Exhibitions

ARS Project Space 24.04.–16.05.2026

Opening 23.04.2026 from 6 PM

In May 2025, Jaanika visited the Alps. The landscape dictated the artist to keep her balance, which didn’t allow her to see further than the next slope. It was the low season for tourism, so no ski lifts were operating to ease her journey upward. Jaanika was alone with the mountain, as she continued her way forward. The glacier at the foot of the mountain had melted and in order to come into contact with the ice and snow, she had to climb even higher. This was her first direct encounter with glaciers: until that moment, she had only experienced them through the sounds, videos, literature and photographic material of other authors. All of these contained descriptions of glacial ice, its essence and foreseeable fate. The expansive, solid and mountainous landscape made her feel small. Yet the desire to reach what seemed unattainable remained.

The glacier is considered unpredictable, even dangerous both in real life and as a symbol. It might be seen as the historic archive of atmosphere, giving us hints of past climates and exposing the ways we are all connected to our ancestors and the generations that follow us. We are bound together by a shared destiny and responsibility. We use scientific methods to describe and interpret the mountain, but the actual experience of it might feel sublime and ordinary at the same time.

The glaciologist Jemma Wadham perceives glaciers as characters who have their own personalities and destinies. René Daumal has written about an imaginary expedition to an imaginary mountain, inviting us to interpret it as a symbolic and spiritual journey. Reaching for the sublime is a universal human desire. The mountain climber is not simply a hiker or an adventurer, but a truth seeker whose journey seems almost predestined. In the current exhibition, the mundane is brought together with the divine, the scientific with the sublime.

The exhibition features a large-scale installation, melting ice, ink works on wax paper and a meditative space imbued with John Grzinich’s soundscape. The artist has also inspired students from the Sally Studio Art School located within the ARS Art Factory: under the guidance of Annely Köster six artworks in dialogue with the exhibition were created and will be displayed as a satellite project in the courtyard windows of the Sally Studio Art School. In the framework of the public programme, an artist talk with Jaanika Peerna and the sound artist John Grzinich will take place on 15 May at 5:00 PM, followed by their joint performance at 6:00 PM.

Jaanika Peerna is an Estonian-born artist who lives and works in Estonia, Portugal and New York. For more than a decade, she has dedicated herself to the study of glaciers, working through a vast amount of material about the lifespan and condition of glaciers, while associating it with travelling, philosophy and spiritual ideas. In her artistic practice, she has woven these themes into drawings, installations, videos and performance art. Her performances often engage with the audience, inviting them to reflect upon the ongoing global warming. Peerna’s practice stems from the physical human experience and strives towards a greater awareness of the fragility, interconnectedness and uniqueness of all living things.

She has exhibited her works and given performances around the world. Her last solo exhibition was held in Seoul, Korea. Her works can be found in numerous private collections in Europe and the USA, as well as in public collections, such as the French National Foundation for Contemporary Art.

Curator

Liisi Kõuhkna is a curator and project manager who graduated with a master’s degree in health sciences from the Tallinn University and has also studied in MA programme of curatorial studies at the Estonian Academy of Arts. She has curated contemporary art exhibitions in various galleries in Estonia and abroad. Since March of this year, she works as the gallery assistant for the Estonian Artists’ Association.

Exhibition information

Location: ARS Project Space, Pärnu mnt. 154, Tallinn

Artist talk and performance together with sound artist John Grzinich: 15.05, respectively from 5 PM and from 6 PM

Open for visitors: 24.04.–16.05.2026, Mon–Fri 12–18, Sat 12–16

Curator: Liisi Kõuhkna

Graphic design: Cristopher Siniväli

Photo documentation: Roman-Sten Tõnissoo

Sound design: John Grzinich

Technical support: Aksel Haagensen, Mattias Veller

Special thanks to: Cultural Endowment of Estonia, ARS Art Factory, Estonian Artists’ Association, Merike Hallik, Sandra Sirp, Liis Tedre, Gunnar Kalmet, Agu Peerna, Hannes Egger, Mari Volens, Sally Studio ja Annely Köster

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On Thursday, 9 April at 6:00 PM, a duo exhibition On the Verge of Completion by contemporary artists Gerda Hansen and Rebecca Norman will be opened at the Hobusepea Gallery.

The end is actually an unspeakably bleak place where no clear way forward presents itself and nothing no longer seems to lie ahead. The duo exhibition by Gerda Hansen and Rebecca Norman invites the viewer to experience art not only as something definitive, but as a way of becoming. The exhibition reveals the stages of artistic practice that usually remain hidden, offering a chance to step into the moment where a work is born and where meanings have not yet settled.

