Exhibitions

Curated by Bob Bicknell-Knight / isthisit?
Artists: Anastasiia Krapivina, Kroplya, Denis Kudrjasov, Olev Kuma, Bob Bicknell-Knight, Rosa- Maria Nuutinen, Kertu Rannula, Nora Schmelter, Aidan Timmer and Edvard Vellevoog
11 th – 22 nd June
Opening 10 th June, 6-9pm
Uus Rada gallery, Raja tn 11a, 12616 Tallinn, Estonia

The curatorial platform isthisit? is excited to present About The Birds, an exhibition at Uus Rada that explores house sparrows, their ubiquity and resilience, alongside their status as invasive pests. Stemming from an interest in how pervasive and common this species of bird has become, and how they have spread all over the world, About The Birds is an exhibition exploring ideas surrounding the home, transformation and change.
Each artist in the exhibition was provided with a custom-built wooden bird house, made specifically for house sparrows. They were given free reign with what to do with the structure, enabling the artists to produce a new work of art that echoes their ongoing practice whilst asking them to reflect on their own relationship to this common bird.

The exhibition at Uus Rada is the first piece of a three-part curatorial project. Once the exhibition ends the bird houses will be installed in and around Tallinn on different trees and buildings, for the public to visit and discover. The different locations will be accessed via a map published on the isthisit? website. Once installed, the works will be left to live outside in the natural environment, decaying and transforming with time.

The final part of the project will be a book published in late 2025, featuring documentation of the different works, both at Uus Rada and in their locations around the city, as well as a series of short texts reflecting on the project and its themes.
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Bob Bicknell-Knight (b. 1996, Ipswich, UK) is a multidisciplinary artist and curator currently based in Tallinn, Estonia, working with digital media producing films, paintings, sculptures and installations. His practice explores ideas surrounding time, control and degradation, with a particular interest in the underlying mechanics of video game worlds and power structures
that proliferate online and in new forms of technology. Bicknell-Knight is influenced and inspired by our pre-apocalyptic present, climate collapse, virtual worlds and 24/7 hyper- capitalism.

Bicknell-Knight is also the founder and director of isthisit?, a platform for art that’s specialised mainly in digital art since its creation in May 2016, and has worked with hundreds of artists since its inception. Through the platform he curates online and offline exhibitions, hosts an infrequent residency programme and has designed and edited a series of books, focusing on several broad themes from contemporary modes of surveillance to fake news and video game culture.

Poster Font: MAURIZIO by Jaan Pavliuk (2020)

Alyona Movko-Mägi’s solo exhibition Soo is open from June 6 to September 27, 2025, at the Museum of Photography’s Seek gallery, situated in Tornimäe.

The exhibition inaugurates the new season in Estonia’s one-of-a-kind Night Gallery format. During the summer months, the gallery is open Wednesday to Saturday during late evening and nighttime hours: from June to August, 20:00–02:00; in September, 20:00–00:00.

Soo (Estonian for “Bog”) explores the relationship between body and landscape, treating the bog as a layered archive—a place where bodies, stories, and histories accumulate. It is a site of preservation and transformation, where life is held and reshaped. The exhibition invites reflection on the symbolic relationship between embodied presence and terrain, with the bog acting simultaneously as a keeper of memory and a space of change.

At the heart of the exhibition is the female body—as a bearer of life, memory, and belonging. The stratification of bodily experiences—ranging from creation to sacrifice and transformation—intertwines with the landscape, where human traces and narratives blend into visible and invisible layers.

Alyona Movko-Mägi (b. 1984) is an artist whose practice intersects material-based research, expanded photography, and memory embedded in nature. Living and working beside the bogs of Lahemaa in northern Estonia, she gathers and processes materials remembered by the land. Her work weaves together leather, glass, light, photography, motion, and digital forms—bringing forward how time moves through both body and earth, and how care, disappearance, and transformation remain held in matter.

