Open Lectures

Oona Libens
29.05 17.00 B-305

NAUSEA – performance and lecture

Oona Libens is a swedish-belgian visual and performance artist. Her work revolves around the history of the (moving) image and media-archeology. Using simple components such as light, shadows, and analog projections, she illustrates scientific subjects, providing a tactile screen experience with shadows and refractions that animate the entire space.  Her performances become a mixture of object theatre and film. The audience gets to see how the images are being created and manipulated live.

On Wednesday, May 21st at 18:00 in the EKA Auditorium,

a world-renowned architect Mark Cavagnero will share his thoughts and experiences in a lecture titled:
“The Architectural Approach and the Use of Light in Civic Architecture”

Mark Cavagnero is an acclaimed American architect whose work has been strongly influenced by Scandinavian architecture. Cavagnero is also working on the design of the new U.S. Embassy building in Tallinn.

In his lecture, Cavagnero will discuss how light, materials, and architectural approach create meaning in public spaces.

The lecture will be in English.

For more information about the speaker: cavagnero.com

Public venia legendi lectures for candidates for the 2025 academic staff competition in May 2025.

NB! The password is G!cvas82

May 6

Venia legendi lectures for candidates for professor of Contemporary Art in the EKA main hall, A-101

13:00 Anu Vahtra “Making Space”

14:15 Merike Estna “Alive”

15:30 Craig Leonard “Instinctual Critique”

The lectures will be held in English.

May 8

Venia legendi lectures for candidates for professor of Photography in room A-501

13:00 Maria Kapajeva “Artist from the Borderlands: Between Questions and Connections, Experiments and Experiences”

14:15 Tuukka Kaila “Various Small Shifts”

15:30 Hanna Timonen “Photographic Explorations of the Everyday and Beyond”

The lectures will be held in English.

May 13

Lecture for associate professor candidate of the Center for Interior Architecture and General Theoretical Subjects in room A-501

15:00 Gregor Taul “Becoming Responsiv(bl)e”

May 14

Lecture for associate professor candidate of Social Design in room A-302

16:00 Daniel Kotsjuba “Designer in Public Service”

You are all welcome to listen!

Textiles 110: Open Lecture by Päivi Vaarula “Material and Content, Working Together in textile Art”

On April 29, at 5 p.m in room A501

Päivi Vaarula is a textile artist from Hämeenlinna, Finland. Her work is rooted in keen observation of everyday life, which she thoughtfully transforms into the visual language of textile art. Rather than seeking to entertain, she aims to create meaningful, thought-provoking works that often engage with present contemporary issues—particularly those related to the environment.

Vaarula works with local materials, traditional floor looms, and natural dyes, embracing sustainable practices in both concept and technique. For several years, she has been known for her distinctive three-dimensional woven surfaces, skillfully utilizing the expressive qualities of wool to bring depth and texture to her pieces.

Her art has been featured in over 70 group exhibitions and she has held 18 solo exhibitions, both in Finland and internationally. Alongside her artistic practice, Päivi Vaarula has worked as a full-time lecturer for more than 30 years. She has led lectures and workshops in numerous countries, including Finland, Denmark, Germany, Japan, Wales, Scotland, England, and Iceland.

Päivi Vaarula will talk about her textile journey and about her art.

Her solo exhibition “Entertainment” is also open at HOP gallery (Hobusepea tänav 2, Tallinn) until April 29th.

Textile 110 is a series of events celebrating the 110th anniversary of EKA’s textile design education, as part of which a series of open lectures focusing on textiles will be held, a series of publications will be published, and a selection of works from the EKA Museum’s textile collection can be seen throughout the year.

The lecture series opens up the spectrum of diverse opportunities in the field of textiles, both in design, industry, and creative practices, bringing out different roles and methods of creation in the field through various invited guests.

Supported by the Research Fund of EKA and the Cultural Endowment of Estonia

At the seminar ‘Contemporary Higher Art Education: A Dialogue with the Future,’ leaders from five Nordic art academies will share ideas and exchange perspectives. In addition, faculty members from the Faculty of Fine Arts at the Estonian Academy of Arts will discuss these challenges.

Advocating for art and art education has never been an easy task. This seminar focuses on key issues in contemporary higher art education here and now, at a time when critical thinking, ethical approaches and the independent power of art are more important than ever. The development of higher art education is closely connected with contemporary art movements – it’s not easy to say which influences the other more. Art must be able to engage with a vast range of phenomena and questions.

Art must maintain creative freedom, independence and autonomy, while also integrating more and more with other fields. A significant portion of contemporary art is exploring research-driven paths. In the education landscape, art education must offer comparability with research-based universities. Art and artists must manage themselves, communicate, and market their work. At the same time, art higher education must remain an attractive choice for the new generation. How can art academies offer all of this and meet these expectations?