The exhibition examines the boundaries between completion and incompletion, approaching finality not as a destination, but as a state in which the forward movement is temporarily suspended. The creative process, often shaped by uncertainty, experimentation and internal tension, is usually resolved when the artist decides to declare a work complete. In this exhibition however, the viewer comes into contact with the process rather than the finalised work. The presented works do not conceal their unfinished state. Instead, they emphasise its value. On these canvases, thoughts remain dispersed, forms and tones are still taking shape, and meanings remain open. It is a moment where possibilities remain unended and the potential of the work is still unfolding.

Perhaps completing a work is a merely provisional decision, a pause within an ongoing process? The artist appears here as a practitioner of continuous choices and interruptions, guided by an intuitive and often sensitive self-reflection. Imperfection, repetition and error are not deviations, but integral to the organic nature of making. As Gilles Deleuze suggests, artworks are not defined by what they appear to be at a given moment, but by what they might become. The exhibition offers an insight into the concealed layers of artistic production, presenting the artwork as something that unfolds over time.

In Hansen’s works, layered structures strive toward presence and transparency. Repeating forms and interruptions create a rhythm that does not lead to a solution but instead exposes different stages of the creative process. She is interested in the moment when a work of art dissolves and comes into being at the same time. In Norman’s practice, the notion of completion is examined through its various permutations including the use of unstable colour pigments. For her, the apparent incompleteness of a work is not a deficiency, and the abundance of potential is realised through the material itself. The tension between continuation and completion becomes a deliberately sustained condition, in which the work does not close, but remains in an active and meaningful state of breathing.

Artists                                   

Gerda Hansen (b. 1994) is a contemporary Estonian-based artist whose practice explores the intersections of painting and digital image-making. She holds a BA in painting (2022) and an MA in contemporary art (2025) from the Estonian Academy of Arts. In the current exhibition, Hansen brings together manual processes with AI-based generative systems. Her works emerge through a visual dialogue with the machine in which images remain intentionally ambiguous and leave the attribution of meaning to the viewer. Hansen has exhibited both in Estonia and internationally and is the recipient of the 2023 Adamson-Eric Young Artist Scholarship.

Rebecca Norman (b. 2001) graduated in painting from the Estonian Academy of Arts (2025), while also supplementing her studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague (2024). Her practice addresses the convergence and misalignment between the author and the material and the resulting dissonant outcomes. Her works often engage with seemingly insignificant moments that call for new forms of categorisation through sustained attention. She is drawn to utilitarian objects that have irreversibly lost their function and various forms of apparent nonsense that mimic purposefulness. Norman has participated in several group exhibitions and received the Endover Prize for her 2025 graduation work Loaded Vacuity.

Curator

Liisi Kõuhkna is a curator and project manager who graduated with a master’s degree in health sciences from the Tallinn University and has also an MA from curatorial studies and a BA in jewellery and blacksmithing from the Estonian Academy of Arts. She has curated contemporary art exhibitions in various galleries in Estonia and abroad. Since March of this year, she works as the gallery assistant for the Estonian Artists’ Association.

Exhibition information

Location: Hobusepea Gallery, Hobusepea 2, Tallinn

Opening: 9.04.2026 from 18:00

Open for visitors: 10.04–10.05.2026,Wed, Fri–Sun 12–18, Thu 12–19

Curator: Liisi Kõuhkna

Graphic design: Helena Pass

Photo documentation: Kail Timusk

Special thanks to: Estonian Artists’ Association, Cultural Endowment of Estonia, Hans-Otto Ojaste, Mari Volens, Märt Vaidla, Paul Aadam Mikson, Jaana Kormašov, family members of the artists, Põhjala Pruulikoda, Nudist Drinks

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“I leave
With tears in my throat
To where
The roads are wrapped in mist
Riga, my love remains behind.”
— Vennaskond

Join us on Friday, April 3 at 19:00 for the premiere of Karolina Peterson’s graduation film at Roosikrantsi 8b Gallery.

The film will be screened daily from April 3–13 at: 12:00 · 13:45 · 15:30 · 17:15 · 19:00 · 20:45.

Karolina Peterson (aka Kara Popicon) is a Latvian artist from an Estonian-Russian background who spent the past five years studying in Tallinn. Returning to Riga after a long time away, she found herself feeling like a stranger in her own home.

Her solo exhibition “Riga, My Love” explores this sense of distance through film – capturing the city both as it lives in memory and as it exists today.

