Category: Doctoral School

Pre-reviewing of Art and Design PhD student Dila Demir’s first design case-study “SQUEAKY/PAIN” will take place via Zoom on Friday, May 14th at 15.00.
Case-study “SQUEAKY/PAIN” is part of the artistic doctoral thesis of Dila Demir.
Please register for the pre-reviewing HERE

Peer Reviewers: Dr. Danielle Wilde and Dr. Claudia Núñez-Pacheco
Supervisors: Dr. Nithikul Nimkulrat and Dr. Kristi Kuusk

Online Exposition “SQUEAKY/PAIN”: https://dilademir.com/PhD-Porjects

Dila is a Ph.D. student at the Estonian Academy of Arts. She is working in the field of interactive textiles, bodily engagements, soma design, and somaesthetics. She will be presenting her first case study on the 14th of May. Her first design case titled “SQUEAKY/PAIN” is an inquiry into the possibilities of wearable interactive textiles to facilitate somaesthetic awareness through movement-based bodily interactions. The project utilizes bodily disturbances as a design material for bodily engagements, specifically, pain is adopted as a bodily disturbance in this design case. “SQUEAKY/PAIN” is the name of the interactive wearable artifact that externalizes pain by mimicking its qualities. With this project, Dila is exploring the ways of promoting somaesthetic awareness via sensory bodily interactions by mimicking the pain experience. The research question of the project is:

How pain can be externalized through interactive textiles and how interactive textiles that externalize pain can facilitate somaesthetic awareness?

In addition to the peer review event, Dila is presenting her work in a form of online exposition (https://dilademir.com/PhD-Porjects). In this online exposition, you can explore the research and design process, and findings of her study.

The annual Conference of EKA Doctoral School will take place on April 15th, 2021.

Performers, discussants and moderators will participate via ZOOM, all other participants are welcome to follow the conference via EKA TV https://tv.artun.ee/eka. 

Viewers are welcome to ask questions via the link under the EKA TV broadcast window.

Please register by April 13th at the latest.

Conference is supported by European Regional Development Fund

TIMETABLE

10:00 gathering to Zoom and EKA TV

10:05 welcoming words: Vice rector for research Dr. Anu Allas

10:20 introduction from Visiting professor Dr. Danielle Wilde 

10:30 keynote talk: 

Dr. Lina Michelkevičė, associate professor Dr. Vytautas Michelkevičius (Vilnius Academy of Arts) “Atlas of Diagrammatic Imagination: How Can Maps Transfer Knowledge in Artistic Research”. Moderator Dr. Anu Allas

11:30 coffee break

Art and Design
Moderator Dr. Liina Unt

11:40 Britta Benno “Thinking in Layers, Worlding in Layers. Posthuman Landscapes in Extended Drawings and Prints” (supervisor Dr. Elnara Taidre). Discussant Ulvi Haagensen

12:15 Ulvi Haagensen “An Unravelling Line: A Story of Cleaning” (supervisors Dr. Liina Unt, Jan Guy). Discussant Britta Benno

12:50 lunch break

Cultural Heritage and Conservation
Moderator Dr. Anneli Randla

13:30 Maria Hansar “How Do We Make New Knowledge in the Conservation and Cultural Heritage Domain?” (supervisor Prof. Hilkka Hiiop). Discussant Nina Stener Jørgensen

14:05 Triin Talk “The Changes in the Community and Functionality of Tallinn Old Town” (supervisor Dr. Lilian Hansar, Caludio Milano). Discussant Mattias Malk

14:40 stretch break

Architecture and Urban Planning
Moderator Dr. Jüri Soolep

14:50 Mattias Malk “The Urban Fabric, Rail Infrastructure and Fit – A Rail Baltic Case Study From Tallinn” (supervisor Prof. Maroš Krivý). Discussant Triin Talk

15:25 Nina Stener Jørgensen “The Power of the Tower: Nicolas Schöffer’s Tour Lumière Cybernetique for La Défense 1962–1973” (Supervisor prof. Maroš Krivý). Discussant Maria Hansar

16:00 concluding discussion:

Vice rector for research Dr. Anu Allas, Visiting professor Dr. Danielle Wilde, Dr. Liina Unt, Prof. Krista Kodres, Dr. Anneli Randla, Dr. Jüri Soolep

16:45 break

Evening programme:

17:30 Screening of a research movie “Ruinenlust Lasnamäel: ettekanded kunstnik-uurijale” by Britta Benno. The movie is in Estonian.

