Category: Institute of Art History and Visual Culture

On Thursday, October 28th at 4pm, Ruth Sargent Noyes will give an open lecture “Globalizing art histories of North-eastern Europe before modernity: a view from the Baltic” as part of the Open Lectures’ series of the Institute of Art History and Visual Culture of the Estonian Academy of Arts.
Room: A-101

Through a series of queries and micro-historical case studies, Dr. Noyes takes up the questions of issues of globalizing Baltic art before modernity, from the perspective of an art historian focused on connecting Italy and the Baltic over the longue durée. Global approaches have been gaining momentum in recent years across fields dedicated to the study of art, architecture, and visual-material culture. An increasing number of scholars of North-Eastern Europe, including the Baltic sphere, have expanded the purview of research through the integration of comparative and transcultural methods. Elsewhere, the global turn has led to new transgeographical perspectives which have begun to challenge previous national paradigms in various art-historical traditions. This presentation examines these issues from a transregional, transcultural perspective, and also considers how integration of Baltic Europe’s art histories in the discipline’s ongoing explorations of cultural heterogeneity and global circulations of artefacts can be inflected through other fields.

Ruth Sargent Noyes took her BA (Harvard University) and MA and PhD (Johns Hopkins University) in Art History, and is presently Marie Skłodowska-Curie EU Senior Research Fellow at the National Museum of Denmark (Copenhagen). Author of a number of books and articles, her research takes up the intersection of art, religion, and science of the long Counter-Reformation (c. 1550-1800) in its global context, with special interest in cross-cultural perspectives between Italy and North-eastern Europe, including the Nordic-Baltic region. A 2014 Fellow of the American Academy in Rome and recipient of a number of research grants and awards, she currently leads the Marie Skłodowska-Curie European Union Individual Fellowship Project, The art of (re)moving relics and reforming holiness in Europe’s borderlands (TRANSLATIO).

Lecture will be held in English.

Covid certificates will be checked at the entrance of the lecture hall, masks are obligatory.

Online discussion “Working with the Post-Cold War Heritages in the Baltics and Beyond”

The discussion will take place on Facebook

Participants: Eglė Rindzevičiūtė, Hilkka Hiiop, Kati Lindström, Raitis Šmits, Linara Dovydaitytė, Ele Carpenter

Moderators: Ieva Astahovska, Linda Kaljundi

The visible traces of the Soviet period in the Baltic landscapes include diverse and numerous technologically political infrastructures, including remnants of abandoned, collapsed or destroyed military buildings. This online discussion addresses the ways of working with the post-cold war heritages from the perspective of environmental history, technology studies, as well as contemporary heritage conservation and art.

More info 

Facebook

This is the fourth discussion of the research and exhibition project “Reflecting Post-Socialism through Post-Colonialism in the Baltics,” organised by the Latvian Center for Contemporary Art in Riga in collaboration with Kumu Art Museum and the research project “Estonian Environmentalism in the 20th Century” (both Tallinn). The project analyses the imprints of post-socialism and post-colonialism in the Baltic region, here exploring them through the prism of environmental history and the current ecological crisis.

As a part of Tallinn Photomonth The Institute of Art History and Visual Culture’s Research Secretary and lecturer, Annika Toots, is curating the exhibition “Tierras malas”, which examines the representation of landscape in photography, emphasizing two aspects related to the landscape.

Artists: Bleda y Rosa (ES), Aap Tepper (EE), Paco Ulman (EE), Dovilė Dagienė (LT)

First of all, the exhibition focuses on landscape as a way of seeing, examining how landscapes are constructed through the gaze and looking. The exhibited works point out how some parts of the surrounding environment are seen in aesthetic terms, while others are seen as useless. Second, the exhibition looks into the traces of cultural memory hidden in the landscape, focusing on what is not visible or what is left out of the frame.

Tierras malas refers to a type of landscape characterized by a lack of vegetation and the erosion caused by water and wind; it is considered poor, useless or dull. The exhibition takes a look at how such “useless landscapes” are defined in different contexts and how they are represented in photography. The title also refers to invisible traces of gloomy past events that the landscape might conceal.

