Exhibitions

As part of Tallinn Photomonth, FOKU gallery hosts the presentation of And Then It Fades (Away), a new bilingual (Lithuanian-English) book on contemporary Lithuanian photography. The publication brings together twelve artists whose works explore themes from placelessness and archives to instability and identity, weaving personal, cultural, and ecological narratives into a vivid map of the present.

Editors Geistė Marija Kinčinaitytė and Paulius Petraitis will discuss the book with moderator Annika Toots, touching on its themes as well as broader questions of contemporary photography. Published by Six Chairs Books, the volume highlights photography as a medium of inquiry and experimentation.

The presentation will be preceded by an introduction of the new MA in Photography programme at Vilnius Academy of Arts, Kaunas Faculty. MA in Photography is a unique programme in the Baltic states, dedicated to exploring photography as a critical, experimental practice that responds to and questions contemporary realities.

The presentation and discussion will be held in English.

New Visions in Slovak and Estonian Architecture: Exhibition and Discussion

Under the leadership of Sille Pihlak, Dean of the Faculty of Architecture, a discussion with a group of Slovak architects will be held on the contemporary development and visions of Slovak and Estonian architecture.

At the same time, we will also open the landscape/nature/architecture exhibition of students of the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava.

The exhibition and event are organized by The Embassy of the Slovak Republic in Helsinki.

All interested parties are welcome!

On 29 September, as part of the Design Night festival, the exhibition “UPMADE® in Kenya: DiMa + EKA Circular Design” will open in the Krulli quarter, showcasing creative works made from the textile offcuts of a Kenyan factory.

The exhibition is free to attend, with the opening on Monday 29.09 at 18:30 at The Machine Shop I, Krulli quarter. Regular opening hours Tuesday–Saturday 11:00–20:00 and Sunday 11:00–18:00 (29.09-05.10.2025).  

The textile industry is one of the world’s most environmentally impactful sectors – it consumes vast amounts of raw materials and energy and generates large volumes of waste. In Kenya, where the industry is rapidly growing, sustainability principles have not yet been systematically implemented.

At the Rivatex textile factory in Eldoret, Kenya, the Estonian science- and design-based UPMADE® model—built on value-adding recycling, or upcycling—was taught and applied in collaboration with students from the Estonian Academy of Arts (EKA). The goal was to reduce the environmental footprint of production, develop skills, and help bring the local industry in line with circular-economy principles and climate targets.

From the factory’s textile remnants, the students designed clothing, accessories, lamps, sunshades and a variety of other objects. The exhibition presents the creative work of EKA circular-design master’s students who participated in the initiative during 2024–2025: Doreen Mägi, Eva Liis Lidenburg, Kaisa Ilves, Lisandra Türkson, Maria Rojiko Nisu, Mariann Hendrikson, Marit Saare, Mart Maide, Marta Konovalov, Merily Mikiver and Eva Reiska. The students were supervised by Reet Aus, Maria Pukk and Lisandra Türkson.

The EKA x T4EU podcast episode “Rethinking Fashion Waste” is available HERE. Designer and researcher Reet Aus shares insights on rethinking fashion waste in a discussion led by Anna Lohmatova, exploring the UPMADE® model in Kenya and the impact of EU sustainability regulations on the textile sector.

The exhibition is part of the project “Transferring UPMADE Expertise to Kenya,” led by EKA’s Sustainable Design and Materials Laboratory (DiMa). The project was carried out in cooperation with the Stockholm Environment Institute Tallinn Centre (SEI Tallinn) and Moi University, funded by the Estonian Ministry of Climate’s international climate-cooperation programme, with student mobility supported by the EU Erasmus+ programme.

Running from 29 September to 5 October, Design Night features many other EKA initiatives. The satellite programme includes EKA Design Week and a fashion artists’ exhibition, and EKA students will also take part in the joint display of Estonian design schools. The festival’s opening performance, “Inclusion Is Action,” is organised by EKA lecturer Reet Aus.

The full Design Night programme can be found here.

Brenda Purtsak’s solo exhibition “Distant veils” will open at Artrovert Gallery on 24th of September from 6pm.

Brenda Purtsak’s artistic practice has reflected themes related to human biological body, birth, death, family and kinship. The exhibition at hand combines all themes mentioned above through the lens of contemporary painting with the keywords of desacralized Christian art, compassion and self-sacrifice.

The exhibition addresses people as cultural artifacts and draws parallels between works created especially for the exhibition and well-known historical artworks such as Michelangelo’s Pietà sculpture and Madonna and Child paintings. The desacralization of these symbols allows the artist to address a wider range of personal and cultural meanings that are not associated with religion. 