For more information:
Sirja-Liisa Eelma
sirja-liisa.eelma@artun.ee

Conference is part of the project “EKA LOOVKÄRG – Eesti visuaal- ja ruumikultuuri õppe- ja teaduskeskus (Sisutegevuste projekt)” nr 2014-2020.4.01.16-0045.

Situated Writing as Theory and Method – Or Why Don’t You Write a Novella Instead of an Article?

Lecturer: Prof Mona Livholts

22-23 April 10.00-15.00

Registration fo PhD students HERE:
Registration is open until March 15.

How can we create spaces for writing and language in the academic world that are inclusive to diverse ways of knowing and life forms, textually, materially and visually? This seminar invites you as participants to engage in thinking, conversations and practices of writing as art-based practice in dialogue with your own research projects. It is inspired by the ideas and practices from my book Situated writing as theory and method. The untimely academic novella (Routledge 2019), where I theorise writing as a situated practice that are embodied and spatially located across spaces, institutions, and landscapes. The methodological tool is the writing of untimely academic novellas, composed by literary fiction and creative narrative life writing genres such as diaries and letters, memory work, poetic writing, and photography.

The seminar is designed to inspire your own novella writing. It begins with an introductory lecture where I talk about the departures of situated writing and diffraction as a key conceptualisation for multiple forms of writing, with exemplars from the untimely academic novellas “The Professor’s Chair”, “The Snow Angel” and “Writing Water”. It continues with hands-on writing practices and small and large group conversations based on selected reading and individual preparations (see separate document).

Mona Livholts [pronouns: hon/hän/she] is Swedish Language Professor of Social Work in the Department of Social Sciences, University of Helsinki; founder and leader of The Network for Reflexive Academic Writing Methodologies (RAW) 2008–2017. Research focuses on creative writing and art-based methods, in particular auto/biographical and narrative life writing genres such as diaries and letters, memory work, poetry, and photography. Research themes include media narratives on rape, gender, space, and communication, social art and glocal- and post-anthropocentric social work.

Selected publications: Situated Writing as Theory and Method. The Untimely Academic Novella (Routledge 2019), Discourse and Narrative Methods: Theoretical Departures, Analytical Strategies and Situated Writing (Sage with Tamboukou 2015), Emergent Writing Methodologies in Feminist Studies (Routledge, 2012).

Blogposts on writing: https://bsapgforum.com/2019/10/07/situated-writing-as-theory-and-method-or-why-dont-you-write-a-novella-instead-of-an-article-dr-mona-livholts/

http://www.urbariablog.fi/tracing-urban-exhaustion-through-slow-writing/

This event is organised by the Graduate School of Culture Studies and Arts, supported by the ASTRA project of the Estonian Academy of Arts – EKA LOOVKÄRG (European Union, European Regional Development Fund)

On Monday, 14 December at 16.00, pre-reviewing of Art and Design programme PhD student Britta Benno’s exhibition „ Ruinenlust: Lasnamägi” will take place at Hobusepea Gallery (and via Zoom). Exhibition is part of the artistic (practice-based) doctoral thesis of Britta Benno.

Audience is welcome to join via Zoom. Link HERE

The exhibition is open until 14 December, 2020.

