Category: Faculty of Art and Culture

Estonian Academy of Arts Grad Show TASE ’23
tase.artun.ee
01–17.06, open every day 12.00–18.00
Opening: 31.05, 16.00 at the Freedom Square and 19.00 at the Estonian Academy of Arts

Exhibition locations:
Freedom Square 8, Tallinn Art Hall, Artists Union’s studios, shop and bar rooms, Vent Space, Grafodrom and Experimental Printmaking Studio
Freedom Square 6, Tallinn Art Hall Gallery
Põhja pst 7, Estonian Academy of Arts (Architecture faculty’s grad works)
Lai 17, Estonian Museum of Applied Art and Design yard (Graphic Design MA grad works, open until June 11)

On Freedom Square, we present the deconstructed fashion show You Have Only A Moment by Lab of Figurative Thought, followed by the announcements of the winners of the Young Artist and Young Applied Artist awards. Additionally, for the first time this year, the Young Designer Awards will be given out! Opening event continues at 19.00 at the TASE of Architecture, located in EKA!

TASE is the annual graduation show of the Estonian Academy of Arts. The exhibition presents graduation works of the Architecture, Art and Culture, Design, and Fine Arts faculties. Most works are exhibited in the Freedom Square buildings 8 and 6. The Architecture faculty’s graduation works are located at the Estonian Academy of Arts. The Graphic Design master’s works are exhibited in the yard of the Estonian Museum of Applied Art and Design (open until June 11).

tase.artun.ee opens with the exhibition on May 31!
Along with the works at the main exhibition, written theses are presented digitally on tase.artun.ee together with the PhD and Art and Culture works.

PROGRAMME

Grad Show TASE ‘23 grand opening
Fashion-performance You Have Only A Moment by Lab of Figurative Thought
Linda Mai Kari, Anita Kremm, Kristel Zimmer, Liisamari Viik
Supervisor: Ene-Liis Semper
31.05 at 16.00
Freedom Square

TASE of Architecture exhibition opening
31.05 at 19.00
EKA, Põhja pst 7

Theses defences
29.05–14.06
artun.ee/kaitsmised

TASE FILM
14.06 at 18.30
EKA, A101, Põhja pst 7

Guided tour by Anna-Liisa Villmann
15.06 at 15.00 in English
Starts at Tallinn Art Hall, Freedom Square 8
Guided tour by Gregor Taul (Faculty of Architecture’s graduation works)
16.06 at 12.00 in English
Starts at EKA lobby, Põhja pst 7

SATELLITE PROGRAMME

Fragment_21:12, Jewellery and Blacksmithing course works
Aleš Rezler, Elis Liivo, Lara Herrmann, Maarja Hallika, Madlen Hirtentreu, Madli Pajos, Helen Tiits, Paul Aadam Mikson
Supervisors: Eve Margus and Nils Hint
19.05–04.06, every day at 14.00–20.00
Tower of Old Town, Pikk Jalg 2

Unbounded Nature, Glass and Ceramics course works
Annali Kruusamägi, Annika Luhaäär, Erko Lill, Helen Tiits, Kätriin Reinart, Laura Stina Parri, Marta Vikentjeva, Sara Kyllönen, Valeria Poljakova, Õnne Paulus
19.05–18.06, every day at 9.00–19.00, opening 18.05 at 17.00
Tallinn Zoo, Paldiski mnt 146, entrance with the zoo ticket

Contemporary Drawing: Worlding in Layers, Contemporary Art course works
Triin Anijalg, Maria Hindreko, Sander Karjus, Kassandra Laur, Rebecca Norman, Helena Pass, Mia Rulli, Nana Schilf, Sirel Tammisto
Supervisor and curator: Britta Benno
23.05–17.06, Tue-Sat at 12.00–18.00, opening 22.05 at 17.00
EKA Gallery, Põhja pst 7

