:00 for a tangible party.

Hand sanitizer on us, beer on you!

artun.ee/IxD

What connects Toblerone to Bill Gates, waterbeds, orange juice, Coca-Cola, the Virgin Mary, and Immanuel Kant? Olof Olsson takes you on a mind-bending trip of comic infotainment.

Driving the Blues Away is an info comedy racing through the histories of art, chocolate, cola-drinks, personal computers, philosophy, and theology. Along the way there’s a romantic melodrama – where Olof’s almost partner is seduced by an ultra famous software entrepreneur in the tax-free shop of Delhi’s Indira Gandhi Airport. The whole thing is steeped in Olof’s twisted love of language: “Our language and the world are not always hooked up one-to-one. It’s a mess, and that makes us nervous. But it’s a funny mess.”

Olof Olsson is a product of the charter tourism of the 1960s. His Dutch catholic mother and Swedish social democrat father met on Mallorca. In his youth Olof made attempts in journalism, documentary photography, and as a radio disc jockey. After having studied languages, philosophy and translation theory, Olof studied visual art at Konstfack in Stockholm and the Royal Academy in Copenhagen. Between 1992 and 2007, Olof mainly made conceptual art. Since 2007, Olof has been focusing on spoken performances – like lectures, speeches, and info comedy.

Olof Olsson’s Driving the Blues info comedy will be in English and is part of the EKA Contemporary Art MA (MACA) programme’s public lecture series ART TALKS.

Everybody is welcome to join!

On February 21–22, 2020, the Estonian Academy of Arts will host an international symposium titled “Prisms of Silence”. The symposium seeks to analyse and understand the prisms through which we could meaningfully reconsider significant silences. A particular interest lies in rethinking the silences about WWII, its aftermath and the Soviet era in order to explore how they could offer productive ways of understanding present social change. The main organizers of the symposium are Dr Margaret Tali at the Institute of Art History and Visual Culture at the Estonian Academy of Arts, and Ieva Astahovska at the Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art. The symposium is a part of the collaborative project “Communicating Difficult Pasts” between the Institute of Art History and Visual Culture at EAA and the LCCA. The participants include humanities scholars, curators and artists: see the CFP.

 

“PRISMS OF SILENCE” SYMPOSIUM PROGRAM

Venue: Room A501, Estonian Academy of Arts,

Põhja puiestee 7, Tallinn

 

DAY 1: FRIDAY, 21 FEBRUARY 2020

9:00 – 9:10 Welcome by Mart Kalm, Rector of the Estonian Academy of Arts

9:10 – 9:30 Introduction to the Symposium by Margaret Tali and Ieva Astahovska 

9:30 – 11:00  Session 1: Absences, their Impacts and Memory Work, Moderated by Violeta Davoliūtė, Vilnius University

Asja Mandić, Suppression of Socialist Narratives of the Second World War and its Modes of Visual Representation

Annika Toots, Exhibition Displaced Time: 10 Photographs from Restricted Collections as a Model of Remembrance

Jan Miklas-Frankowski, A City of Amnesia: Marcin Kącki’s Białystok. White Power. Black Memory

11:00 – 11:30 Coffee break

11:30 – 13:00  Session 2: Difficult Knowledge and Artistic Interventions, Moderated by Ieva Astahovska

Margaret Tali, Thinking through Silence and Mental Health in Recent Documentary Film

Zuzanna Hertzberg, Nomadic Memory: Artivism as Everyday Feminist Antifascist Practice

Rasa Goštautaitė, Contested Soviet Legacy: The Case of the Petras Cvirka Monument in Vilnius, Lithuania

13:00 – 14:00  Lunch break

14:30 – 16:00  Guided tour in the Vabamu Museum, Toompea 8 (1,5 h)

16:30 – 18:30 Session 3: When Sources Fail: Visual Languages for Analysing Past Trauma, Moderated by Margaret Tali

Assel Kadyrkhanova, Image, Sound, Absence, Silence. Artmaking on Historical Trauma

Lia Dostlieva, “I still feel sorry when I throw away food – Grandma used to tell me stories about the Holodomor.”

Kai Ziegner, A History of Violence 

Aslan Goisum, Realms of Memory and Sources of Resistance

18:30 – 19:30 Dinner

 

SATURDAY, 22 FEBRUARY 2020 

9:30 – 10:15 Short keynote by Giedrė Jankevičiūtė, Reconstruction of Contested History: Vilnius, 1939-1949, Introduced by Margaret Tali

10:15 – 11:45 Session 4: The Unspeakable and Agency, Moderated by Eneken Laanes, Tallinn University

Katrina Black, Absence as Form: Spaces of Articulation in the Work of Chantal Akerman

Kati Roover, Project Red

Jaana Kokko, Oral History and Moving Image

11:45 – 12:15 Coffee break

12.15 – 13.45 Session 5: Patterns of Muting and Silencing, Moderated by Siobhan Kattago, University of Tartu

Franziska Link, Brawling Silences. Rereading Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s Écrits Maudits 

Mischa Twitchin, Refracting Implication: The Uses of Silence

Jan Matonoha, Dispositives of Silence: Injurious Attachments and Discursive Emergence of Silencing; “Missing” Gender in Czech Dissent Samizdat and Exile Literature

13:45 – 14:45 Lunch break

14:45 – 16:15 Session 6: Breaking Silences and Challenges to Changing Discourses, Moderated by Ilya Lensky, Director of the Museum “Jews in Latvia”

Shelley Hornstein, Architecture’s Dirty Little Secrets

Ieva Astahovska, On Collaborations, Silences and Lustration

Maayan Raveh, The Implication of Silence – The Promised Land in Palestinian Christian Theology