In the artist’s words:
“The bog invites slowness. It gathers silence, light, moisture, and pressure. Movement becomes perception; presence begins to settle in layers. Each pause creates a space for listening—quietly and attentively, without explanation. Photography unfolds here as an embodied act. Light gathers the surface, layering presence. The image does not depict an object, it shapes the conditions for presence and perception, connecting body and space.”

Throughout the summer, the accompanying public program will feature talks on folk heritage, concerts, and workshops on analog photography.

Exhibition Team
Curator: Annika Haas
Sound design: Maksim Adel
Lighting design: Mikk-Mait Kivi
Graphic design: Katariin Mudist
Installation team: Mikk Kivila, Marten Esko, Valge Kuup

Supported by:
The Estonian Academy of Arts (EKA), Department of Glass and Department of Photography.
This exhibition is part of the TASE ’25 graduate festival program.

Night Gallery Opening Hours
• June–August: Wed–Sat, 20:00–02:00
• September: Wed–Sat, 20:00–00:00

The Museum of Photography—located behind Town Hall in a former medieval prison—is part of the Tallinn City Museum and the home of Estonian photographic heritage. In its SEEK gallery, contemporary photography enters dialogue with architectural history.

Here For Six Hours
A hybrid event of exhibition, performance and hanging out

05.06.2025 at 5pm–11pm
Ankru Studio (Ankru 6, Tallinn)
Artists
Anna Ovtšinnikova
Anumai Raska
Bob Bicknell-Knight
Clara Jantson-Köstner
Edvard Vellevoog
Fausta Noreikaite
Keithy Kuuspu
Liisbeth Horn
Mats Johan Soosaar
Nora Schmelter
Olev Kuma

Ricu and Anrku ateljee

On June 5, we invite you to Here for 6 Hours — a six-hour hybrid event that blends the concepts of an exhibition, performance and casual, unrushed hangout. The event begins at 17:00 and ends at 23:00, welcoming those who are curious and interested in the idea of slowing down time. To participate it is necessary to be present for the entire duration of the event, but fresh air breaks are possible on the balcony!

How can you stay in a space for six hours without feeling the need to rush?
Is it possible to look at art for longer than 30 seconds?

The space is filled with works by sixteen artists — installations, paintings, live broadcasts, sound pieces, performances and other interdisciplinary gestures. Some works are activated by the artists, whilst others only require the gaze of the participants.

Within the event being together is the content, reflecting on rapid consumption and hustle culture, capturing and streaming both the meaningful and meaningless moments of idling, live to EKA TV and via influencers’ Instagram feeds. How instagrammable is idling? How instagrammable is simply being present? Does loitering remain loitering when it is documented? Six hours is long enough for the unpredictable to unfold, to let go of all expectations and to settle into a relaxed, and perhaps boring, timeless state.

Curated by: MA Contemporary Art students, EKA

Location: Ankru Studio (Ankru 6, Tallinn)

Date & Time: 05.06.2025 | 17:00–23:00

Free entry, registration needed: https://forms.gle/NxWLLu3iqMsnGJHt9

Vegeterian food and drinks available on site

More info:

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kuustundikohal/

EKA TV link: coming soon on facebook event and instagram

Young Narvian Paulina is excited to invite all to the premiere screening of the animated film inspired by real-life stories and her personal memories of her hometown.

Paulina Belik is a graduate of the Estonian Academy of Arts, Animation Department. She was born and raised in Narva — a city that became both the inspiration and the setting for her graduation film From Narva with Love. Paulina is not only the director, but also the narrator and main character of the film, which draws from her personal memories and real-life stories. It is an autobiographical and documentary animation that reflects her deep connection to her hometown and its complex social landscape.

Narva is a border city with a complicated history and many social cracks. It is here that the film’s heroes, street kids, grew up, and their adventures became the foundation for this story. How to find joy in life when you’re surrounded by abandoned buildings, endless slush, and indifferent adults? What to do when social care is just a formality and the street becomes the school of growing up? The film shows Narva through the eyes of those whose childhood unfolded on its streets. This is an honest, slightly dark, but loving and subtly romantic confession from the author to Paulina’s hometown.