Supervisor: Dr. Elnara Taidre
Pre-reviewers of the exhibition: Dr. Elo-Hanna Seljamaa, Andreas Trossek

When waking up from a lunch-time nap, it had transformed to a gigantic future dinosaur that no one had ever seen before. One can imagine the soaked bulks of houses thrown on a hillocky landscape behind the fog. These are the ruins of concrete panel houses that have luckily survived in a spot that once was called Lasnamäe.

The cuboids had no windows nor doors, darkness smirked its toothless grin behind the cavities. And yet, there was no emptiness there – new life had moved in Lasnamäe. Creatures like the dinosaur were living there – huge, miraculous animals whose ancestors originated from the Anthropocene.

Ruinenlust in Lasnamäe is a science fictional prospective to post-human urban landscape where jungle and mountaneous terrain with the future creatures have taken over the ruins of a former bedroom community. Pleasure of looking at the ruins, Ruinenlust, is projected to the district of Lasnamäe that has lost the heavy burden of meanings. The message has been expressed through the models of houses characteristic to Lasnamäe have been used in puppet animation as well as the etching drawings that look like findings from an ancient civilisation.

Marginal and old-time arts, printmaking and stereoscopic puppet animation accompanied by harpsichord music form a staged installation. Concern about the dystopian state of our environment motivates to imagine the post-human future. Hybrid art and layered combination becomes the tool of such imagination and depiction.

Current exhibition also serves as Britta Benno’s second peer-reviewed creative output of her studies in the Doctoral School at the Estonian Academy of Arts. In her artistic research, Benno concentrates on depicting science fictional landscape in the extended field of drawing and printmaking.

Britta Benno (b. 1984) is an artist mainly working with drawing and printmaking, she lives and works in Tallinn. She is intrigued by various hybrid techniques and materials as well as the new perspectives that start to emerge when juxtapose and combine the abovementioned techniques and materials. Benno’s exhibitions of the past few years function as a series while depicting post-human urban landscapes. Conceptual keywords are: memory, power, fugacity of meanings (ruins), visualisation (worlding), mental tools of a graphic artist (layered thinking) and posthumanist philosophy.

Benno’s last pop-up exhibition Of Becoming a Shape of a Land(Scape) was completed during a residency in Iceland and was opened for a few days in Outver gallery, Iceland. In Tallinn the same exhibition project, titled as Once I Had, was held together with Heather Beardsley in Kraam Project Room in the autumn of 2019. The most prominent personal exhibition Dystopic Tallinn was open in Tallinn Art Hall gallery in the summer of 2019.

The artist expresses her gratitude to: Ragnar Neljandi (cameraman, animator, post-production), Heigo Eeriksoo (puppet master), Mait Eerik (prop master), Cultural Endowment of Estonia, Nukufilm LLC.
Exhibitions in Hobusepea gallery are supported by the Cultural Endowment of Estonia,

Estonian Ministry of Culture and Liviko Ltd.

Siim Tuksam, PhD student of the Estonian Academy of Arts, curriculum of Architecture and Urban Planning, will defend his thesis „Modulated Modularity – from mass customisation to custom mass production“ („Moduleeritud modulaarsus – masskohandamisest kohandatud masstootmiseni“) on the 22nd of December 2020 at 13.00 EET (UTC +2).

Audience is welcome to follow the live-stream on the link below: https://tv.artun.ee/doktoritoodekaitsmised

The defense will be held in English.

Supervisors: Dr. Renee Puusepp (Eesti Kunstiakadeemia) and Dr. Antoine Picon (Harvard University)

External reviewers: Andrew Witt (Harvard University) and Dr. John Harding (University of Reading)

Opponent: Andrew Witt

The digitalisation of the construction industry is in full swing. The infrastructure for the computer-aided fabrication of buildings is here, yet mass customisation by robotically manufactured infinitesimally variable components, as suggested by the early digital architects of the 1990s, is still not viable on an industrial scale. Architecture is seemingly forced to adapt to the industry rather than the other way round. How is it possible, within this context, to maintain the autonomy of the architectural discipline, facing the realities of extensive standardisation, automation, and artificial intelligence?