Paintings, ceramic works and charcoal drawings are displayed within Brenda’s exhibition. The ceramic series derive from My Little Pony toy series that she remembers from her childhood. They consist of colorful ponies with unique symbols on the sides of their bottoms called “cutie marks.” These marks represent the unique talent of each pony and its connection to and the relationship with it. The ponies, people, and charcoal drawings in Brenda’s paintings may at first glance seem unfinished and somehow collaged together. However, human memories are mostly not crystal clear or possible to freeze to take a deeper look the same way as photography or film enables to do. As time passes new layers are added or we might discover some that we had not realised existed before.

The exhibition team

Location: Artrovert Gallery, Ristiku tn 10, Tallinn

Opening: 24.09, from 6pm

Open: 24.09–01.11.25, Tue-Sat 12am–6pm

Curator: Liisi Kõuhkna

Graphic design: Rainer Kasekivi

Support and thanks to: Cultural Endowment of Estonia, Artrovert Gallery, Brenda’s family, Maria Elise Remme, Keithy Kuuspu, Ian Simon Märjamaa

Eugenio Marini & Ingrid Helena Pajo
THE DAY THE LINE BENT INTO A SPIRAL
Second floor of EKA Gallery 27.09.–19.10.2025
Open Tue–Sat 12–6 pm Sun 12–4 pm
Opening: Friday, September 26 at 6 pm

We don’t know the exact day the line bent into a spiral. At some point, it was simply happening—twisting ever forward, spinning as it turned. In the beginning, perhaps it all moved a little slower—the bending and the spinning—and already then, we were inside it.

“The Day the Line Bent into a Spiral” brings together works, material experiments, and found objects created and collected over the course of nearly a year by artists Eugenio Marini and Ingrid Helena Pajo. The main principle for building this collection of fragments was to work with a single idea for no longer than a week—both in parallel and in collaboration. Another key aspect was the associative threads that emerged while working with the materials: allowing these to carry the artists along, and pausing from time to time somewhere in the middle of the process. While the material may suggest a direction, in the end each form speaks about the artists’ themselves and their temporary states. The exhibition becomes a kind of diary, written in an unknowable order, along curved lines. Now, the artists invite you to turn with them along this line—summoning memory, and rowing your way back to the starting point through the spiral labyrinth.

Eugenio Marini (IT) and Ingrid Helena Pajo (EE) are artists based in Tallinn and Rome. While both artists have individual artistic practices, they have been combining their backgrounds in sculpture and textile by collaborating regularly since 2022. Pajo’s works explore early textile technologies through gathering and weaving, trying to make sense of the experience of human life. Marini reflects on the idea and meaning of utility in today’s living. Found materials are an integral part of this shared journey of exploration, highlighting the importance of the path and the process, often encouraging improvisation.

Graphic design: Daria Titova
Technical support: Erik Hõim
The exhibition is supported by the Cultural Endowment of Estonia, Sadolin Estonia and Tallinn City.
Opening drinks from mirai™ and Põhjala Brewery.

On Thursday, September 25th at 18.00, Ron Verlin’s first solo exhibition that which I was in life, I am in death will open at Draakoni Gallery. The exhibition brings fashion into the gallery context in a distinctive way, framing it through existential and social perspectives.

The spatial installation presented in the gallery integrates fashion, light, and sound to create an environment that invites visitors to engage in existential reflection. Central to the exhibition are garments conceived as symbolic objects, embodying themes of decadence, decay, and transition as metaphorical states of weariness that precede redemption or rebirth. These motifs unfold through a language of symbols and allegory. At the root of the project is the artist’s dream of navigating a city with a bottomless pit at its core. The artist later found echoes of this haunting dream in the pages of Dante Alighieri’s Inferno, and together with Purgatorio, these seminal texts served as foundational sources of inspiration.

Ron Verlin is an emerging fashion designer whose work draws upon faith, mythology, and the psyche. The works engage with existential concerns against the backdrop of a world marked by scientific progress and technological advancement, yet spiritual depletion, raising questions about the possibility of redemption and renewal. The exhibition interrogates fashion’s role in contemporary society, questioning whether it functions solely as aesthetic expression or whether it can also serve as a conduit for critical inquiry.

The curator of the exhibition is Sten Ojavee (Estonian Center for Contemporary Art), and the project manager is Olivia Soans.

Supported by: Cultural Endowment of Estonia
Partner: Center For Contemporary Arts, Estonia

The exhibitions at Draakoni Gallery are supported by the Cultural Endowment of Estonia, the Ministry of Culture, and Liviko AS.

Fashion designers Ron-Jonas Verlin (Ron Verlin), Maria Roosiaas, Jaagup Kaiv, Kristiina Tali and Hanna Tiina Pekk from the Estonian Academy of Arts’ Fashion Department will present the best works from their successfully defended graduation collections in the spring of 2025 at the Solaris Centre.

The works selected by the designers will be on display on the Solaris Centre’s Design Street from 29.09-12.10.2025.