The work is also shaped by her participation in a series of protests in Riga advocating for women’s and migrants’ rights, where she created a new artistic action each time. These experiences brought a political dimension into her practice.

This new video piece traces the evolution of that politicization, interwoven with personal reflections on loss, identity, and the emotional disconnection from home.
Supervisor: Anita Kremm

Film duration: 96 minutes
Language: English

Exhibition is supported by the Faculty of Fine Arts, Estonian Academy of Arts.

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“A prairie dog town refers to the vast underground networks of tunnels and chambers constructed by prairie dogs across the grasslands. At the surface, these colonies appear as little more than a dispersed field of cone-shaped mounds. Beneath this modest topography, however, lies an extensive and highly organized architecture: a labyrinth of tunnels connecting nesting chambers, waste disposals, listening bays, nurseries, and bolt holes, before branching into distinct wards and family burrows.

Prairie Dog Town takes this subterranean architecture as both structure and allegory. The exhibition turns toward other underground networks—such as those operating within the logic of cartoons—where the burrow becomes a conceptual passage. Moving below the visible surface, tunnels open onto chambers of a more devious nature: spaces where  logics conceal themselves, circulate, and multiply.” – H.D.

“Prairie Dog Town” is Hayden Daughtry’s inaugural show in Estonia. Originally from South Carolina, entering the European art scene through the Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam, Hayden lets the uncanny constructs of the outside seep into the gallery, places where it might not otherwise allow. Sometimes a playful veneer might be a scratchcard  with an inverse prize. His work takes shape to its surroundings.

Opening March 27th at 18:00, then to be visited 28.03 – 05.04

M-T By appointment

F-S 14:00 – 18:00

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Asmus Soodla
“Tool Room, Gallery”
EKA Gallery 4.–26.04.2026
Open Tue–Sat 12–6 pm Sun 12–4 pm, free entry (NB! EKA Gallery is closed on Good Friday, April 3 and Easter Sunday, April 5!)
Opening: Thursday, April 2 at 6 pm
Guided tours: Fri, April 10 at 1 pm (est) / Sun, April 12 at 2.30 pm (est) / Sun, April 12 at 3.30 pm (eng)

Asmus Soodla’s exhibition “Tool Room, Gallery” focuses on the art gallery as an ecosystem, where value-based distinction between the result and the process doesn’t exist. The conceptual starting point of the project is the internal conditions and work processes of the gallery as an institution, as well as its spatial logic. The exhibition focuses on activities that are usually hidden from the visitor’s gaze, but which play a decisive role in how the artwork and the viewer meet.

The project includes a spatial intervention that occupies the entire gallery, highlighting the spaces of EKA Gallery and its contents. The conceptual framework also includes the group exhibition “Field Notes from Immediate Proximity”, the curation of which Soodla entrusted to artist Riin Maide. This role-playing gesture treats the form of collaboration as a separate artwork.

Asmus Soodla (b. 2003) is a Tallinn-based artist and art technician. Soodla’s practice is conceptual and spatially sensitive, often employing sculpture, text, and photography. His work is primarily inspired by the existing environment and objects, unraveling their operational logic and history. Through his installative interventions, invisible systems and traces of human thought are brought into focus. Soodla earned a Bachelor’s degree in Installation and Sculpture (2025) from the Estonian Academy of Arts and completed a preparatory course in architecture and interior design (2022) at the EKA Open Academy. Additionally, he has furthered his studies at artist Simon Starling’s studio in Copenhagen.

Technical support: Mattias Veller
Graphic design: Sunny Lei
The exhibition is supported by the Cultural Endowment of Estonia, Tallinn City and Sadolin Estonia.
Opening drinks from mirai™ and Põhjala Brewery.

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FIELD NOTES FROM IMMEDIATE PROXIMITY
EKA Gallery storage room 4.–26.04.2026
Open Tue–Sat 12–6 pm Sun 12–4 pm, free entry (NB! EKA Gallery is closed on Good Friday, April 3 and Easter Sunday, April 5!)
Opening: Thursday, April 2 at 6 pm
Guided tours: Fri, April 10 at 1 pm (est) / Sun, April 12 at 2.30 pm (est) / Sun, April 12 at 3.30 pm (eng)

The exhibition “Field Notes from Immediate Proximity” provides an insight into artists’ work and creative spaces. In addition to documenting the studios and homes of six creators, they also become windows into their inner world.

Postcards, tools, potted plants and piles of books that have been captured on the artist’s canvas or photograph, reveal moments from the artists’ everyday lives, from the spaces where the artist spends the most time doing their work – on the one hand, it is an opportunity to see inside the creative processes of contemporary artists, into their different practices, on the other hand, these works are simply interpretations of personal space, ways of seeing everyday life.