Digital architecture as a critical discourse was largely built upon Gilles Deleuze’s idea of folding, proposing a continuous formation of matter based on intensities. Folding in architecture resulted in an almost frictionless combination of topology and tectonics, where the whole consists of continuously variegated adaptive details. It is this continuous adaptation that is contested within the thesis in which modulation is proposed as an active intervention rather than frictionless optimisation – subverting the prevailing ideology from within by taking the system more seriously than the system takes itself, to paraphrase Slavoj Žižek.

Looking at modularity in architecture, starting with the professor of architecture at the École Polytechnique Jean-Nicolas-Louis Durand and the analytical method at the beginning of the 19th century, and studying mid-twentieth century modular structures inspired by system theory, a lineage is traced towards the digitisation of architecture. The introduction of modularity into digital architecture produces an internal tension that constrains the formation of matter. In the 1960s the German architect Eckhard Schulze-Fielitz explored this type of emergent formation through the term Raumstruktur (structure of space), a macro material capable of modulation. By modulating the conditioning circumstances into a model of the Raumstruktur, a design space is created that governs formation – not a mould, but an emergent structure of space.

These internal tensions manifest themselves in the formal qualities of this macro material as an expression of the underlying structure. Through this expression, the communicative and political dimensions of modulation are explored in the thesis, suggesting an ornamental quality within the work and therefore a differentiation from mere construction.

The study is projective and reflective at the same time – experimental research by design that turnsinto both practice research and theoretical research. Through a series of projects in collaboration with the Estonian wooden house manufacturing industry, this exploration has evolved from looking at mimetic algorithms and variable tectonics towards a pre-rationalised design approach – modulated modularity.

Members of the Defence Council: Dr. Jüri Soolep, Dr. Anu Allas, Prof. Klaske Havik, Prof. Panu Lehtovuori, Dr. Suzie Attiwill, Prof. Toomas Tammis

Please find the PhD thesis HERE

Sille Pihlak, PhD student of the Estonian Academy of Arts, curriculum of Architecture and Urban Planning, will defend her thesis “Prototyping Protocols, Protocolling Prototypes: A Methodological Development of Somatic Modularity for Algorithmic Timber Architecture in Estonian Context” („Prototüüpides protokolle, protokollides prototüüpe: Somaatilise modulaarsuse metodoloogia kujunemine puitarhitektuuris“) on the 21st of December 2020 at 10.00 EET (UTC +2).

Audience is welcome to follow the live-stream on the link below: https://tv.artun.ee/doktoritoodekaitsmised

The defense will be held in English.

Supervisors: Dr. Jüri Kermik (Eesti Kunstiakadeemia) and Dr. Roland Snooks (RMIT University)

External reviewers: Prof. Michael U. Hensel (Vienna University of Technology) and Dr. Jan van Schaik (RMIT University)

Opponents: Prof. Michael U. Hensel and Dr. Jan van Schaik

This practice-based thesis posits the methodology of somatic modularity as a tool to manage complex, multilayered and highly collaborative workflow processes associated with algorithmic timber architecture. Based on computational modularity and variable resolutions, this methodology is systematized and articulated through the dynamic relationship between the detail and the whole, intending to implement that throughout the design process, including its output. The key objective of the proposed methodology is to identify design “protocols” (a set of design parameters) according to different levels of tectonic complexity introduced in the process of the “prototype” (the preliminary version ) development. The scope of resulting workflow models and their potential to adequately support new algorithmic design approaches is analysed specifically in Estonian context.

For nearly 90 years, the Estonian construction industry has been neither particularly sustainable nor automated. However, our recent work in the architectural practice PART indicates the possibility of positioning renewable materials again at the heart of the large-scale building economy with digital collaborative workflow between architects, engineers and fabricators. My dissertation addresses the question of how to robustly embed architects’ design intentions in the entire production chain of architecture from design to fabrication, combining bottom-up and top-down design workflows, which will allow more sustainable and design-led contemporary timber architecture to emerge.