Opening times: Tue–Fri 12–18, Sat 12–16
Vaal Gallery (Tartu maantee 82, Tallinn)
Accessible by wheelchair

The group exhibition “Pinefulness” will be opened in the City Gallery on September 30, with the participation of Eike Eplik (MA, EKA Sculpture and Installation), the legendary Olimar Kallas, Reet Kasesalu, Jan Lütjohann, EKA graphics alumna Mall Nukke and EKA photography alumni Hanna Samoson and Johannes Säre. The curator is Siim Preiman, an alumnus of the Institute of Art History of EKA.

The exhibition deals with Estonians’ relationship with the environment and is an attempt to raise awareness of the impact of today’s actions on the future of dreams through bitter humor and affordable gestures.

The exhibition is part of Tallinn Art Hall’s ongoing exhibition series, which pays special attention both to the possibility of being good and to ecological responsibility in conditions of certain destruction. The series is an institutional attempt to find an ethically suitable platform for dealing with burning issues. Therefore, we have excluded all single-use materials from the standard ‘toolkit’ of a contemporary art exhibition, using as few materials as possible – and only things found on site.

A curatorial tour with Siim Preiman will take place on October 2 at 12pm. The exhibition will remain open until 28 November.

Pine-fulness is part of the series of events organised by Goethe-Institut, entitled World Wild Wald. 

Tallinn City Gallery (Harju 13) is open from Wednesday to Sunday 11–6 pm, free entry.

Open lecture of the Institute of Art History and Visual Culture of the Estonian Academy of Arts, in cooperation with and the Estonian Centre for Environmental History at Tallinn University on September 17 at 4pm.

Five-thousand Parisian farmers grew vegetables for two million Parisians at the turn of the nineteenth century. Black residents of Washington, DC paid down on their homes during the Great Depression by maintaining gardens on their urban lots. Soviet and Cuban urbanites staved off a famine in the 1990s after the collapse of Soviet agriculture by farming urban peripheries. These stories have been missed in plain sight because they do not coincide with ideas of urban progress and neat categorizations dividing urban from rural. Recapturing these stories points to the efficacy of small-holder intensive farming in urban areas which produce a wealth of waste than can be recycled into nutrients. These stories also point to a history of urban commons and mutual aid societies that undermine triumphal or inevitable histories of capitalism.

Kate Brown is a Professor in History of Science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology whose research interests illuminate the point where history, science, technology, and bio-politics converge to create large-scale disasters and modernist wastelands. She is the author of several prize-winning books, including Plutopia: Nuclear Families in Atomic Cities and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters (2013), and Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future (2019). Her studies on Chernobyl point to the lasting impact of the nuclear catastrophe, but also to the role of local specialists and communities in coming to terms with its effects, as also explained in this interview. In the framework of her new project on urban gardening Kate Brown does fieldwork also in Estonia. She also discusses the reasons why we should recapture the stories of urban gardening in the article Resurrecting the Soil.

More information: https://sts-program.mit.edu/people/sts-faculty/kate-brown/

The language of the lecture is English.

The lecture is organised in co-operation between the Institute of Art History and Visual Culture of the Estonian Academy of Arts, the Estonian Centre for Environmental History at Tallinn University and the Centre of Excellence for Intercultural Studies at Tallinn University. Kate Brown is the visiting leading researcher at the Centre of Excellence for Intercultural Studies at Tallinn University, funded by the EU Regional Development Funds in the framework of Tallinn University’s ASTRA project (activity A7).

From the 4th to the 6th of June,  Contemporary Art master students of Estonian Academy of Arts will have an exhibition titled “Second Act” in Viljandi, together with dance students from Viljandi Culture Academy.  

“Second Act” is an art event, where young artists from Estonia and Europe, as well as from Asia, will fill one old stage with artworks. The exhibition will tell us a story of an empty theatre stage and of home as a fortress, where we have hidden ourselves behind the curtains.

During the second corona virus wave, Alev started to make fast sketches instead of finely finished oil paintings. The motivation behind the paintings is from a human perspective and regards his positioning in the room, with sometimes an insistent absence of a subject, but also a loneliness, and the question of how to adapt to it.

The pieces will visually describe an artist’s internal call, where a pandemic has thrown us. Works are created during the second corona wave in Estonia, therefore they speak topics of the common experience: longing, alienation, overloading of information, and internet communication. In the exhibition one can see painting, stained glass, video art, performance and dance.