PROGRAMME

11:30 –12:00 Coffee, Gathering and Welcome Words
12:00–12:20 – Maj Hasager (Rector of Malmö Art Academy) – Higher Art Education and the Political Gaze
12:20–12:40 – Jacob Jessen (Head of Department, Trondheim Academy of Fine Art) – Art and Research in the Creative University
12:40–13:00 – Kirke Kangro (Dean of Fine Arts Faculty, Estonian Academy of Arts) – Art Education between Freedom and Frameworks

13:00–13:20 – Coffee break

13:20–13:40 – Bjarki Bragason (Dean of Fine Art, Iceland University of the Arts) – environments in art education – a few thoughts
13:40–14:00 – Leevi Haapala (Dean of the Academy of Fine Arts, University of Helsinki) – Art Education and the Professional Art Field

Event will be held in English.

Please register to the seminar through the following link: https://forms.gle/wYxHjxZ8GiAiQkiWA

More info: Kati Saarits, kati.saarits@artun.ee

Pablo Ignacio Hermansen Ulibarri – Visiting Lecturer at the Estonian Academy of Arts

Pablo Ignacio Hermansen Ulibarri is a designer with a PhD in Architecture and Urban Studies. He teaches and conducts research at the School of Design at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile. His work focuses on co-design, interaction design, socio-natural ecosystems, photo-ethnography, performative politics in public space, more-than-human prototyping, and public services as public space.

He will be visiting the Estonian Academy of Arts from April 14–16 and will give a public lecture, “Counter Designing: Animals and Algorithms as Creative Agents,” on April 16 at 18:00 in room A501.

In January, EKA Interaction Design students visited his university in Chile to develop collaborative projects and academic exchange.

We look forward to seeing you at the opening of the CTC – Climate Truth Crisis exhibition on 11.04, at 14:00, in the open area in front of the Estonian Academy of Arts (Põhja pst 7).

The CTC – Climate Truth Crisis project deals with the spread of misinformation and understanding the climate crisis. The project involves educating young designers in these areas, creating a website that gathers information about the topic, publishing a podcast series, a dictionary and a collection of articles. In addition, students are visualizing the topic in various media. More information on the project website: https://www.climatetruthcrisis.eu/

The first workshop of the project will take place at the Estonian Academy of Arts on 7-11 April, during which students will write down concepts related to the topic, visualize them and on Friday, 11 April, open an exhibition in a public space in front of the EKA to introduce the topic to a wider audience.

The workshop is held in cooperation with the EKA Graphic Design Department and the Department of Semiotics of the University of Tartu. The students will be supervised by semioticians, conspiracy theory and disinformation researchers Mari-Liis Madisson and Daniel Tamm, Laura Vilbiks from the Estonian Foundation for Nature (ELF), and graphic designers Laura Merendi, Ott Kagovere and Kert Viiart. In addition to the supervisors, there will be students and lecturers from Bosnia, Spain, the Netherlands, England, Iceland and Lithuania.

In addition to the workshop, there will also be lectures open to the wider audience:

09.04, 16:00, A502 (EKA, Põhja pst 7)
Artist Kristina Õllek with a presentation Absorbing Hypoxic Water

10.04, 16:00, A300 (EKA, Põhja pst 7)
Graphic designer Maria Muuk with a presentation Graphic Design as a Degrowth Practice

The project will last for three years, 2025-2028, and workshops will be held at various partner universities:

Academy of Fine Arts Sarajevo,

Estonian Academy of Arts,

ELISAVA,

Iceland University of the Arts,

Royal Academy of Art, The Hague,

University of the Arts London,

Vilnius Academy of Arts

The 2025 Spring semester session of the Open Lectures ”City as novel ecosystem” focuses on landscape architecture and, more specifically, urban nature. 

The lecture series is being put together by landscape architects Karin Bachmann, Merle Karro-Kalberg and Anna-Liisa Unt, who have co-founded and edited the landscape architecture magazine ÕU for 7 years and are currently leading the project “Curated Biodiversity”, which experiments with ways to make urban landscaping more diverse as an environment. Therefore, the open lectures in the spring will also turn their attention to the quality of the space between buildings and, using the speakers’ words and creations, show how to make the city more biodiverse and enjoyable and how people and other species that call the city their home can live in symbiosis.

On April 24 at 6 pm, Penfornis will take the stage in the EKA auditorium to introduce the 20-year practice of the landscape architecture office Taktyk, share the outcomes of he enquiries through design, point at critical future directions.

From Rotterdam to Barcelona, from Paris to Brussels and more lately Zurich, the practice Taktyk has since 2005, been envisaged as an evolving entity, adaptive and responsive to new heterogeneous and complex challenges. For the last 20 years Taktyk acts as a conductor, curator, and mediator of transformation processes using tacit knowledge of gardening, bricolage and painting. The lecture will highlight the emergence and evolution of our voice in the field and how we envision its future.

Taktyk is a landscape architecture office based in Paris and Brussels that experiments with introducing lush plant communities into existing spatial situations. The contrast between the natural and the built environment becomes very visible in their works, because special attention is given to creating new spatial quality that arises from the overlap between the two. New environments are always born from coworking with future users.

The lectures are intended for all disciplines, not only for students and professionals in the field of architecture.

