Open Lectures

On June 13 at 1:00 p.m., ELIA UAx program partner Taras Lesiv, Vice-Rector for Academic Affairs and Research of the Lviv Academy of Arts, will give an open lecture at EKA. 

The lecture is part of the Transform4Europe Week program.

After the lecture, Kristiina Krabi-Klanberg will moderate the Q&A.

Taras Lesiv has been teaching art and art history at Lviv National Academy of Arts (Ukraine) since 2007. He received both BA and MA degrees in Fine and Applied Arts, specializing in sacred art. Since 2005, he has been employed as an artist and project manager on various interior design projects for Christian churches. During 2017–2018 he was a Fulbright fellow at Georgia State University (USA). He defended his dissertation “Icon Painting in Galicia from the late 19th – early 21 centuries: Artistic Imagery and Theoretical Discourse” in 2021, receiving the Candidate of Sciences degree (PhD). Taras Lesiv was appointed Vice-Rector for Academic Affairs and Research of the Lviv National Academy of Arts in September 2021. His research interests embrace history, theory, and practice of Christian sacred arts, visual arts and national/ethnic identity building.

During the war, the Lviv National Academy of Arts was faced with the critical challenge of safeguarding the safety and education of its students. This presentation provides a narrative account that highlights the diverse challenges our art institution encountered at the onset of the conflict, offering insights into our management strategies under trying circumstances. These challenges, including the mass departure of teachers and students to foreign countries, the transformation of educational settings, and financial constraints, all occurred alongside ongoing higher education reforms. Through partnerships with other art institutions and thanks to the dedication of our faculty, staff, and students, we established a resilient framework to maintain classes during the chaotic wartime conditions. While overcoming numerous obstacles, we are prioritizing the quality of education during and after the war. Recognizing the importance of support from both within and outside Ukraine, our goal is to prevent brain drain and preserve the vibrancy of art education.

Supported by: ERASMUS programme

Film Screening

Title: Zum Vergleich / In Comparison 

Harun Farocki (2009)

x  Project Presentation Building Information: Kadambari Baxi, Klaus Platzgummer, Lennart Wolff (2022-)

Description

Bricks are the resonating foundations of society. Bricks are simply very long-playing records. Like records, they appear in series, but every brick is slightly different – not just another brick in the wall. Bricks create spaces, organise social relations and store knowledge about social structures. They resonate in a way that tells us if they are any good. Bricks form the basic sound of our societies, but we haven’t yet learned to listen to them.

Farocki’s film lets our eyes and ears consider different traditions of brick production in comparison – and not in competition, not as a clash of cultures. Farocki shows us various brick production sites in their colours, movements and sounds.

Farocki shows sites of brick production in their colours, movements and sounds. Brick burning, brick carrying, bricklaying, bricks on bricks, no voice-over. 20 inter-titles in 60 minutes tell us something about the temporality of brickmaking processes. The film shows us that certain modes of production require their own duration and that differences between cultures can be shown in brick time.

(Ute Holl)

Credits

Original title: Zum Vergleich. Director Harun Farocki; Script Harun Farocki, Matthias Rajmann; Cinematographer Ingo Kratisch; Sound Matthias Rajmann; Editor Meggie Schneider; Drawings Andreas Siekmann; Collaboration Antje Ehmann, Anand Narayan Damle, Michael Knauss, Regina Krotil, Iyamperumal Mannankatti, Mamta Murthy, Markus Nechleba, Jan Ralske, Yukara Shimizu, Isabelle Verreet.

Format 16mm, col. Length 61 min. Year 2009

“Bricks create spaces, organise social relations and store knowledge about social structures. […] Bricks form the basic sound of our societies, but we haven’t yet learned to listen to them. Farocki’s film lets our eyes and ears consider different traditions of brick production in comparison […]” (Ute Holl)

Harun Farocki’s film In Comparison (2009) opens up a global perspective on the conditions of the production of bricks and compares their modes, ranging from full automation to manual labour. The film screening serves as a point of departure for a discussion on today’s labour processes in architecture.

It will be introduced by Kadambari Baxi, Klaus Platzgummer, and Lennart Wolff, and accompanied by a presentation of their ongoing research and exhibition project Building Information (2022 -). Their project addresses labour processes in architecture in the context of digital ecosystems, structuring relationships among human and non-human actors. It was exhibited at the Architekturmuseum of the TU Berlin and led to a series of events in collaboration with ARCH+.

A series of open architectural lectures will be held this 2023 spring under the title “Triggers of Architecture”. The theme brings architects and theoreticians to Tallinn, who analyze the root causes of architecture and the means of making it.

On May 25 at 6 p.m., Kadambari Baxi will explore the connections between architecture and activism, geopolitics, and propaganda with the lecture “Building Activism: A New Agenda for Architecture”.

