Exhibitions

In Helsinki, Ene-Liis Semper’s (professor of EKA Scenography) project “Untitled” premiered with the theater graduates of the Theater Academy there in the Pasila black-box theater of the local City Theater Kaupunginteatteri.

It is an original play, which, according to Enel-Liis Semper, is to some extent a sequel to the play “72 days”. The similarity is that images were used and the material does not contain verbal dialogue.

EKA scenography students Anita Kremm and Liisamari Viik were assisting the director.

Ene-Liis’ long time collaborator Jakob Juhkam is the composer.

The performance “Untitled” lasts about 1 and 3/4 hours, which, according to the author, guarantees the return from Helsinki to Tallinn on the last ferry.

The play will not be played for long, because “Untitled” is a graduation play.

More information

Author’s text:

Over the course of the years, I have discovered I am mostly drawn to things that, for some reason, refuse to be given a name. These things are interesting to me because they refuse to be fully described or are too special or abstract or obvious to be captured by words. As an artist, I aim to bring these unnamed moments to the stage as they are, without any explanation, so that people can experience them as I did. I am curious to see if and how others will receive and interpret these moments.

To me, the performance composition needs to escape linearity and the feeling of a natural flow of time. That´s why I collect the material working from photography, paintings and frozen poses, and then I assemble them together in different weird ways, that somehow despite being strange, remind me of life in its rawness. These unnamed moments I create are a reminder for me of our actual condition as human beings. I as a subject exist among infinite stories that happen simultaneously in the present moment. Beyond my subjective limited perspectives, and my constant effort to reduce life to something I can hope to make sense of, all moments of existence manifest themselves in extremely weird, absurd deeply touching shapes.

The reality I seek is often overwhelming and incomprehensible, yet provokes in me (and hopefully in the audience) an unconditional empathy that can transport me to a meditative state where reality and its impressions somehow become available.

On Thursday, April 27, exhibition “On the other side, from other things” by Riin Maide will open in Tallinn Art Hall Gallery. Exhibited installations focus on the potential of absent spaces and the temporary beauty.

“On other sides and other things” is a visual exploration of places that don’t actually exist. Using materials such as paper and fabric, for four days Maide creates (and recreates) an environment through which spatial footnotes can be experienced.

“With every good spectacle, I have almost always been more fascinated by what lies behind it. The romantic in me finds the nostalgia and sad beauty of abandonment in empty storefronts, despite the cruelty of capitalism. A disappearing moment that I would like to capture.”

Riin Maide (1997) is an artist and scenographer who lives and works in Tallinn. In her practice, she deals with memory and presence through playful installations and staged environments. Her work can be often characterised as site-specific, ephemeral and reliant on graphic imagery. In addition to exhibitions, she also works as a curator, performer. She has also participated as stage designer in several performances, both in Estonia and abroad. Maide graduated in 2020 with a degree in graphics at the Estonian Academy of Arts, Faculty of Fine Arts (BA) and is currently studying scenography (MA). In addition, she has studied at the Department of Alternative and Puppet Theater at DAMU in Prague. Riin has received the Edmund Valtman and the Eduard Wiiralt scholarships, as well as the EKA Young Artist Award in 2020 and the title of Newcomer in Graphics in 2022.

Artist would like to thank:
Estonian Cultural Endowment,
Estonian Academy of Arts, specially Department of Scenography,
Christo and even more Cristo
Friends who help make things happen and of course Tallinn Art Hall

The exhibition is open:
27.04-30.04.2023
14:00 – 19:00
Tallinn Art Hall Gallery
6 Vabaduse Square, Tallinn

The display is part of a series of art events “Porno” taking place at the Tallinn Art Hall Gallery.

Additional information on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ornokevad

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/p.o.r.n.o_k.e.v.a.d/

riin.maide@artun.ee
+372 5343 7533

On April 22 at 6:00 p.m., EKA animation students Elis-Hetty Leppik and Rebeka Kruus will open the exhibition Come on in, coffee is still hot at Vent Space Gallery.

The exhibition invites viewers to enter the animator’s apartment, where everyday life is intertwined with colorful creations.

The exhibition will remain open until April 28. Every day, 2–7 pm.

Sidney Lepp residency exhibition “Leave the keys outside..I know these doors, I know these windows..doors, windows..day of open doors..open doors day..window closed – door open, door closed – window open..each window is a door?”