The narrow and cramped architecture of EKA Gallery’s storage space brings the viewer closer to the works and their details. Together with the unusual exhibition space, the works form a new spatial whole in which different visual languages ​​and perspectives can meet and merge.

The exhibition was initiated within the conceptual framework of Asmus Soodla’s solo exhibition “Tool Room, Gallery”.

Riin Maide (b. 1997) is an artist and scenographer based in Tallinn, Estonia. Maides practice centers around the connection and comparison of two- and three-dimensional media and creation of staged environments. Maide Maide has obtained a MA degree in scenography (2025) and BA in Graphic Art in the department of graphic art at the Estonian Academy of Arts. In addition, she has studied at the Department of Alternative and Puppet Theater at DAMU in Prague and in the Performative Arts class of Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. She has received several scholarships and awards, including the Wiiralt scholarship in 2023 and Young Artist award of Estonian Academy of Arts in 2020.

Artists: Kristi Kongi, Joosep Kivimäe, Ann Pajuväli, Anu Vahtra and Lieven Lahaye, Mattias Veller
Curated by: Riin Maide
Technical support: Mattias Veller
Graphic design: Sunny Lei
The exhibition is supported by the Cultural Endowment of Estonia, Tallinn City and Sadolin Estonia.
Opening drinks from mirai™ and Põhjala Brewery.

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EKA library, 6.03.–15.05.2026

Dear friend,

It has been a long time since we last heard from you. Last time we spoke, you were working on some prints in the graphic arts workshop with a roller in your hand and ink on your fingers. How is it going? We would love to see some trials or progress pictures. At the moment we are also in the process of doing some tests. I have added a sample in the envelope. Check it out and tell us what you think!

Let’s keep in touch.

The exhibition shows works from the EKA Print Exchange project initiated by the department of Graphic Art at the Estonian Academy of Arts. Printmaking students from different universities were invited to take part and submit an original print edition. Each print was shipped to Tallinn, sorted and sent back to participants, so everyone received a random selection of ten prints.

The vision of this project was to create new connections between printmaking departments and students through collaboration and sharing physical works. So, we wrote to our penpals and were curious what students of other universities were up to. Depictions of current ideas, projects or any experiments were warmly welcomed as a response.

Four universities participated in the exchange: Estonian Academy of Arts (EKA),
Oslo National Academy of the Arts (KHiO), University of the West of England (UWE), The Eugeniusz Geppert Academy of Art and Design in Wrocław.

Exhibitions of the Print Exchange have taken place at the universities participating in the exchange, and the first presentation in Estonia took place in June-July 2025 at the TYPA Balcony Gallery in Tartu.

We would like to thank EKA graafika, TYPA, Anna Kodź, Aleksandra Janik and Angie Butler.

Organisers of the EKA Print Exchange: Alona Chuprina, Margarita Feofanova, Chantal Gerschuetz, Merit Himmelreich, Triin Mänd, Helena Pass, Marten Prei, Sandra Puusepp and our supervisor Charlotte Biszewski.

Exhibition design at the EKA library: Sandra Puusepp and Marten Prei. 

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3rd-year Graphic Art students are showcasing the artists’ book as an independent medium of visual art and an original artwork. The authors draw from personal experiences and memories, exploring themes of physicality, history, and ethical boundaries:

• Aliisa Ahtiainen presents a grandfather’s life story in risography and a “breathing” book inspired by her grandmother’s experience in a tuberculosis sanatorium.
• Jacqueline-Desiree Rosenthal exhibits a piece made of tattooed pigskin rawhide, raising questions about morality and the parallels between animals and humans.
• Olga Dubrovskaja utilizes her background as an intensive care doctor to explore the experience of death through her own and her colleagues’ perspectives. In her second book titled “Delight”, she focuses on the moments of life.
• Adriana Jinmao Biosca Sánchez examines the volatility of memory through materiality and layers of printing.
• Robin August Vöörmann deals with gender identity, drawing parallels with changes in nature.

Supervisors: Eve Kask, Eve Kaaret (binding) and Viktor Gurov. 