I argue for a specific algorithmic workflow, with a central, agile, common platform that has proven to be an advantageous solution in pavilion scale construction, with design implications both in tectonics and for the way we work together. My dissertation maps the development of architectural practice PART, which collaborates closely with Estonian timber house manufacturers, and whose design research has developed from bespoke (2015-2017) and standardized design systems (2017-2018) towards methods of somatic modularity (a variable modular system) since 2018. In each of these periods of development I identify the negotiation between automated design protocols and tangible prototypes and show their potential for contributing to a more articulated, collaborative and material-driven architecture.

I conclude that the systematization of digital design techniques also responds to the changing position of the creative practitioner in relation to algorithmic workflow, and that the application of somatic modularity as a design methodology provides for a strategy to better facilitate design ideas in the rapidly-automating construction industry.

Members of the Defence Council: Dr. Jüri Soolep, Dr. Anu Allas, Prof. Klaske Havik, Prof. Panu Lehtovuori, Dr. Suzie Attiwill, Prof. Toomas Tammis

Please find the PhD thesis HERE

Ingrid Ruudi, PhD student of the Estonian Academy of Arts, curriculum of Art History and Visual Culture, will defend her thesis Spaces of the Interregnum. Transformations in Estonian Architecture and Art, 1986–1994 („Ruumiline interreegnum. Muutused Eesti arhitektuuris ja kunstis 1986–1994“) on the 18th of December 2020 at 17.00 at Põhja pst 7, room A501.

The defence will also be live-streamed on the following link: https://tv.artun.ee/doktoritoodekaitsmised

The defense will be held in English.

Supervisor: Prof. Andres Kurg (Estonian Academy of Arts)

External reviewers: Prof. Vladimir Kulić (Iowa State University), Dr. Johannes Saar (University of Tartu)

Opponent: Prof. Vladimir Kulić

Conventionally, the Estonian architecture history tends to address the late Soviet postmodernism up to the mid-1980s, and then resume with buidlings of the independent republic from the mid-1990s. The period in between constitutes a kind of gap, and indeed, there was a remarkable decline in building activities. Nevertheless, it was a highly loaded period of active production of new social space, establishment of public sphere and public space, and rethinking of the relationship between built environment and its subject. Those processes continue to have a noted impact on our spatial and social environment up to this day. The doctoral thesis challenges this conventional periosidation of the history of Estonian architecture and art, focusing on the era between two more or less clearly defined social formations – the interregnum of 1986–1994 which must not be treated as a temporary transition on the way to ’normalcy’ but as a specific period of abundant creativity worthwile in its own right. During this dynamic era certain late Soviet practices continued while accelerated appropriation and interpretation of new western impulses took place. The transition from one spatial regime to the other did not happen as a clear and definitive cut but rather as a process that was hybrid, fluid and uneven. The dissertation demonstrates how the production of new space took place on various interconnected levels: built and planned, dreamt and imagined, performed and enacted, as well as theorised and reflected.

The monographic thesis encompasses five loosely connected case studies. The chapter Unbuilt space analyses the most vivid examples of the large amount of unrealised architecture projects and urban designs, focusing on aspects such as production of new public space, identity building and the architects’ agency. Utopian space looks at artist Tõnis Vint’s vision of a new high-rise urban settlement on Naissaar island near Tallinn, proposed as a free trade zone, considering the case in the context of international economic developments and New Age ideologies. Discursive space focuses on the two first instances of Nordic-Baltic Architecture Triennials as attempts at establishing an international platform for theoretical exchange, demonstrating the different expectations of the Nordic and Baltic participants and diverging positions regarding the issue of regional architecture  in the global context. Performative space investigates the architecture and performance practices of Group T as an interconnected phenomenon, aiming at establishing temporary counterpublic spaces and an alternative concept of community to counteract the nationalistic social tendencies of the era. Institutional space looks at the renovation process of the functionalist Tallinn Art Hall as a conceptual processual work of art by George Steinmann, demonstrating the artist’s agency in establishing international transdisciplinary networks and reconceptualisating the artspace as a multivalent discursive space. The chapter also addresses the project’s inevitable entanglement with certain neocolonialist allusions and the restitutional mentality of the era, fuelled by the desire for rebirth of the pre-war republic.