Kanal gallery is attended by interdisciplinary artist Sidney Lepp, who started a month-long residency in the Liiva-ATE in early April. To experience the exhibition process, everyone interested will be able to meet the artist in Kanal gallery in April. The exhibition exhibits behind-the-scenes of the art field and opens to viewers how the production of the exhibition or project takes place – why and based on what are choices made; how to get the exhibition to the gallery and how the artist developes during the process.

The artist considers it to be the most important part to show an otherwise invisible fragment of the exhibition – process, preparations, production. Usually the audience is directed to consume the artist’s final work, and without context and numerous co-texts it is difficult to read it. This time, the window is opened right in the middle of the creative process. It is possible to see how ideas and nuances that influence the result arise. By becoming part of the process, it is possible to interact with the work of the gallery as well as the activities of the artist.

The exhibition focuses on the artist’s ideas, discussions, activities of installers and the gallerist, and their interpersonal dynamics. The exhibition exhibits opinions that influence the process. The project gives the participants the opportunity to see the exhibition in the special stages of its emergence, becoming aware of a possible lack of motivation or, on the other hand, a creative outbreak. In any case, the situation may be interfered with if desired. The aim is to show sincerely and honestly how much work, failures and successes accompany the production of one exhibition.

The documentation of the two-month process contains topics that have proved to be current in society during this period, later serving as a time capsule as a reminder of this moment.

The idea is inspired by William Grieve’s cult (documentary) film series “Symbiopsychotaxiplasm 1-3.”

Visual introduction to the exhibition.

Sidney Lepp (1994) is a fluidum that adapts very quickly to the (art) scene. Most of the time, he handles the space in an installation and grafts onto the works such features as to be as interactive as possible. Sidney is a graduate of the EAA in fine arts with a BA and a MA in contemporary art. His current playing field has been Tallinn, Riga, Berlin, Kiev and Brussels.

http://sidneylepp.com/

8.04 Kunstiministeerium

https://cca.ee/ajakiri/mida-motlevad-noored-kunstnikud

The exhibition will be open until 3 June 2023.

Graphic design: Henri Kutsar

The exhibition is supported by the Cultural Endowment of Estonia and Võru linn

Kanal gallery

Liiva 11a, Võru, 65609

Mon-Fri 12-17 Sat 12-15

FB: Kanal galerii

IG: Kanal galerii

Additional information:

Mari Škerin / gallerist

mariskerin@gmail.com

+372 53449447

Vaim Sarv Live Performance @ Entropy Gauntlet (EKA Gallery) on Friday, April 14, 7 pm.

As part of the programming for the Entropy Gauntlet group exhibition, performance artist and experimental musician Vaim Sarv (EE/USA) will be playing free, using voice and electronics to respond to the exhibition themes revolving around the porousness of post-western notions of national identity and it’s haunted histories.

Free admission!

Artists:
Gabrielė Adomaitytė (Lithuania/Netherlands, 1994); Māris Ārgalis (Latvia, 1954–2008); Milla Aska (Finland, 1993); Marikki Hakola (Finland, 1960); Madlen Hirtentreu (Estonia, 1993); Elvyra Kairiūkštytė (Lithuania, 1950–2006); Miska Kukkohovi (Finland, 2001); Daria Melnikova (Latvia, 1984); Rait Prääts (Estonia, 1952); Anna Škodenko (Estonia, 1986); Viktor Timofeev (Latvia/US, 1984); Justinas Vilutis (Lithuania/France, 1991)

Co-authors:
Anders Kreuger (Sweden/Finland, 1965); Jaakko Pallasvuo (Finland, 1987); Miša Skalskis (Lithuania/Finland, 1994)

Kunsthalle Kohta, Helsinki

Opening 12.04, 6pm

“For some reason they thought this exhibition should be titled Amber. Amber could be a natural resource, a souvenir, a wall colour, or a way to accidentally preserve mosquitos full of dinosaur blood, making Jurassic Park possible. 

They are imagining this curator. Her name is Amber. She is on a Baltic-Nordic tour, taking the long trip from LA to Vilnius, making her way through Riga, Tallinn and Helsinki to look for inspiration. Afterwards – Ibiza, for fun and romance.

Maybe Amber is from a tiny spa town with an air of mystery. Shallow Springs, Wyoming. Shallow Springs, Arizona. She has left town, she has made it in the art world, but what happened in Shallow Springs is haunting her dreams.