She will share her collaborative projects where concerns for human rights and climate futures spur different forms of architectural activism. Examining migrant labor exploitation on construction sites, reproductive rights politics, transnational air pollution and climate resilience, she links architecture to geopolitics and advocacy. The lecture discusses how local building sites expand unequal global processes; climate models reconstruct transnational air pollution to depict new zones of toxic responsibility; a plant-installation advocates for abortion rights, and a stalled climate resilience construction evokes imminent climate futures. Collectively, these projects aim to outline a new agenda for activism in architecture.

Kadambari Baxi, architect and educator based in New York, works collaboratively forming interdisciplinary partnerships on project basis. Her design, research and media projects circulate widely in international forums. As Professor of Practice in the Undergraduate Architecture Department at Barnard College, Columbia University, she teaches design studios and environmental visualization seminars. Recent advocacy includes cofounding the group “Who Builds Your Architecture?” and serving on the advisory board of “The Architecture Lobby.”

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

The lectures are intended for all disciplines, not only for students and professionals in the field of architecture. All lectures take place in the large auditorium of EKA, are in English and free of charge.

The lecture series is supported by the Estonian Cultural Endowment.

Curated by Andres Ojari.

www.avatudloengud.ee

Event in Facebook

Additional information:

Tiina Tammet

E-post: arhitektuur@artun.ee

Tel. +372 642 0071

The evening begins with a lecture on Socially involved design by Michał Stefanowski. He will be talking about the practice of social design and showing examples from the world and projects realized at the Design Department in Warsaw. The lecture is followed by a conversation with a focus on the impact and layers of meaning of social design. We will discuss intervention options of social design and what makes it different from other design solutions. In other words, why it is or is not important to deal with social design.

REGISTER HERE

Speakers:

Michał Stefanowski has an active design practice. As a professional, he is a member of the INNO+NPD design team. He has created designs for products, street furniture, packaging, wayfinding systems and visual communication. He is the co-author of the City Information System for Warsaw, the Information System for the Royal Castle in Warsaw and the visual identity of the National Bank of Poland, among others. He is a professor and Head of the Design Department at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. 

Ruth-Helene Melioranski is the Dean of Design at the Estonian Academy of Arts. She has a background in design research, practice and education, focussing on exploring how design can tackle societal challenges. She conceptualises new and emerging design practices in higher educational and professional contexts through her research-through-design projects. Her research focuses on relational design and its qualities. In her professional practice, she leads several strategic, service and co-design projects to help partners envision their future possibilities and build scenarios in healthcare and well-being.
Before her deanship, she developed the Design & Technology Futures MSc and supervised students’ teams with their design-driven innovation projects at Tallinn University of Technology. She was the founding head of the Estonian Design Centre (2008-2011) and, prior to that, the leader of the Estonian Design Year (2006-2007).

Daniel Kotsjuba is a designer working in Estonian Public Sector Innovation Team, part of Estonian Government Office. Their task is to help ministries and their sub-organisations design their services, process and strategies more user-centered. They base their work on design process, with an attention on behavioural sciences and experimentation framework.

Eva Liisa Kubinyi is a designer and creative researcher fascinated by the opportunities for children and young people to participate in society, the principles of open play and care models that support mental well-being. In her design practice, she relies parallelly on the theories of social design, service design and children’s culture.

Benjamin Moua is a NYC-based designer and creative making his return to EKA on April 25th, 2023 to share his insights on the current state, and future, of product design highlighted by topics in innovation, artificial intelligence, streamlined 3-D manufacturing, the global economy, sustainability, and consumer demand.

A series of open architectural lectures will be held this 2023 spring under the title “Triggers of Architecture”. The theme brings architects and theoreticians to Tallinn, who analyze the root causes of architecture and the means of making it.

On May 4, at 6 pm, Klaske Havik will analyze the connections between literature and architecture with the lecture “Between the lines. Poetic imagination in architecture”. Creative imagination is one of the most important tools of every creator, including an architect. Using examples, Klaske Havik examines how poetic imagination works, how some key thinkers and architects conceptualize it.

Klaske Havik is an architect, scholar and writer. She is professor of Architecture at TU Delft, holding the chair of Methods of Analysis and Imagination. Advocating a literary approach to architecture to address societal issues, Havik published, among many other edited books and articles, Urban Literacy. Reading and Writing Architecture (2014). She was editor of architecture journals de Architect and OASE, and initiated the Writingplace Journal for Architecture and Literature. Havik’s literary work appeared in poetry collections and literary magazines.  She is Chair of the EU COST Action Writing Urban Places. New Narratives for the European City – an international and interdisciplinary network that seeks for more socially inclusive and locally specific urban places through the investigation of local narratives. In Estonia, Klaske has written for Maja and Ehituskunst, and been part of the thesis board at EKA.