An end-of-the-year exhibition by Craft Studies first year MA students showcasing a broad spectrum of material-led practices.

In the first semester of the studies, we discuss at length the difference between objects and things — what makes something an object and another a thing? Wikipedia encourages their editors to be “straightforward, just-the-facts, instead of essay-like, argumentative, or opinionated” when explaining and describing the subject at hand. This exhibition is precisely not that. The works in this exhibition are both, neither and in-between. We encourage you, the visitor, to think about the works you see in essay-like, argumentative and opinionated ways, doubting and departing, considering thingness and objectness as up for discussion.

Object or Things II takes place in the studio of the Craft Studies programme at Kopli 70a, Krulli Kvartal, 2nd floor. The opening is on May 30 at 18:00. Visitors are welcome from 13–19:00 on May 31 and June 1,2,3, or by appointment.

For more information, please get in touch with Marite Kuus marite.kuus@artun.ee

Participants: Sylvia Whananaki Treep Burgess, Lap Chun Chow, Margus Elizarov, Maia Margareta Hellman, Nele Kurvits, Marite Kuus, Lyly Letzer, Peixuan Lin, Mariam Mestvirishvili and Joanne-Heleene Sõrmus.

Curators: Juss Heinsalu and Kärt Ojavee

On May 27 from 15:00 to 19:00, an abstract-form-melodic* expedition will take place in the garden of Ööbiku 19, where life forms, perspectives, and fields converge.

*abstract, formal and melodic

In the garden, things clink and clatter, everyone has their own dance and whistle.

Each with their own character and their own sense of humor.

Some seek shelter from the outside, some seek vastness within the wrap.

Where does the neighbor fly, where does the cable run?

Who owns the field of view

and what crackles in the background?

Root Tooters Ensemble: Ats-Anton-Varustin, Eva Maria Põldmäe, Mia-Stella Aaslaid, Nikola Šmeralová

((It can also be added that:)This is an exhibition by students of the sculpture department, supervised by Laura Põld. If you have any questions, please read the event’s Facebook page, which can be found in the bio of @eka.installation.sculpture or contact us on Instagram.)

Zwaantje Kurpershoek & Indrė Liškauskaitė
“Pastel Paws and Resting Rafts”
EKA Gallery 24.05.–17.06.2025

Guided tour: 23.05.2025 at 5 pm
Opening: 23.05.2025 at 6 pm
Open Tue–Sat 12–6 pm Sun 12–4 pm, free entry
NB! EKA Gallery is closed during Pentecost on June 8!

The exhibition “Pastel Paws and Resting Rafts” is the first joint exhibition by Dutch artist Zwaantje Kurpershoek and Lithuanian artist Indrė Liškauskaitė. Both artists have spatial practice: the work of Zwaantje Kurpershoek comes from an interaction between physical materials and fictional stories resulting in mainly paintings and installations, Indrė Liškauskaitė creates drawings that she weaves with everyday found objects and that occupy the exhibition space in unconventional ways.

The selected works offer a glimpse into the personal relationships the artists have with their four-legged companions. Zwaantje Kurpershoek observes and depicts in her painting series the differences and points of contact between two living beings sharing a living space. How, in passing moments, she becomes close with her cat Nami, then distant once again. Her second work is an installation of pastel colored sculptures — part toy, part survival tool — that guides the viewer through a landscape evoking a mythical, ambiguous feeling of childhood. Indrė Liškauskaitė, who researches dog-human play and train dog agility sport with her non-human companions Delta and Delfina, suspends her four-legged collaborators’ toys and leashes within the exhibition space, also making her drawings go through obstacle course-like physical objects.

Artists: Zwaantje Kurpershoek & Indrė Liškauskaitė
Curator: Kaisa Maasik
Graphic design: Fatima-Ezzahra Khammas
Technical support: Karmo Migur

Exhibition is supported by the Cultural Endowment of Estonia, Erasmus+ Mobility Programme and Sadolin Estonia.
Opening drinks from Põhjala Brewery.