On her way across the Baltic-Nordic zone Amber sees what other curators were not able to see. This survey of the region is not giving her the typical post-Soviet archive, austere-but-cozy Lutheran interiors, mystified relationships to lichen or strained X-is-the-new-Berlin coolness.

Amber is having a great time. These sites appear lavish and bewitching to her. Maybe it is her presence that makes them so. She is dancing. People think too much, she tells herself. Her new Baltic friends offer her a super-slim cigarette. Is it a Vogue? she asks. No, a Glamour, her friend responds.”

Info

Participants:
Marie Kanger,Marion Laev,Agnes Isabelle Veevo,Gréta
Þorkelsdóttir,Paula,Xingpei Shen

Tutor:
Zane Shumeiko

Time:
05.04.-14.04.2023
09:00-20:00

Graphic design:
Gréta Þorkelsdóttir

The exhibition Stitch-Sensory-Story displays student work created during the Experimental free-motion machine and hand embroidery course, offered by the Textile Design department in spring 2023.

The course explored the techniques and processes of experimental stitching on various materials and surfaces using free-motion machine and hand stitching techniques.

It investigated the participants’ sensory experiences (tactility, visual, auditive, smell and others) during the making process and after. Each student produced their own personal stitched (memory, emotion, physical, sensory) story.

Each work is accompanied by the students’ written text about their
experience.

Entropy Gauntlet
Zody Burke, Taylor “Tex” Tehan, Joonas Timmi, Lauri Raus April 6 – April 28, 2023
Opening: April 6, 6pm–9pm

“There is nothing more mysterious than a TV set left on in an empty room … Suddenly the TV reveals itself for what it really is: a video of another world, ultimately addressed to no one at all, delivering its images indifferently, indifferent to its own messages. You can easily imagine it still functioning after humanity has disappeared.”

— Jean Baudrillard, America

Entropy Gauntlet invites you to pass a threshold into a transmutation of space. Inspired by wide-eyed summer night visits to amusement parks and roadside motels, laden with the nostalgia of childhood & playing with the expectations generated by the psychogeography of such spaces, the exhibition leads viewers to contemplate the tension between fantasies of the world we’ve inherited versus the reality of a warming planet.

Solastalgia, a concept which describes a form of emotional or existential distress caused by environmental change, presents itself materially through an amalgam of works and artifacts set inside a narrative. Within the Entropy Gauntlet is a contemporary apologue; using architecture as archetype, exploring the porousness of post-western notions of national identity and its haunted histories. Here, utopia and dystopia become uneven categories in the realm of the anthropocene.

In the tradition of transformative environmental-architectural works such as Gregor Schneider’s “Totes Haus u r” and Jonah Freeman’s “Hello Meth Lab in the Sun”, and hearkening to Robert Ashley’s operatic compositions of late capitalist melancholia, the Entropy Gauntlet manifests as a linear series of archaeological sites undergoing perpetual excavation. It is a narrative of motion and placelessness tropifying the notion that invisible, emotional environs can be injected into the visible sphere to create a sense of longing, dread, and even abject horror.

A note from the artists…

The roadside motel is a ubiquitous feature upon the sprawling face of the continental USA, but it is entirely absent in Estonia. It is taken for granted as a place where small tragedies may or may not occur. It is a location for repressed emotions to manifest due to its invisible status, despite its ubiquity in the flyover states. Within the Entropy Gauntlet, our aim is to engage with the surreality that permeates the line where memory and history interact, in an unexpected location in Tallinn; creating a hauntological simulacrum of a space that exists between destinations. The poetic transmutations of culture that occur when countries on opposite sides of the globe mirror and refract one another are acutely fertile terrain for our work.

The fact that the USA exists partially as a fantasy informed by media is intrinsic to our concept. Two out of four of us are American; despite this, the two of us have experienced our home country in ways that run contradictory to the America that exists in the imagination of the cultural status quo. The other two of us are Estonian and have spent a considerable amount of time formulating fantasies about America & weighing these fantasies against facts. To honestly engage with the USA is to deal with omnipresent shadows that resist truth & dominate the country’s emotional cartography, and with an endless deluge of popular fantasies that provide alternative images to the USA that exists.