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

The lectures are intended for all disciplines, not only for students and professionals in the field of architecture. All lectures take place in the large auditorium of EKA, are in English, free of charge.

The lecture series is supported by the Estonian Cultural Endowment.

Curated by Andres Ojari

www.avatudloengud.ee

https://www.facebook.com/EKAarhitektuur/

Additional information:

Tiina Tammet

E-post: arhitektuur@artun.ee

Tel. +372 642 0071

Online roundtable

Since February 2022, many Russian Imperial and Soviet statues and symbols have been removed from public space, accompanied by heated discussions in the local (social) media. The nature of the actions varies, but in several countries political rather than expert decisions have been the guiding force, with an immediate effect on the actual monuments of art, architecture and other cultural artefacts.

The international audience, at the same time, even in the neighbouring regions, has access to very few of those local debates – each country in Eastern and Central Europe has been handling similar kinds of issues on their own. To analyse these developments in more depth, a comparative approach and a longer historical perspective is needed. The situation is changing quickly, and new monuments are lost almost daily. Rather than the monuments themselves, this round table, firstly, seeks to document the local-level discussions, in order to develop a more nuanced understanding of the current situation as well as its broader contexts. Secondly, we want to learn from each other by gathering successful examples of artistic and other transdisciplinary interventions to safeguard or reinterpret those monuments.

The speakers include Linda Kaljundi, Riin Alatalu and Kristina Jõekalda (all Estonian Academy of Arts), Sofia Dyak, Iryna Sklokina (both Center for Urban History of East Central Europe in Lviv) and Mykola Homanyuk (Kherson State University, Ukraine), Maija Rudovska (independent scholar/curator, Latvia), Oxana Gourinovitch (Belarus/RWTH Aachen University), Olga Juutistenaho (Finland/Technical University of Berlin), Stephanie Herold (Technical University of Berlin, Germany), Dragan Damjanović, Patricia Počanić and Sanja Delić (all University of Zagreb, Croatia), Nini Palavandishvili (independent scholar/curator, Georgia), Małgorzata Łukianow (University of Warsaw, Poland), Linara Dovydaitytė (Vytautas Magnus University, Lithuania) and Ivo Mijnssen (independent scholar/journalist, Austria).

The online roundtable can be followed via live video stream on the Facebook page of the Institute of Art History and Visual Culture, Estonian Academy of Arts on Tuesday, 16th May 2023, from 14.00 to ca. 19.00 (Tallinn time, EEST).

If you wish to get involved as a discussant and receive a Zoom link, please let us know here by 15th May.

More information: Kristina Jõekalda (kristina.joekalda@artun.ee), Linda Kaljundi (linda.kaljundi@artun.ee).

GD Lecture Series is organized by EKA graphic design department, where various graphic designers are invited to speak about their life and practice.

Graphic designer and DJ Eleonora Šljanda will be visiting on April 4.

Eleonora has studied at both the Estonian Academy of Arts and the Gerrit Rietveld Academy.

The lecture will start at 5 p.m. at Estonian Academy of Arts in room C304.

Histories and memories of the 20th and 21st centuries in the Baltic States with its different colonialisms are entangled with the uneasy relations between the past and present. How can we acknowledge this history as layered and nuanced? And which methods could help us to address its blind spots and silences as well as solidarities?

In this presentation, Margaret Tali will introduce the transdisciplinary project “Communicating Difficult Pasts” (2019-2024) and focus on its different ways of engaging artists to answer these questions. At the heart of this collaborative project has been creating synergies between humanities scholarship, artistic research and curation in order to learn from each others’ methods and approaches in order to sharpen and enrich our perspectives to history writing. The exhibition “Difficult Pasts. Connected Worlds” co-curated with Ieva Astahovska in its framework at the National Gallery of Art in Vilnius (2022) and in the Latvian National Museum of Art (2020) presented its results to a broader public. During the lecture, Margaret Tali will introduce some of the works included by Lia Dostlieva and Andrii Dostliev, Jaana Kokko, and Quinsy Gario & Jörgen Gario.

Margaret Tali is an art historian and curator, who works as a postdoctoral research fellow at the Estonian Academy of Arts, Institute of Art History and Visual Culture. Her research interests include exhibition histories, curating difficult heritage, relationships of visual art and handicraft, and histories of the art museum. She holds a PhD from the Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis, University of Amsterdam. She is the author of Absence and Difficult Knowledge in Contemporary Art Museums (2018) and co-editor, with Ieva Astahovska, of the Memory Studies special issue Return of Suppressed Memories in Eastern Europe: Locality and Unsilencing Difficult Histories (2/2022). Together with Astahovska she has initiated the project Communicating Difficult Pasts, and as a part of which she co-curated the exhibition Difficult Pasts. Connected Worlds in the Latvian National Museum of Art (2019) and Lithuanian National Gallery of Art (2022).
margarettali.net