A pool with moderate temperature, Painting course works
Karola Ainsar, Luis Bruder, Maria Hindreko, Sander Karjus, Rebecca Norman, Daria Morozova, Elisa Margot Winters
Supervisors and curators: Mihkel Ilus, Tõnis Saadoja, Anna Škodenko
25.05–09.06.23, Mon-Fri at 12.00–18.00, opening 24.05 at 17.00
ARS project space, Pärnu mnt 154

Cherries once grew in my garden, Curatorial Studies and Contemporary art group exhibition
Gerda Hansen, Iryna Tanasiichuk, Siew Ching Ang, Mirjam Varik, Sarah Noonan
Curator: Ketlin Käpp
27–28.05 and 01–04.06 at 12.00–19.00 or by appointment 26.05–07.06
Uus Rada gallery, Raja 11a

In the shadow of tree being, Contemporary Art course works
Triin Anijalg, Maria Hindreko, Sander Karjus, Kassandra Laur, Rebecca Norman, Helena Pass, Mia Rulli, Nana Schilf, Sirel Tammisto
27.05–18.06, every day at 9.00–18.00, opening 26.05 at 17.00
Gallery of Tampere House, Jaani 4, Tartu

Textile Design from Fibre to Tech Solutions, Open Academy course works
Carolin Freiberg, Madde Jerbach, Piret Kuhlbars, Monika Lepik, Marit Lillenberg, Mari-Liis Lõppe, Tiia Nõmm, Heidi Renzer, Aleksander Väär
28.05–19.06, every day at 9.00–23.00
EKA, first floor glass corridor, Põhja pst 7

Creative Realities, Contemporary Art course works
Gerda Hansen, Mirjam Varik, Syed Sachal Rizvi, Eri Rääsk, Mari Steinberg, Anna-Liisa Kree, Mia Felić, Lara Žagar, Mohammadmojtaba Habibidavijani
Curator: Siim Raie
28.05–28.08, Fri-Sat at 12.00–18.00, opening 28.05 at 15.00
Villa Dombrovka, Karepa, Lääne-Virumaa

Three Drops of Blood, student exhibition
Agnes Milla Bereczki, Anu Kadri Uustalu, Lumimari, Kaur Joonas Karu, Kirke Mari Päll, Piret Potter, Ringo Roots, Triinu Väikmeri, Wing Kiu Mak, Denise Damaso, Camille Laurelli
31.05–14.06, Wed–Thu at 13.00–20.00, Fri-Sun at 11.00–18.00
Kalamaja Museum, Kotzebue 16, entrance with the museum ticket

Catarsis, Interior Architecture course works
Marleen Armulik, Katarina Ild, Hanna Kruusma, Laura Movits, Getter Pihlak, Elle Marie Randoja, Jaan Repnikov, Sven Samyn, Mirjam Vaht
Supervisor: Nele Tiidelepp
01–04.06, 24/7, performance on 31.05 at 19.00
Abandoned hut across from EKA main entrance, Põhja pst 2

Sense of Measure, Interior Architecture course works
Simon Baguette, Piret-Liis Carson, Päär-Joonap Keedus, Ann-Katriin Kelder, Anni Truu, Krete Tarkmees, Laura Maria Tõru, Viktoria Ugur, Mari Uibo, Eliisabet Valmas-Romanov
Supervisors: Roland Reemaa, Hannah Sergerkrantz
01–17.06, every day at 09.00-23.00, opening 31.05 at 18.00
EKA cafeteria, Põhja pst 7

Pretty Gimmicks, Charming Trinkets and All the Other Things, Curatorial Studies and Contemporary Art course works
Sandra Ernits, Mara Kirchenberg, Rose Magee, Sarah Nõmm, Siim Preiman, Leonor Talefe
Curator: Anita Kodanik
3–11.06, Mon-Fri at 14.00–20.00, Sat-Sun at 12.00–18.00, opening 2.06 at 18.00
Last stop with the Kopli tram, at the kiosk next to Kopli 99b

Head organiser: Pire Sova
Assistant: Dana Lorên Vares
Exhibition design: Kaisa Maasik, Johannes Luik
Architecture exhibition design: Diana Drobot, Karl Erik Miller
Communication: Solveig Jahnke, Andres Lõo, Maarja Pabut
Graphic design: Birgita Siim, Agnes Isabelle Veevo, Aaro Veiderpass
Web coordinator: Kert Väljak
Web developer: Patrick Zavadskis
Install manager: Johannes Luik
TASE FILM: Maya Chaudhary, Terje Losvik
TASE shop: Sigrit Lõhmus

Supported by: Estonian Artists’ Association, Tallinn Art Hall, Cultural Endowment of Estonia, Akzonobel, Punch

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+.

