Category: Graphic Design

The exhibition “I Got a Great Lick of It Before It All Melted” is an exhibition by students of Graphic Design and Product Design at the Estonian Academy of Arts, which reflects on choices and experiences.

Opening 24 April 6 PM
ARS Art Factory – Studio 53 ja 98

Entrance from the courtyard

We all have a certain number of experiences in life, on which we build the next one. It is like an archive. You can’t ever experience anything without the latter.. And then we end up with those choices that we unconsciously and finally consciously make every day again and again. We are faced with something that is self-evident, like putting one foot in front of the other when walking or inhaling and exhaling.. we don’t notice these actions, but yet we do them constantly. Our choices shape our experiences and, when combined, our dance through life.

Artists: Riko Smirnov, Richard Vainola, Gabriella Tarja, Laura Sööt, Katriin Saulus, Anna Elisabeth Remmelg, Kenneth Pert, Hanna Milk, Anett Elis Männil, Brit Maripuu, Paula Maria Mengel, Stella Maris Liiva, Kelli Kütt, Helen Kärt Käbin, Martin Kislõi, Mark Kokotov, Teele Kiisk, Grittel Kastan, Greg Mikael Juhanson, Daria Titova, Johannes Adrik, Aries Puusepp, Rebecca Lopez,
Graphic Design: Mark Kokotov

Dance like this is the first of its kind for the students and they have been guided to this by Kristel Saan.

Supported and sponsored by Estonian Academy of Arts and Põhjala Brewery

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Academy of Fine Arts Sarajevo,

Estonian Academy of Arts,

ELISAVA,

Iceland University of the Arts,

Royal Academy of Art, The Hague,

University of the Arts London,

Vilnius Academy of Arts

POSSIBLE WORLDS
EKA Billboard Gallery 3.03.–2.04.2025
Open 24/7, free

An exhibition by III year graphic design students displaing fragments of their graduation thesis projects.

Participants: Andres Alliksaar, Rasmus Einman, Anete Ots, Mette Mari Kaljas, Kätriin Reinart, Nelli Viisimaa, Filipp Rodtšenkov, Diana Tammets, Kasper Korsen, Hanna Marnat, Markus Laanisto, Lola Pärna, Ines Uudam, Martin Merirand, Rasmus Lukas, Marlene Schwindt

Supervisors: Ott Kagovere, Kert Viiart

DANCING WITH THE STARS!
EKA Billboard Gallery 3.02.–2.03.2025
Open 24/7, free
Opening: 3.02.25 at 5 pm

Dancing with the Stars! exhibition showcases the designed letters and the process of the class Typography I. During 14 weeks several exercises and experimentations were carried out, drawing was done both by hand and on the computer, using toilet paper, towels, foam and even a metal engraver.

While the first seven weeks were dedicated to experimentation and playing, the last seven focused on creating an entire alphabet and going through the letter design process. Vectorised letters were created, several of which were also made into working font files.

Students:
Simon Janson, Ryan Kaabel, Anni Kangur, Riste Sofie Käär, Jan-Markus Maasepp, Alina Maškina, Elisabeth Mägi, Berit Raun, Mattias Erik Tiik, Rasmus Tikerpe, Katariina Tõnismäe, Mark Albert Villand, Artjom Ševtšenko, Kätriin Reinart, Eline Cremers, Mira Keygnaert, Dennis Vugts

Supervisor:
Agnes Isabelle Veevo

The fonts can be downloaded for free from the SUVA Type Foundry website: suvatypefoundry.ee

EKA Graphic Design MA program invites prospective students to join the online info session on Tuesday, February 4, 2025 at 17:00 EET (local Estonian time). This will be an opportunity to hear more about the program, to meet and ask questions directly from the faculty.

The online info session will be hosted on Zoom, the link will be e-mailed to all registrants 2 hours before the start of the event.

Register HERE

On Wednesday, November 6 at 4:00 p.m., the newly elected EKA honorary doctor prof. will hold an open lecture in hall A101. Linda van Deursen. 

Linda van Deursen is a graphic designer based in the Netherlands. Together with Armand Mevis, she founded the studio Mevis & van Deursen in 1987, which has collaborated with various cultural institutions: their partners have included the Stedelijk Museum, documenta 14, Haus der Kulturen der Welt and the artists Armin Linke, Yael Davids and Aglaia Konrad, with whom they worked on publications and exhibitions.

Since 1990, Linda van Deursen has taught at various schools, for example at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam (where she was head of the graphic design department), the Yale School of Art and currently at the Royal Academy of Arts in The Hague.

Van Deursen is a designer whose approach and design ideas have been among the most influential in the last twenty years. She has also had a great influence on the local design scene, because many Estonian designers have studied under her at various art universities in Europe and North America.

The lecture is held in English

In April, the public lectures of the Venia legend of the candidates for the 2024 academic staff competition will begin.