Artists:  Eero Alev (EST), Jamie Dean Avis (UK), Muhhammad Suyfan Baig (PK),  Aino Garland (EST), Liisbeth Horn (EST), Georg Kaasik (EST),  Gregor Pankert (BE), Brenda Purtsak (EST), Maryn-Liis Rüütelmaa (EST), Inga Salurand (EST), Jonathan Stavleu (NL), Elle Viies (EST), Junni Yeung (HKG) 

“Second Act ” is Estonian Academy of Arts curatorial studies and contemprorary art studies common project, lectured by Anders Härm and Margit Säde.

Support:  Estonian Academy of Arts, Teatrihoov,  TU Viljandi Culture Academy, Viljandi Kunstikool

The 15th conference from the series “Studies in Contemporary Culture” is dedicated to analyzing the cultural policies of the transition era (~1986–1998) in Estonia. The conference is organized by the Research Group of Contemporary Estonian Culture (EKA, TLÜ, TÜ) and the Estonian Writers’ Union.

The conference is supported by the Estonian Research Council (grant PRG636), the Cultural Endowment of Estonia, and the research fund of the Estonian Academy of Arts.

On 15 May, the exhibition “In Isolation”, curated by the master’s students of the Estonian Academy of Arts, will open in the Tartu Art Museum. It uses the motif of looking out of a window to examine the isolation experienced in different eras and in different locations. The exhibition brings together the internationally renowned artist Ilya Kabakov and the oeuvre of the Estonian classic masters Ülo Sooster, Jüri Arrak, Karl Pärsimägi, Nikolai Kormašov, Andres Tolts, Ilmar Malin and Kai Kaljo. The exhibition will remain open until 27 June.

The central artwork and conceptual starting point of the exhibition “In Isolation” is Ilya Kabakov’s visual narrative “The Looking-out-the-Window Arkhipov”, which is about a character named Arkhipov who is hospitalised; isolation and loneliness have an increasingly devastating effect on his mental condition.

Last spring, we unexpectedly found ourselves in a situation that is reminiscent of Arkhipov’s. Isolated inside the four walls of our homes for an unknown length of time, we at first enthusiastically followed the random passers-by and everyday situations from our windows, but as time passed and loneliness intensified, windows became the border between isolation and freedom. Windows not only showed what was visible, but in them were also reflected our dreams and yearnings.

The curators of the exhibition invite visitors to look out of the window together with the artists and to contemplate this unique time in history when in a weird way isolation has become the thing that unites us all and maybe manages to do so in a more personal manner than any situation ever has.

Curators: Signe Friedenthal, Reigo Kuivjõgi, Eerika Niemi, Jelizaveta Pratkunas, Kerly Ritval, Jelizaveta Sedler and Mae Variksoo

Team: Richard Adang, Nele Ambos, Indrek Grigor, Mare Joonsalu, Margus Joonsalu, Hanna-Liis Kont, Kristlyn Liier, Katrin Lõoke, Kadri Mägi, Julia Polujanenkova, Anti Saar, Kristel Sibul, Peeter Talvistu and Ago Teedema

Graphic design: Laura Pappa

Works from the Tartu Art Museum, the Art Museum of Estonia and the artist Kai Kaljo

Supporters: Cultural Endowment of Estonia, Estonian Academy of Arts, Krisostomus, Hektor Light and Peaasi.ee

Additional information: https://tartmus.ee/naitus/eraldatuses/

The book launch of the newest volume from the series History of Estonian Art, Volume 4, covering the years 1840–1900, will take place at the Kadriorg Art Museum in Tallinn on March 17th, starting at 17:00.

The editor of the volume is Juta Keevallik, the contributing authors are Tiina Abel, Jüri Hain, Karin Hallas-Murula, Lilian Hansar, Ants Hein, Juta Keevallik, Kaalu Kirme, Tiina-Mall Kreem, Mai Levin, Tõnis Liibek, Aleksander Pantelejev, Reet Piiri, Juta Saron, Mart Siilivask, Egle Tamm. The head editor of the series is Krista Kodres. The publishers of the book are Estonian Academy of Arts and Kultuurilehe AS, the volume was funded by the Estonian Academy of Arts and the Cultural Endowment of Estonia.