Exhibition dates: 6.03.–15.05.2025

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“To feel the pull of desire is to feel the presence of absence.”
-Anne Carson, “Eros The Bitterweet”

It was the gods’ punishment to separate the whole being into two, condemned to fit the chase of our ideal fullness into one lifetime — and pathetically, we turn back to gods to show us the ways we can be united again. Some say this love belongs only to gods themselves. Still, we defy that notion treacherously, and we face whatever form of divinity we believe in, to plea:
“I wish.”
To wish is to indulge in the lack. The lover does not only wish for the ephemeral sense of fulfillment, but eventually wishing itself serves to satisfy the lover’s hunger. The wish transforms into the sustenance and our appetite refuses to act as a form of weakness, but as devotion.
The exhibition “The Wishing Well” is simultaneously a practice ground and a receipt of reverence. Light a candle, throw a coin, count the petals and make your wish.

opening 05.03.2026 at 6PM

06.03. – 12.04.2026

open Wed-Sun 12.00-18.00

KETT gallery / Aparaaditehas, Kastani 42, Tartu

Irmak Semiz (b. 1997, Istanbul) is a multidisciplinary artist living in Tallinn, currently pursuing a master’s degree in contemporary art at the Estonian Academy of Arts. Working primarily through sculpture, installation, and animation, their practice focuses on expressing contradictory identities, decisions, and emotional states, processed through the lens of humor, connection, and myth-making.
Jana Ribkina (b. 1995, Riga) is a multidisciplinary artist living and working in Riga. Working primarily with ceramics, textiles, and illustration, she explores reflections from her daily life through a playful approach, while drawing inspiration from folklore and fantasy. Her work seeks to weave the personal and the mythical into one continuous thread.

Graphic design: Paul Graßler
The exhibition is supported by the City of Tartu and the Cultural Endowment of Estonia.

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5–31 March 2026

On Wednesday, 4 March at 18:00, Katariin Mudist’s exhibition “Temporary Solution”(Ajutine lahendus) will open at ARS Showcase Gallery.

“Temporary Solution” brings together doorholders collected from various institutions, mainly from Estonia’s cultural field. Doorholders are born out of necessity: something needs to be held open for a moment, something needs to be let through. Yet a temporary solution tends to become permanent without anyone noticing. In this way, an accidental form and material can become surprisingly universal.

The exhibition focuses on small moments of annoyance: when your bike tyre is flat again; when you forget your towel, but discover it at the gym; when you have to return the shirt you ordered; when the internet keeps buffering during a film; when someone explains something you already know; when, at the grocery store, the line you chose is the slowest, or when the doorholder is missing. This annoyance is a minor disturbance that, through repetition, begins to shape attention, movement, and one’s attitude toward space. A door has been kept open for years with the help of an apparently insignificant piece of material. But one day, arms full of things, that familiar wooden block is no longer there. There is a brief delay and mild irritation: something else is quickly found as a substitute, the door is held open again, and work continues. The moment passes and is very likely forgotten immediately.

Over the course of a year, the collected doorholders have held open different kinds of doors (main entrances, side doors, back doors, etc.) and operate according to different principles: as a wedge, as a threshold stopper, or as weight. What unites these objects is that they come from institutions where doors are not merely architectural elements but tools of access and work organisation. Doorholders are small, unofficial spatial interventions that make movement smoother and signal for whom a space “works. ” Removing them and gathering them into one room reveals a layer of temporary solutions on which institutional space quietly depends.

The door to the exhibition is always (temporarily) open.

Katariin Mudist is an interdisciplinary Estonian artist who believes that the most telling things are often those that usually remain behind the door. She is interested in small annoyances that arise, for example, when a door refuses to cooperate- whether it’s an automatic door that won’t open or a missing doorstop. Humour and irony run through her practice. She examines social norms and the practices and meanings of being an artist within the context of the cultural field and its institutions, using material and process-based approaches. She is currently studying in the Fine Arts Studio programme at the Estonian Academy of Arts, searching for common ground between visual and material-centred art. Mudist holds an MA in Contemporary Art (EKA, 2022) and a BA in Media and Advertising Design (Pallas University of Applied Sciences, 2018). She has received the Adamson-Eric Scholarship (2025) and the Young Sculptor Award (2025). In 2026, together with Keithy Kuuspu, she received the main prize of the Visual and Applied Arts Endowment for the exhibition “Unfortunately, You Were Not Selected This Time” (2025) and the performative Awards Gala (2025).

Exhibition team:
Exhibition design and production assistance: Alden Jõgisuu
Graphic design: Katariin Mudist
Supporters: Punch Club, Põhjala, Estonian Artists’ Association
Special thanks: Alan Voodla, Johanna Mudist, Eva Nava, Keithy Kuuspu, Maria Elise
Remme, Helena Pass, and all the institutions from which the collected doorholders originate.

Exhibition open:
5–31 March 2026
Mon–Fri 12–18, Sat 12–16

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