“30×30. Exhibition on the Graphic Arts Collection of the Faculty of Architecture at the Estonian Academy of Arts”
EKA Gallery 29.08.–21.09.2025
Open Tue–Sat 12–6 pm Sun 12–4 pm
Opening: Thu 28.08. at 7 pm

The Estonian Academy of Arts has been educating architects for 75 years. The exhibition “30×30”, which kicks off the anniversary year, explores the past decades of the Faculty of Architecture of the Estonian Academy of Arts through graphic assignments from the first year.

“Architectural Design I”, “Project Graphics”, “Composition I” – behind the different names lies a preparatory studio that has existed since the 1970s, which has been completed by all first-year students of the EKA Department of Architecture. Also in 2025, new architecture students will be introduced to rapidographs, the materiality of paper, questions of composition, the differences and similarities between plan and section, and the possibilities and impossibilities of graphic imagery. This is the students’ first exposure to the tools of an architect, which are both the means of depicting and creating space, as well as the ways of thinking about space and communicating it on a more abstract level.

The archive exhibition “30×30” opens up an array of graphic works secretly collected in the EKA Museum and the archives of the Faculty of Architecture. The paper and ink and the form of the works seem unchanged, yet the nearly seven hundred sheets reveal the emphases, feelings and tasks that have changed over the course of half a century, on the basis of which the shaping of a person into an architect begins.

The works exhibited at the exhibition belong to the collection of the EKA Museum and the archives of the Faculty of Architecture of the Estonian Academy of Arts.

Exhibition organizers and architecture: Madli Kaljuste, Paco Ulman
Participants: former first-year students of the Estonian Academy of Arts, Tallinn University of Arts and the State Art Institute of the Estonian SSR
Graphic design: Maria Muuk
Exhibition construction: Dream Team (Johannes Säre, Dénes Farkas, Eke Ao Nettan, Paul Säre)
Technical support: Karmo Migur
Lighting design: Mikk-Mait Kivi
The exhibition is supported by the Estonian Association of Architects, the Estonian Cultural Endowment, the Faculty of Architecture of the Estonian Academy of Arts, ETS NORD, Niguliste Museum, Sadolin Estonia and Tallinn City.
We also thank: Ulla Alla, Imbi Hepner, Malle Jürgenson, Tiina Kaljuste, Reeli Kõiv, Laura Linsi, Hannes Lung, Mari Möldre, Andres Ojari, Sille Pihlak, Tarvo Roose, Tarmo Saaret, Mihkel Säre, Merilin Tee
Opening drinks from Põhjala Brewery.

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Public program at the exhibition “30×30” at EKA Gallery
Participation in the events is free!

Thursday, September 11 at 4–6 pm
Event “And this is not all…”
Drawing lesson with Malle Jürgenson, head of the Interior Architecture Department (on the second floor of EKA Gallery, in Estonian)
NB! The number of participants is limited, register here.

Sunday, September 14
At 1 pm, guided tour led by curators Madli Kaljuste and Paco Ulman (in Estonian)
At 2 pm, curatorial tour (in English)

Sunday, September 21 at 3 pm
Discussion

This Friday, August 29th from 4 pm to 6 pm, the Erasmus+ BIP “Navigating Through the Complexities of the Digital Jungle” pop-up exhibition will be open in the monumental gallery of the EKA White House.

The Erasmus BIP workshop “Navigating Through the Complexities of the Digital Jungle” was held on 25–29 August 2025, organized by the Department of Ceramics of the Estonian Academy of Arts.

18 students from five partner universities are participating: Aalto University, Vilnius Academy of Arts, Latvian Academy of Arts, Saarland University of the Arts and Estonian Academy of Arts.

The students’ primary task was to recognize a specific spatial condition in the human environment where biodiversity and coexistence are limited. Based on this, they had to consider how the 3D design solution could connect and interact with the architecture or other specificities of the chosen location to increase species diversity and/or energy and matter circulation.

This project included lectures, presentations, discussions and practical sessions where they 3D modeled and adapted their files to be suitable for 3D clay printers. The workshop also covered different slicing software and other parametric path creation techniques. Our lecturers and invited expert from Belgium guided both the practical work and discussions and contextualized 3D clay printing in a broader theoretical framework.

Participants: Marcelo Guajardo, Mattia Anderle, Florêncio Justino João, Julie Ternus, Christian Schmidt, Stephan Andreas Petry, Ādams Sūna, Lauris Krauze, Laima Madara Lauriņa, Beatrise Kaktina, Beatrise Grudule, Jeva Šiaudvytytė, Rugilė Kriaučiūnaitė, Tauras Stuogis, Ruta Gedeikaite, Jonas Rakutis, Karl Otti, Olivia Jegorov.

Supervisors: Dries Verbruggen, Lauri Kilusk, Kaiko Kivi

Coordinator: Kersti Laanmaa