Visit Peru, Sicily, Słubice and more on May 26: Urban studies thesis presentations and defence

Urban Studies students will present and defend their thesis projects on May 26, 10–18 (A501).

This year’s projects explore a real kaleidoscope of places and themes: urban creativity and cooptation in Ljubljana; post-disaster reconstruction in Hatay, Turkey; urban river regulation in Vienna; anti-gentrification movements in Lisbon; an informal market at the Polish-German border; fishermen and urban NGOs vying to shape a Peruvian coastal community; and a housing speculation scheme in Sicily.

Come join us on this journey and support the students—the final review is open to the public.

Follow our channels for further details.

Kata-stroofe / Catastrophes is the group exhibition of the second year painting students of the Estonian Academy of Arts, opening Thursday, 22nd of May in ARS Project Space (Pärnu mnt. 154, Tallinn).

The participating artists are Aleksander Kiigemägi, Alec Hales, Kirke Kits, Marit Loitmets, Liisa Nurklik, Veronika Pavliuk, Elery Sallert, Polina Solovjova.

This exhibition brings together the works of eight different young painters who are connected by a shared studio space, common studies and the era into which they have been born. In addition, the works on display are connected by their format, the starting point of these paintings was a large blank canvas, mostly measuring around 2 x 3 metres in size. Such a surface challenges a painter in various ways, expecting sufficient planning and an ability to keep a freshness throughout the whole process.

Painting big is like running a marathon, with the performer needing to keep the spark until the end, knowing and preparing in advance for the idea and resources to last for a longer time and a wider brushstroke.

The resulting artworks variate between figuration and abstraction, predominantly being poetic and introspective. The artists themselves comment on the following:

Here on the walls we have verses made of frames, canvas, paint and something else in between. We have reached for what appeals to us, haunts, nourishes, questions without giving an answer. What ought to be the answer, instead turns out to be a pair of opposites divided by a slash. Control/trust, something/nothing, serious/absurd, emptiness and fulfillment, individuality and hiding oneself.

The exhibition remains open until the 15th of June, Wed-Sat 12-18, Sun 12-16.

The students were supervised by Sirja-Liisa Eelma, Alice Kask and Holger Loodus.

Graphic design by Pärtel Eelmere, photography by Mikk Keis.

The exhibition is supported by the painting department of the Estonian Academy of Arts, Rott/Rat, Estonian Academy of Arts, Estonian Artists’ Association, ARS Art Factory, Põhjala Brewing AS, Kulinaaria OÜ, Punch Club OÜ.

The exhibition is held by the painting department of the Estonian Academy of Arts and is a part of the Estonian Academy of Arts Grad Show TASE’25 satellite programme.

Contact: sirja-liisa.eelma@artun.ee, holger.loodus@artun.ee

Catastrophes

Hello, dear person – you are so welcome in our space. Here on the walls we have verses made of frames, canvas, paint and something else in between. We have reached for what appeals to us, haunts, nourishes, questions without giving an answer. What ought to be the answer, instead turns out to be a pair of opposites divided by a slash. Control/trust, something/nothing, serious/absurd, emptiness and fulfillment, individuality and hiding oneself.

Should we consider this lack of one certain answer a catastrophe of multitudes? See the absence of one final and definitive confirmation as a failure of the question itself? If we truly believed in that, we would have covered up our stanzas and left this room.

The exhibition’s title comes from a poem of the same name by Artur Alliksaar. In this poem, the following line can be found: “Why won’t you believe in the doors you have not unlocked? Why?!” Thank you, our guest, for taking the step towards our door. We’ll now lead you to more than one window.

Public screening of the short films by the 2nd year students of the department of photography at the Estonian Academy of Arts will take place at 10:00AM on Monday, May 26th in Cinema Sõprus (Vana-Posti Street 8, Tallinn).

Films were made during the Art Project 3 course, supervised by Paul Kuimet, Lauri Laasik, Mattias Veermets and Jevgeni Berezovski.

The screening is free and everyone is welcome!

More info: Paul Kuimet, paul.kuimet@artun.ee