Artist Bios:

With an eye towards the complicated nature of inherent and enforced structures, American multidisciplinary artist Zody Burke criticizes the absurdity of late capitalism and the mythologies and archetypes it generates, while leaving a liminal space for larger ways of being together.
Working with sculpture, illustration, sound, and other media, Burke has sought to establish that societal concepts of identity, symbolism, brutality and hierarchy are as tenuous as we see to craft them, and yet they paradoxically shape practically every facet of our lives.

Taylor “Tex” Tehan is an M.A. Graphic Design student from the United States and an interdisciplinary practitioner. Working with textiles, sound, metal, wood and film, his work is influenced by the landscape, nostalgia, speculative futures, mythology and romanticism of the American West. Previously working in the fashion industry, Tehan has worked as a designer for various brands, including a recent traineeship on the Menswear Design Team at Louis Vuitton in Paris. His interests meet at the cross section of fashion, music, contemporary art, film and graphic design, with a strong emphasis on experiential-environmental themes.

Joonas Timmi is an Estonian artist & designer who explores the contemporary identity of craftsmanship by combining traditional woodworking techniques with VR-modeling, 3D-printing and CNC-milling. In his work, he expresses the relations between functionality and sentimentality in objects using furniture as the main medium. Each piece aims to be a somewhat functional artifact with an emphasis on biomorphic form with anthropomorphic charisma. A recent work, “Traction” chair, was exhibited in the exhibition “Present Yet-to-Be” (Tallinn, Hobusepea gallery) in January 2022. The installation combined meandering forms of plywood with textile to create throne-like structure, inspired by the idea of alternate realities.

Lauri Raus is an Estonian songwriter & guitarist, most notable for his work in contemporary country/shoegaze ensemble Holy Motors. Through his work, he engages with western musical tropes from a distance, transfiguring his own interpretation of Americana into something subtly different and altogether unique. His band is signed to New York-based indie label Wharf Cat which has enabled him to tour the USA, allowing him to rupture, expand, and transform his relationship with the musical tradition he uses as a foundation for his art. He studies anthropology at Tallinn University.

On April 1, the EKA Pop-Up Shop selling modern design and new art will open on the shopping street of Telliskivi Creative City, 

The original designs and works of art of the students of the Estonian Academy of Arts on sale in the EKA Pop-Up Shop.

More than forty students bring out their best, latest, most sustainable design and art. Among the many EKA artists, the pop-up shop also features the works of already recognized authors. Among others, fashion student Cärol Ott, laureate of the 2021 Wiiralt scholarship, ceramicist and jewelry artist Elize Hiiop, accessory designer Sandra Luks, performance artist and Master’s student in EKA ceramics, and Keithy Kuuspu will present their creations in the store.

During April workshops and master classes for city residents, tourists, people from abroad will be held. One can find creations varying from graphics, drawings, paintings and photographs to clothing design, accessories, jewellery, ceramics and blacksmithing.

Designs and art works by the following authors will be present:

Markus Vernik
Kaisa Uik
Oliver Udeküll
Keithy Kuuspu
Helen Griffiths
Visa Eino
Triin Türnpuu
Sergei Saprykin
Evridiki Papaiakovou
Daria Dementeva
Kaileen Palmsaar
Natalia Mirzoian
Alp Eren Özalp
Helena Pass
Helen Tiits
Mirjam Aun
Riina Lii Parve
Elisa Margot Winters
Sirje Järv
Mia Felic
Anna Ovtšinnikova
Piibe Tomp
Erle Nemvalts
Cristopher Siniväli
Maria Elise Remme
Valeria Poljakova
Cärol Ott
Anu Kadri Uustalu
Samuel Eff Markkus Savimägi
Elize Hiiop
Villu Mustkivi
Liis Tisler
Zoe Koerbunner
Rita Volkov
Sandra Luks
Heli Haav
Rita Lenore
Valdek Laur
Gontsugova
Morris Motel
Elis Liivo
Kärt Heinvere

The EKA Pop-Up Shop opens on April 1 at 11:00 a.m. and will remain open until the end of the month. 

Opening hours: Mon–Fri 11–19 and Sat, Sun 11–17

Follow the information on the EKA Pop-Up Shop Facebook page

www.artun.ee; EKA üld FB; EKA Pop-Up Poe FB

Info: 

Piibe Tomp

piibe.tomp@artun.ee

Tel 5241780