The case studies demonstrate that the Estonian architecture culture from the end of the 1980s to the beginning of the 1990s was far from in hibernation: quite the contrary, it was unprecedentedly vigorous and operated in active dialogue with other processes in the production of space for the new society. Making use of the radical openness of the era, the architecture of the interregnum built upon the previous late Soviet experience and realised some of its desires. It also tested out new impulses connected with the opening up of the society. The experiments stemmed from a belief in creative individuals’ essential role in imagining future space and their right to participate in the public sphere, thus helping to keep open the discussions of possibilities. The spaces thus produced might have been intangible but they were nevertheless vital in shaping the social life of the interregnum.

Members of the Defence Council: Prof. Krista Kodres, Dr. Anu Allas, Prof. Virve Sarapik, Dr. Anneli Randla, Prof. Juhan Maiste, Prof. Marek Tamm, Prof. Tõnu Viik

Please find the PhD thesis HERE

On Thursday, 19 November at 17.00, pre-reviewing of Art and Design programme PhD student Sofja Hallik’s exhibition “New World” will take place at Very Hard, 2nd floor of T1 shopping mall. Exhibition is part of the artistic (practice-based) doctoral thesis of Sofja Hallik.

The exhibition opening will take place on November 5 at 18-21.

The exhibition is open until 21 November, 2020
Wed-Sat 12-19

Pre-reviewers of the exhibition: Dr. Raivo Kelomees, Keiu Krikmann

Supervisors: Prof. Kadri Mälk, Dr. Jaak Tomberg

Kristina Jõekalda, PhD student of the Estonian Academy of Arts, Curriculum of Art History and Visual Culture, will defend her thesis “German Monuments in the Baltic Heimat? A Historiography of Heritage in the “Long Nineteenth Century”” (“Saksa mälestised ja Balti Heimat. Pärandi historiograafia “pikal 19. sajandil””) on the 20th of November 2020 at 11.00 at Põhja pst 7, room A501.

Up to 30 people from EKA can participate on-site, please register HERE
The defence will also be live-streamed on the following link: https://tv.artun.ee/doktoritoodekaitsmised

Live-stream viewers can submit their questions HERE

The defense will be held in English.

Supervisors: Prof. Krista Kodres (Estonian Academy of Arts), Prof. Ulrike Plath (Tallinn University)

External reviewers: Prof. Jörg Hackmann, Dr. Ants Hein

Opponent: Prof. Jörg Hackmann (University of Szczecin; University of Greifswald)