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).

This event will bring together current research on writing Ukrainian art history of the 20th century from scratch, since an art historical canon has not yet been produced for this period. Focusing on the Soviet and post-soviet eras, art historians Lizaveta German, Olga Balashova and Svitlana Biedarieva will present their ongoing research and reflect on how museums, exhibitions and artists have conceptualized these periods in art history writing until now. How has the National Art Museum of Ukraine—which is currently closed due to war—written and presented 20th-century Ukrainian art history? What can we learn from histories of exhibitions? What could parallels with other former post-Soviet countries, such as the Baltic States, contribute to revisiting this period? How is Ukraine to rewrite its art history after the war? Artist and researcher Andrij Bojarov will act as a respondent and Margaret Tali will moderate.This hybrid event will be hosted by the Institute of Art History in the Estonian Academy of Arts.

(Not) permanent exhibition at the National Art Museum of Ukraine

Olga Balashova

At the time of the gallery’s closure, the exhibition on the second floor of the National Art Museum in Kyiv was dedicated to 20th-century Ukrainian art. In the absence of a written history of art, we were always referring to this second floor for an up-to-date understanding of this history. Despite this influential role, however, the second-floor exhibition responded to the influence of external contexts, with the core museum team changing it three times during the past 20 years. The first non-Soviet exhibition had a strong national idea behind it, with a central narrative built around the Ukrainian Academy of Art, created in 1917 in the Ukrainian People’s Republic, and artists who were looking for peculiarities of the “Ukrainian style.” In the second exhibition, created after the Revolution of Dignity in 2014, the narration was more open for international interpretation, with a central focus on the avant-garde. The most recent change took place in 2020, just months before Covid-19 hit, with the narration dedicated to the idea of Modernism. The exhibition contained not only positive storytelling but also critical views of historical events and related art movements. After the war, the second-floor exhibition should change again. So far, it is difficult to say in which direction it will unfold, but it needs to include expertise from previous exhibitions and to consider the new post-war context.

We learn what we exhibit what we learn: Looking at art history from the perspective of exhibitions

Lizaveta German

Offering another perspective on how a particular art historical narrative can be (re)written, this presentation will focus on exhibition history as a method and elaborate on cases from two periods in Ukraine: the 1960s and the 1990s. Based on long-term research on both periods, Lizaveta will discuss how one can navigate through gaps in knowledge and lack of physical material, as well as how (and if) apocrypha can stimulate an alternative view of art history.

From this perspective, the former period—namely, the unofficial art of the so-called Ukrainian Sixtiers generation—can be roughly described as a period known through works which could never have been exhibited under the political circumstances of their time. Nor could they have been acquired for museum collections or entered the private art market, which generally didn’t exist in the USSR. As a result, monographic collections of the works of a number of the generation’s key artists have been well preserved in family estates and can be accessed for research. Yet, they have never been seen as subjects of a shared public discourse and have never been viewed as particles of the same space of artistic thought and vision by an external audience. While a good number of artworks from the 1990s—the period inaugurating the recent history of state independence—have long been scattered across anonymous public collections inside and outside Ukraine, others have physically disappeared due to their ephemeral nature or have remained beyond public and scholarly physical reach. Yet, there are somewhat chaotic but curious private documentary archives that cover the first curatorial endeavors to exhibit 1990s art in various non-institutional contexts. Today, this period can be interpreted through the way the art was presented rather than through the actual works.