16:15 – 16:45 Coffee break

16:45 – 18:15 Session 7: There and Not There – Ways of Giving Voice to the Past, Moderated by Pille Runnel, Head of Research at Estonian National Museum

Elina Niiranen, Finnish Linguist Pertti Virtaranta and Silenced Identity of Karelians in the 1960’s Soviet Karelia

Paulina Pukytė, Repetition of Silence

Elisabeth Kovtiak, (Non-)sites of Memory of the Holocaust in Belarus: Cases of Minsk and Brest

18:15 – 18:45 Final discussion and conclusions

19:00 – 20:00 Dinner

 

Supporters of the symposium:

EKA LOOVKÄRG – Eesti visuaal- ja ruumikultuuri õppe- ja
teaduskeskus (Sisutegevuste projekt)
2014-2020.4.01.16-0045

Nordic Culture Point

Cultural Endowment of Estonia

EKA research fund

NEP4DISSENT: COST Action 16213

On 14th January 2020 at 15:00 you are welcome to the Estonian Academy of Arts’ assembly hall to join EKA Design Showcase – a public presentation of the freshest design projects made in collaboration with various enterprises.

Registrer here: forms.gle/f57Np17xGetoVTAP6
Event on Facebook: facebook.com/events/2613872371981428/

Concepts, prototypes and final results for innovative products and services will be presented, featuring new developments in the field of design. All enterprises, EKA’s present and future cooperation partners, and enthusiasts of innovative design are kindly invited to attend the event! The presentations will be given in English and the event will be in English.

Timeline:
15.00 Opening remarks by Kristjan Mändmaa (Dean of EKA Design) and Martin Pärn (Professor of Design at TalTech, Design & Technology Futures Head of Curriculum).

15.10 Linnar Viik – “Innovation – verb, not noun”

15.30 – 16.30 First block of presentations
– Smart Clothing for Moon Habitat. Swiss Space Center, Igluna 2020, D&TF
– Modular Clothing System for Lunar Habitat. Swiss Space Center, Igluna 2020, D&TF
– Mindful Listening in Spotify. Spotify + IxD
– TalTech Library: Advisory. TalTech Library + D&TF
– Re-thinking TalTech library. TalTech Library + D&TF
– Terve ruum /Healthy room. PERH + Product design
– Banners for Reidi tee promenade. Port of Tallinn + Graphic design
– Tallinn Pattern Buildings. Faculty of Architecture

16.30 – 16.50 Coffee break

16.50 – 18.15 Second block of presentations and closing remarks
_ Vessels for Transition, Exploring Circular Economy for Bolt. Bolt + IxD
– Aruna Clothing (India) + Fashion design
– Tvilum + D&TF
– More than a piece of furniture. Tvilum + D&TF
– Ruum. Tvilum + D&TF
– NOOK. Tvilum + D&TF
– “Nest of Emotions”. Porkuni school + glass/textile design
– Viimsi bus stops and gates. Viimsi county + Product design

The event will be funded by European Union Regional Fund.

The series of open lectures titled “International Inspiration”, co-organized by the Center for Contemporary Arts Estonia and the Institute of Art History and Visual Culture at the Estonian Academy of Arts, is proud to host our next guest, dr Anna Novikov.  On January 15th, she will give a lecture titled “Nation is the New Black: Patriotic Fashion and Performance in the Post-Communist States” at EKA, starting at 18:00 in the room A501. The lecture will focus on  the transnational revival of patriotic attire linked to patriotic performance that became fashionable in the Post-Communist states of Eastern-Central Europe and Central Asia in the last decade. Dr Novikov will examine visual and ideological links between media, dress, performance and the current development of patriotic fashion and performance in these areas.

The open lecture is followed by a seminar “”My Body is My Runestick and My Tattoos Tell My Story”: Performing Self-Barbarization in the Digital Age” held on January 16 in room A301, starting at 18:00. The seminar will focus on the broader trend in current popular culture of celebrating what the “civilized” Western cultural narrative has previously regarded as “barbarian”, and seeking to return to authenticity, albeit in reconstructed or borrowed forms.

Dr Anna Novikov, originally from Israel, lives and works in Greifswald in Germany, studying the broader sociopolitical context of fashion, including the recent rise in nationalism in Central and Eastern Europe, and its impact on the issues of fashion and identity.

The lecture series is supported by the Cultural Endowment of Estonia.

On Monday, January 13th, the Institute of Art History and Visual Culture will host a research seminar “Technical Art History and Forgeries” by professor Hilkka Hiiop from the Department of Heritage Protection and Conservation, and Greta Koppel, curator at the Art Museum of Estonia, on the topic of contemporary technical research methods and their impact on the study of art history, as well as the issue of art forgeries.

See the roundtable discussion published in the cultural weekly Sirp.

Urban Studies, resesarch studio presentation.

While few outside Berlin know where Schöneweide is, new developments led by the likes of Bryan Adams and Olafur Eliasson position the neighbourhood as a silent frontier of gentrification dynamics in the city. This research studio explores ongoing transformation of this former industrial area, once the base of the famous AEG electrical company. Contra the commonplace reading of gentrification through the lens of ‘hipster’ culture, the studio underlines the roles of state, finance and real estate as drivers of neighbourhood change and displacement. Investigating dynamics of gentrification at the urban edge, the case of Schöneweide serves as an entry point into a wider debate on how diverse groups are vested in reclaiming cities and its intersection with the official political structures – it necessitates rethinking the role of city planners as mediators between the public and private interests.