In Estonian humanities the Baltic Germans (Deutschbalten) are mostly addressed as a historical phenomenon, despite the fact that the architecture that they left behind from medieval and later times still continues to shape the local environment of the present. How did the Baltic Germans project the image they held of their past onto their goals for the present and the future? How did that path relate to the culture of the Germans living elsewhere in Eastern Europe? What new research prospects are there available to be taken up today? This transdisciplinary and transnational dissertation looks at the representations of Baltic German identity that expressed themselves in art historiography and in heritage preservation from late eighteenth century until the interwar era. This period witnessed not just the rise of nationalism, but also the emergence of the concept of heritage as a culturally valuable entity, the formation of the humanities and of the idea of civil society. Attitudes to monuments and historiography are reflections on political and social processes. Nevertheless, not much research exists to date on the history of art history and heritage preservation taken as a combined topic, nor yet on the popular dimension of these fields, beyond academic circles. This thesis seeks to show that, rather than leaning exclusively on Estonian nationalism, the idea of the existence of a national heritage goes back to the patriotic movement of the Baltic Germans, which had also struggled to create and preserve the symbols of a glorious past against the background of German identity. This is the first attempt made within Estonian humanities to research the challenges that heritage studies – a field heavily tilted toward contemporary concerns – have posed for the discipline of art history. The analysis also has many overlaps with nationalism studies and German diaspora studies, the key concepts being ʻheritageʼ, Heimat and ʻnationʼ, all seen as constructs. What is in focus here is not the local architectural monuments themselves, but the process of turning them into heritage. Ideological standpoints are more fully articulated in the handbooks and widely disseminated texts that hence provide the main sources for this work, especially texts relating to cultural memory, identity and belonging. Addressing various media by which (national) heritage is constructed – in image, word and practice – this dissertation constitutes a critical historiography of texts on the history and protection of local architecture, focusing for the most part on the contribution of the learned societies and of Wilhelm Neumann (1849–1919). The dissertation therefore looks at discussions on monuments through various visions of continuity and discontinuity, of similarity and difference, of localism and universalism, of nationalism and internationalism, of Balticness and Germanness (and Estonianness), of scholarship and popularisation.

Members of the Defence Council: Prof. Andres Kurg, Dr. Anu Allas, Prof. Virve Sarapik, Dr. Anneli Randla, Prof. Juhan Maiste, Prof. Marek Tamm, Prof. Tõnu Viik

Please find the PhD thesis HERE

On Tuesday, 15 September at 14.20, pre-reviewing of Art and Design programme PhD student Ulvi Haagensen’s exhibition „ Thea Koristaja Museum” will take place at Hobusepea Gallery. Exhibition is part of the artistic (practice-based) doctoral thesis of Ulvi Haagensen.
Please registrate your participation at the pre-reviewing irene.hutsi@artun.ee.

The exhibition is open until 21 September, 2020.

Supervisors: Dr Liina Unt, Jan Guy (The University of Sidney).
Pre-reviewers of the exhibition: artist Urmas Lüüs and dr Ester Bardone, dr Anu Kannike.

Ulvi Haagensen’s solo exhibition “Thea Koristaja Museum” at Hobusepea Gallery

“Welcome to our place”, says Thea Koristaja, as she opens the door and indicates for us to enter an exhibition that explores the connections between art and everyday life. Thea Koristaja is an imaginary person, an artist, and a cleaner and this is her museum. Together with two other imaginary artists, known as Olive Puuvill and Loome Uurija, she works with Ulvi Haagensen, who is quite real, to explore how art and life can meet, converge, overlap and sometimes clash.

The exhibition uses the upstairs and downstairs of the gallery to present two different contexts – the exhibition space and the studio. Upstairs is clean and tidy, not dissimilar to a living room or hallway in a home – after all, we want to make a good impression, don’t we? But the real action of everyday life may in fact take place somewhere else, in the kitchen, the laundry, in front of the telly, in the everyday, when the visitors aren’t visiting. Downstairs is the cluttered, untidy workspace. This is where Haagensen and her imaginary team discover the unexpected as they push the familiar into new territory. A discarded greeny-blue Värska mineral water bottle, new and recycled timber, a length of rusted steel, wool and cotton yarns in a myriad of colours – all start to find a persona or a potential they never knew they had. Is it possible, here in the studio, to see the most exciting part, the magic of making, the moment when the thing emerges as a thing? Or is that something that takes place in the artist’s mind and can’t be shared?

Ulvi Haagensen was born in Sydney, Australia, but has been living, working and teaching in Tallinn for many years. She studied at City Art Institute in Sydney (BA) and College of Fine Art, University of New South Wales (MFA) and is currently doing her PhD at the Estonian Academy of Arts researching the connections and overlap between art and everyday life, as seen through the eyes of an artist, for whom art, work and everyday life are closely interwoven. 2018–2019 she spent a year as Artist-in-Residence and Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Sydney. She has had solo exhibitions in Estonia, Australia, Sweden and Lithuania.