Documenting Russia’s war on Ukraine in art, 2014–2022

Svitlana Biedarieva

The tensions related to the political changes and the war in Ukraine have provided an important background for a shift towards documentary practices in Ukrainian art after 2014, including film, video work, reportage, artist’s diaries and photography. The presentation will focus on the processes of documentation and creation of artistic archives following the beginning of the war through the full-scale invasion of Ukraine by Russia from 2014. The presentation explores the changes in documentation practices with the recent escalation of violence and the simultaneous transformation of artists’ perspectives on war atrocities, historical memory, trauma and decoloniality. The presentation draws on the interdisciplinary approaches of the film researcher Erika Balsom, the curator Okwui Enwezor and the artist Hito Steyerl to analyze the transformative role of documentary art as a form that emerges in a state of war-related violence and mirrors the effects of the political and economic crisis. It is based on research conducted for the book Contemporary Ukrainian and Baltic Art: Political and Social Perspectives, 1991–2021, edited by Biedarieva (ibidem Press, 2021). This recently published text is the first comparative volume to focus on the reflections of postcolonial transformation, contested history and resistance in Ukraine and the Baltic states (Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania), examining how these topics have been documented and interpreted in the art of these countries.

Olga Balashova is an art historian, curator and critic and the head of the Museum of Contemporary Art NGO in Kyiv.

Lizaveta German is a curator and art historian as well as a co-founder of The Naked Room, Kyiv, and co-curator of the Ukrainian Pavilion, 59th Venice Biennial.

Svitlana Biedarieva is an art historian with a focus on contemporary Ukrainian art, decoloniality and Russia’s war on Ukraine, and is the editor of Contemporary Ukrainian and Baltic Art: Political and Social Perspectives, 1991–2021(2021) and At the Front Line: Ukrainian Art, 2013–2019 (2020).

Andrij Bojarov is a Ukrainian Estonian visual artist, independent curator and researcher who has, from the early 2000s, focused on exploring neglected histories of avant-garde art in the central European context, expanding and blending artistic and curatorial work with research practices.

Margaret Tali is an art historian and co-initiator of the project Communicating Difficult Pasts, which has brought together scholars and artists to revisit the 20th-century past in the broader Baltic region.

Lizaveta German and Olga Balashova are currently visiting researchers at EKA with support of the Estonian Research Council.

Dear curriculum leaders, lecturers, students and study specialists!

Teaching and study programs at EKA have received a very good evaluation from our graduates, but – keeping the curriculum at a very good level is a constant challenge. The curriculum in higher arts education is a comprehensive network of activities during which students shape their approach to creative practice. Designing learning paths and creating an inspiring learning environment in higher arts education is an art in itself. Questions like: what are the new approaches to the curriculum? How to create, find new and effective approaches to the formation of a creative practitioner? How to create a whole? Are waiting a response.

At EKA, we have conducted two curriculum analyses, from which we see the challenges at our curricula. Several curriculum teams have carried out systematic development in cooperation with the Department of Art Education, and based on this experience and in order to meet the challenges of curriculum quality, we have put together EKA curriculum development workshop program “The Art of Curriculum Planning”.

Therefore, we invite curriculum leaders, lecturers, students and curriculum support staff to participate in it.

The workshop will be supervised by Maria Jürimäe, lecturer in curriculum theory at the University of Tartu, and Anneli Porri, lecturer in art education at EKA.

The program will take place in two parts, it is important to join both of them:

1. introductory seminar – where we map the possibilities, educate the horizons;
2. practical curriculum workshops in faculties.

Participating in workshops provides practical help for curriculum management, curriculum development and analysis writing.

Let’s start with the introductory seminar “The Art of Designing a Curriculum” on Thursday, 19 January 2023 at 13.00-15.30, room A-501 (3 academic hours).

The aim of the seminar is to create a common understanding and find an agreement on the most important strategic learning goals of the ESA.

ENG will be provided if there is a need.

Please register to first seminar by January 10.