NB! The password for the videos is Faw1!.ec

April 15 in room A-501

Associate professor of Glass Design, head of BA specialty, head of department (1.0 positions)
at 11:30 Andra Jõgi lecture “Half empty & fully full”

Associate professor of theory and history of Product Design (0.75 positions)
at 12.30 Triin Jerlei lecture “Shared and personal (time) stories in design”
April 29 in room A-501

Associate Professor of the Department of Animation (1.0 positions)
at 13.30 p.m. Lilli-Krõõt Repnau lecture “We tell ourselves stories in order to live…”
April 29 in room A-501

Professor of Textile Design (1.0 positions)
at 3 p.m. Kärt Ojavee lecture “Textiles in interludes”
April 30 in room A-501

Associate Professor of Graphic Design (0.5 positions)
at 11 Kert Viiart lecture “Research in graphic design education and practice”

Associate professor of Fashion Design (0.5 positions)

at 12 Anu Samarüütel-Long lecture “Without or with thought, in silence or in noise. The path of creation”

May 3 in room A-501

Associate Professor of Interaction Design (0.75 positions)

at 10:30 Nesli Hazal Oktay lecture “Interaction Design of Our Future(s)”

at 11.30 Emrecan Gülay lecture “Empowering Human Creativity: Bridging the Physical and Digital Worlds in Interaction Design and Education”

at 12.30 Velvet Spors lecture “Inter-Personal, Inter-Connected, Inter-Faced: Exploring Technology as a Tool for Relationality”

Lectures for candidates for the Associate Professor of Interaction Design are in English

You are all welcome to listen!

On Monday, October 30, 18.00, Rotterdam-based curator, writer and artist Isabelle Sully will introduce her practice in room A302.

Working with feminist histories in mind, Isabelle Sully works across curating, writing and art-making, taking the mechanisms and materiality of administration as the main focus within her work to develop conceptual projects that span experimental writing, performance, exhibition-making and publishing. Through drawing on her work as founding editor of the publication series Unbidden Tongues as well as founder and co-curator of the event platform Playbill, Sully will present a series of projects that take writing as a primary mode of thinking. Given that language and its handling are central to her work, she will also focus on the realisation of these projects as they relate to graphic design and techniques of distribution—approaches developed through learning from methods of information circulation used within various feminist movements.

Isabelle Sully (1991, AU) practices across art-making, curating, editing and writing. Originally from Melbourne, she now lives in Rotterdam where she is the founding editor of Unbidden Tongues and co-curator of Playbill. Her involvement with the administrative sphere of institutional practice also plays out in her current role as assistant director-curator at Kunstverein, Amsterdam.

Isabelle Sully’s lecture is co-organized by Graphic Design and Contemporary Art MA programs.

Everyone is welcome to join!

On Thursday, October 19 at 18.00 Eva Weinmayr will talk about her practice and the social and political agency of artists’ publishing. Speaking from an intersectional feminist perspective the talk’s focus is not on the commodity genre “art publication”, but on the collective processes, exchanges, and relationships such critical publishing practices can enable.

The lecture will take place at the Contemporary Art Museum of Estonia (EKKM).

Eva Weinmayr conducts practice based research at the intersection of art, critical pedagogy and institutional analysis. In 2020 she published her doctoral thesis, titled Noun to Verb, on a MediaWiki. This research is concerned with the micro-politics of publishing and entangled notions of authorship from an intersectional, feminist perspective. (HDK-Valand, University of Gothenburg, SE)

As interims chair of faculty Art and Education at Munich Art Academy (2022-23) she co-initiated together with students kritilab, an open source platform for discrimination-critical teaching in the arts. From 2019 to 22 she co-led the EU-funded collective research and study programme “Teaching to Transgress Toolbox” inspired by US activist, teacher and theorist bell hooks (with erg, Brussels, BE). She is currently Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Postdigital Cultures, Coventry University (UK) with Ecologies of Dissemination​​​​​​, a collaboration with artist Femke Snelting seeking strategies for dissemination and a politics of re-use that acknowledge the tensions between feminist methodologies, decolonial knowledge practices and principles of Open Access (HDK-Valand, 2023-24).

Eva Weinmayr lectures widely and works with art and activist spaces (SALT Research Istanbul, MayDay Rooms London, Showroom London, Kunstverein München, Steirischer Herbst Graz) as well as established art institutions (National Art Gallery Warsaw, Contemporary Art Museum Saint Louis, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia Madrid, Biennale di Venezia).

Recent artistic research-based projects include “Teaching the Radical Catalog – a Syllabus” (2021-22, with Lucie Kolb), “Library of Inclusions and Omissions” (2016-20), “The Piracy Project” (2010-15, with Andrea Francke), AND Publishing (2010-ongoing, with Rosalie Schweiker).

Eva Weinmayr’s lecture is co-organized by MA Graphic Design and MA Contemporary Art programs.

EEE is a graphic design studio based between Bologna and Ravenna (IT) born from the collaborative experience of Emilio Macchia and Erica Preli.

The studio is engaged in a wide range of projects within the field of arts and culture, including publication and book design, brand identities and exhibition design.

EEE gives lectures and holds workshops at universities and other educational institutions, both in Italy and abroad, such as: Fine Art Academy Bologna, Fine Art Academy Macerata and Alma Mater Studiorum Bologna University.

The studio also works on research-based and self-initiated projects; some of the most recents are SUBSTITUTES and Fahrenheit 39 art book fair in Ravenna since 2010.