All lectures are held on Thursdays at 6 pm in the EKA main auditorium. All lectures are in English and free of charge.

Schedule of the Spring 2025 lectures:

March 27. Toposcape:

April 3. Ingo Kowarik

April 10. Jan van Schaik

April 24. Taktyk

Within the framework of a series of open lectures, the Faculty of Architecture of EKA presents a dozen unique practitioners and valued theorists in the field in Tallinn every academic year.

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

www.avatudloengud.ee

Maria Lalou & Skafte Aymo-Boot
→ Lecture performance: [UN]FINISHED
→ Screening: Barbaresou Legacy, or The Cursed One, 2024
→ Book presentation: [UN]FINISHED – Atlas of Athens’ Incomplete Buildings – A Story of Hidden Antimonuments (Jam Sam Books, 2023)

The architectural archetype of the unfinished concrete building can be found everywhere in the Athenian cityscape. Those structures, left in the middle of a discontinued building process in a seemingly never-ending pause, are signs of invisible financial and political forces defining the physical appearance of the city. With its character of a ruin of a forgotten purpose the unfinished building is at the same time pointing to the past and to the future, as a frozen moment of time preserved ever since its volume reached that concrete state. The unfinished concrete skeletons of Athens are keepers of stories that are evidence of unseen structures that form the Greek society: family, bureaucracy, and finance. The work of Lalou & Aymo-Boot makes apparent how these ever-present factors continuously influence the everyday of the city and its inhabitants.

The full story of Barbaresou Legacy, or The Cursed One is included as one of the chapters in the book [UN]FINISHED – Atlas of Athens’ Incomplete Buildings – A Story of Hidden Antimonuments by Maria Lalou & Skafte Aymo-Boot, published in 2023 by Jap Sam Books.

Maria Lalou is a Greek conceptual sculptor and experimental filmmaker. Her work focuses on the politics of the viewer in the form of installations, performances, filmic documents and publications. She has presented her work internationally in exhibitions, screenings and lectures and published two monographs: [theatro] (Onomatopee, 2015) and the camera (Dolce Publications, 2019).

Skafte Aymo-Boot is a Danish architect with an independent design and research practice. He has realised a variety of permanent and temporary works in Europe and Asia, many of which are the result of collaborations with artists operating in the overlap between architecture and visual art. He is also a partner at the architectural office OP – Open Platform in Copenhagen.

Since 2012, Lalou & Aymo-Boot have worked together on [UN]FINISHED, their continuous research on the unfinished concrete buildings of Athens. In 2020, they founded cross section archive in Athens, a space for art and architecture, exploring urban phenomena that occur in the intersection of those disciplines and how historical facts, political structures and everyday circumstances have been interfering with, forming, and directing them. They curate an annual thematic program of research and exhibitions, inviting artists, architects and thinkers to collectively investigate and expand the theme at stake, and publish the zine Document.

Contemporary Art and Context is a lecture series hosted by MA Contemporary Art and features talks by artists, curators, and researchers, offering diverse perspectives on contemporary art practices and their societal contexts.

The lecture takes place in English, everyone is welcome to join!

The 2025 spring semester session of the Open Lectures “City as Novel Ecosystem” focuses on landscape architecture, specifically the interaction of the city, people and nature. In connection with the EKA doctoral school conference taking place on April 10, the lecture series will include a lecture by one of the seminar’s keynote speakers on the meaning of research methods.

On April 10 at 6 pm, Dr. Jan van Schaik will give an open lecture “The work is the Knowledge” in the EKA main auditorium.

Jan van Schaik will discuss the productive conflict inherent in reflective practice research – namely that there are both benefits and detriments to halting the flow-state of creating to critically observe that same act of creating. And he will discuss how reflective practice research is bound to a networked community of practice, and how defining and owning this binding is critical to a practitioner making a case for the existence of an original contribution to knowledge in their own work.

Dr Jan van Schaik is an artist and architect based in Melbourne. He is the director of MvS Architects, a researcher and PhD supervisor at RMIT Architecture & Urban Design, founder of +Concepts creative practice presentation and performance series, author of the Lost Tablets artwork series, and the design director of creative sector strategy and advocacy consultancy Future Tense. Making art about architecture, and vice versa, Jan is engaged in the governance and communities of both.

The lectures are intended for all disciplines, not only for students and professionals in the field of architecture.

All lectures are held on Thursdays at 6 pm in the EKA main auditorium. All lectures are in English and free of charge.

Schedule of the Spring 2025 lectures:

March 27. Toposcape: Justyna Dziedziejko & Magdalena Wnęk 

April 3. Ingo Kowarik

April 10. Jan van Schaik

April 24. Taktyk

Within the framework of a series of open lectures, the Faculty of Architecture of EKA presents a dozen unique practitioners and valued theorists in the field in Tallinn every academic year.

www.avatudloengud.ee

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

Lecture by Dr. Jan van Schaik will be held in cooperation with the Estonian Doctoral School for Engineering and Technology. Project “Cooperation between universities to promote doctoral studies” (2021-2027.4.04.24-0003) is co-funded by the European Union.