Public seminar Arts, Crafts, Affects: Documenting HerStories and Worldbuilding at Estonian Academy of Arts and workshop by #FramedinBelarus

Participants: #FramedinBelarus (Rufina Bazlova and Sofia Tocar), Katrin Mayer, Mare Tralla

Discussant: Katrin Kivimaa

Organized by Margaret Tali (Estonian Academy of Arts) & Ulrike Gerhardt (University of Potsdam)

Pre-registration is required. Please register here

Introduction

Handi/crafts have made a visible and present return in contemporary art. Many artists have found their tools of expression in traditional media which require special training and skills that are often passed down through generations. Yet these manual ancestral techniques have complex connotations which can be pinned down to their specific purposes; these range from spiritual to communicative, ecological to existential, and last but not least, economic needs.

The area of handi/craft and textile studies has long been neglected and marginalized in art history writing. Yet textile art often has a strong conceptual and epistemic grounding and the use of crafts and old techniques brings to the fore new possibilities of resistance and alternative worldbuilding. In various Eastern European countries between the late 1960s and mid-1980s, many communities were formed around textile art, transforming the genre into an experimental, progressive, and community-feeding way of art making (Hock 2013). More recently, over the last decade, textile, quilting and embroidery techniques have seen a renaissance that urges us to rethink this research field as an increasingly intertwined and interdisciplinary terrain of art, design, material culture and handi/craft.

Feminist art historians have suggested that embroidery and related media have provided women with weapons of resistance, offering a potential challenge to the boundaries between high and low, gender and class relations, and their intersections with identity, race and diasporic memories (Parker 1984, Smith 2014, Plummer 2022). In this context, embodied herstory can be understood as women’s history embedded and encrypted in gendered techniques, textures and patterns, through which this historical knowledge is being carried, lived and transformed through generations, continents and local contexts.

This public seminar will bring together the experiences and research strategies of two artists, Mare Tralla (London / Tallinn) and Katrin Mayer (Düsseldorf / Berlin), as well as one collaborative craftivist project, #FramedinBelarus (Rufina Bazlova and Sofia Tocar, Prague). They will articulate relationships between embodied herstories and their chosen material forms. Furthermore, they will consider handi/craft as a channel of alternative communication that has long been used for transmitting women’s struggles and hardships in patriarchally structured and capitalist societies. Central questions of the public seminar are: How can we explain this return of traditional and transgenerational body-related techniques in art in the age of surveillance capitalism and diaspora? What kinds of affects do these techniques and materials channel and carry? How do they allow us to document and connect different feminist struggles, and bring together contemporary and historical resistances? In the context of this public seminar, art historians Margaret Tali (Tallinn) and Ulrike Gerhardt (Potsdam) are specifically interested in handi/craft as a newly interpreted tradition and as material labor and a means to express and communicate the unspeakable, including its capacity to raise new questions about international solidarity, acts of resistance and mental health, and to offer alternative worldbuilding practices.

On November 26^th a workshop by #FramedinBelarus will take place in collaboration with the Vabamu Museum of Occupations and Freedom in the framework of the seminar.

Mare Tralla is an Estonian queer-feminist interdisciplinary artist and activist living in London.

Katrin Mayer is an artist based in Berlin. Her approach is a type of archeology of knowledge, she takes up gender political histories of a place and translates them into spatial-material formulations.

Rufina Bazlova is a Belarusian artist who works with the traditional folk embroidery as a medium to depict socio-political issues.

Sofia Tocar is a curator and cultural manager who works on artivist collaborative projects and documentary films in the region of Central and Eastern Europe.

#FramedinBelarus is a social art project by Stitchit dedicated to political prisoners and organized by Stitchit art group. Stitchit was created in 2021 in Prague by Rufina Bazlova and Sofia Tocar, who invite different communities and individuals to join their creative process.

Katrin Kivimaa is an art historian, whose main areas of research are feminist art history, Estonian modern and contemporary art, historiography of Estonian art history, representation of women in art and visual culture.

Ulrike Gerhardt is a visual studies scholar with a focus on cultural memory practices in post-socialist art and artistic co-directress of the feminist video art platform D’EST.

Margaret Tali is an art historian and cultural theorist whose work deals with memory politics, art museums and curation of difficult histories in the Baltic context. She co-curates the project “Communicating Difficult Pasts”.

The event is supported by European Regional Development Fund, Estonian Academy of Arts and University of Potsdam.

The seminar “Michel Sittow in the North and South” will be held on Wednesday, November 23 at 16:00 in EKA room A101.
The seminar is held in English.

SPEAKERS:

Oskar Rojewski, University of Silesia in Katowice, University Rey Juan Carlos in Madrid
Michel Sittow’s service to Isabel of Castille (1492-1502) and Habsburgs (1505-1515)

Greta Koppel, Art Museum of Estonia
Michel Sittow in the North? Is there any material evidence to testify his artistic activities?

Anu Mänd, Tallinn University
Michel Sittow in the archival documents of Tallinn

Discussion on Michel Sittow’s legacy will follow.

The focus of the seminar is on the internationally renowned artist Michel Sittow (c. 1469–1525), who was born in Tallinn. Sittow, who was trained in the school of Netherlandish art in Bruges and worked in various European courts, was active as an artist in Tallinn for almost fifteen years. His person and works and the wider cultural context of their creation continue to be of interest to both researchers and the general public. One of the sequels to the extremely popular exhibition at the Kumu Art Museum and National Gallery of Art in Washington (2018) is the research and exhibition project of the Art Museum of Estonia and the Hälsingland Museum in Sweden “Michel Sittow in the North? Altarpieces in dialogue“. Oskar Rojewski, who is visiting EKA within the Transform4Europe partnership, is one of the speakers at the seminar.

In Estonia, in the last decade, the heritage of the Soviet period has been evaluated with an open eye and the best of it has been protected. The Department of Cultural Heritage and Conservation of the Estonian Academy of Arts organizes from 03 – 07 October for the second time, an intensive course where the architecture and related monumental art of the Soviet period  are discussed in comparison with other Eastern European countries.

When in 2020 the heritage of Georgia and Lithuania were under observation, this year it is the heritage of Bulgaria and Romania. On Tuesday, guest lecturer Dora Ivanova will focus on the restoration of the controversial Buzludzha monument and Dumitru Rusu on the legacy of the socialist period in Eastern Europe, especially Romania and Moldova. On Wednesday, John Patrick Leach will talk about the legacy of totalitarianism in Europe. On Monday, Laura Ingerpuu, a PhD student at EKA, will talk about Estonian architecture, and Anu Soojärv, who recently defended her master’s thesis at EKA on the same topic, will talk about Estonian monumental art. The study trip of the course leads to Sillamäe.
The course is coordinated by Riin Alatalu.

Program:

3.10 A-400
17:00 Riin Alatalu, EKA
Introduction. Dissonance of Soviet Architecture in Different Contexts.

17:30 Laura Ingerpuu, EKA
The Best of Soviet Architecture in Estonia. Social, political and Cultural Context.

19:00 Anu Soojärv, TLU, EKA
Monumental-Decorative Art in Soviet Estonia – Soviet Heritage or Estonian Heritage?

4.10 A-501
17:00 Dumitru Rusu, (B.A.C.U.)
Socialist Period Heritage. The Ambitions and Outcomes of the Bureau for Art and Urban Research. Socialist Heritage in the Former Eastern Bloc Countries  (Romania and Republic of Moldova)

18:30 Dora Ivanova, Buzludzha Project
Socialist Heritage in Bulgaria. The Ambitions and Outcomes of Buzludzha Project.

5.10 A-400
17:00 Patrick Leach, Atrium
The Heritage of Totalitarian Regimes. The Network of Atrium.

18:30 Anu Soojärv
Why Do We Need Soviet “Red” Monuments.

6.10 A-400
17:00 Anu Soojärv
Applied Artists as Creators of Monumental-Decorative Art in Soviet Estonia. Leo Rohlin.

7.10 A-101
17:00 Riin Alatalu, EKA
Protection of Socialist Architecture and Soviet Monuments in Estonia. International Networks.

More info: Riin Alatalu (riin.alatalu@artun.ee)