Category: Faculty of Fine Arts

We are excited to invite you to our performance “∞Eight∞”.

The performance is created by Chia-Ling from EKA MA Animation, Mayu from Accademia Dimitri in Switzerland and Rikuo based in Berlin. We met in Prague last year and developed this piece together. Now we are very happy to share with you our performance on 09.04 in EKA!

This performance brings together a dancer, Mayu Shirai (Japan), a live painter, Chia-ling (Taiwan), and a musician, Rikuo Toyono (Japan).

Each collaborator explores IKIIKI—a Japanese term meaning a state of being fully alive in the present—through their own medium by only using a simple, universally accessible motif of the figure-8, seeking a balance between autonomy and coexistence. 

Their collaboration is rooted in improvisation and relational exchange, where each practice continuously influences the others. Beyond technical skill, the performers are chosen for their character, humor, and sensitivity to shared space.

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Performance will be on:
09.04 Thursday 
at 4p.m. 
A-100.1 (Trepid, Stairs next to Café) in EKA

Duration:
60mins+ 20mins talk!

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It’s free of charge and family child friendly!
Welcome to join with your friends, families and share your feelings with us!

On Thursday, 9 April at 6:00 PM, a duo exhibition On the Verge of Completion by contemporary artists Gerda Hansen and Rebecca Norman will be opened at the Hobusepea Gallery.

The end is actually an unspeakably bleak place where no clear way forward presents itself and nothing no longer seems to lie ahead. The duo exhibition by Gerda Hansen and Rebecca Norman invites the viewer to experience art not only as something definitive, but as a way of becoming. The exhibition reveals the stages of artistic practice that usually remain hidden, offering a chance to step into the moment where a work is born and where meanings have not yet settled.

The exhibition examines the boundaries between completion and incompletion, approaching finality not as a destination, but as a state in which the forward movement is temporarily suspended. The creative process, often shaped by uncertainty, experimentation and internal tension, is usually resolved when the artist decides to declare a work complete. In this exhibition however, the viewer comes into contact with the process rather than the finalised work. The presented works do not conceal their unfinished state. Instead, they emphasise its value. On these canvases, thoughts remain dispersed, forms and tones are still taking shape, and meanings remain open. It is a moment where possibilities remain unended and the potential of the work is still unfolding.

Perhaps completing a work is a merely provisional decision, a pause within an ongoing process? The artist appears here as a practitioner of continuous choices and interruptions, guided by an intuitive and often sensitive self-reflection. Imperfection, repetition and error are not deviations, but integral to the organic nature of making. As Gilles Deleuze suggests, artworks are not defined by what they appear to be at a given moment, but by what they might become. The exhibition offers an insight into the concealed layers of artistic production, presenting the artwork as something that unfolds over time.

In Hansen’s works, layered structures strive toward presence and transparency. Repeating forms and interruptions create a rhythm that does not lead to a solution but instead exposes different stages of the creative process. She is interested in the moment when a work of art dissolves and comes into being at the same time. In Norman’s practice, the notion of completion is examined through its various permutations including the use of unstable colour pigments. For her, the apparent incompleteness of a work is not a deficiency, and the abundance of potential is realised through the material itself. The tension between continuation and completion becomes a deliberately sustained condition, in which the work does not close, but remains in an active and meaningful state of breathing.

Artists                                   

Gerda Hansen (b. 1994) is a contemporary Estonian-based artist whose practice explores the intersections of painting and digital image-making. She holds a BA in painting (2022) and an MA in contemporary art (2025) from the Estonian Academy of Arts. In the current exhibition, Hansen brings together manual processes with AI-based generative systems. Her works emerge through a visual dialogue with the machine in which images remain intentionally ambiguous and leave the attribution of meaning to the viewer. Hansen has exhibited both in Estonia and internationally and is the recipient of the 2023 Adamson-Eric Young Artist Scholarship.

Rebecca Norman (b. 2001) graduated in painting from the Estonian Academy of Arts (2025), while also supplementing her studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague (2024). Her practice addresses the convergence and misalignment between the author and the material and the resulting dissonant outcomes. Her works often engage with seemingly insignificant moments that call for new forms of categorisation through sustained attention. She is drawn to utilitarian objects that have irreversibly lost their function and various forms of apparent nonsense that mimic purposefulness. Norman has participated in several group exhibitions and received the Endover Prize for her 2025 graduation work Loaded Vacuity.

Curator

Liisi Kõuhkna is a curator and project manager who graduated with a master’s degree in health sciences from the Tallinn University and has also an MA from curatorial studies and a BA in jewellery and blacksmithing from the Estonian Academy of Arts. She has curated contemporary art exhibitions in various galleries in Estonia and abroad. Since March of this year, she works as the gallery assistant for the Estonian Artists’ Association.

Exhibition information

Location: Hobusepea Gallery, Hobusepea 2, Tallinn

Opening: 9.04.2026 from 18:00

Open for visitors: 10.04–10.05.2026,Wed, Fri–Sun 12–18, Thu 12–19

Curator: Liisi Kõuhkna

Graphic design: Helena Pass

Photo documentation: Kail Timusk

Special thanks to: Estonian Artists’ Association, Cultural Endowment of Estonia, Hans-Otto Ojaste, Mari Volens, Märt Vaidla, Paul Aadam Mikson, Jaana Kormašov, family members of the artists, Põhjala Pruulikoda, Nudist Drinks

“I leave
With tears in my throat
To where
The roads are wrapped in mist
Riga, my love remains behind.”
— Vennaskond

Join us on Friday, April 3 at 19:00 for the premiere of Karolina Peterson’s graduation film at Roosikrantsi 8b Gallery.

The film will be screened daily from April 3–13 at: 12:00 · 13:45 · 15:30 · 17:15 · 19:00 · 20:45.

Karolina Peterson (aka Kara Popicon) is a Latvian artist from an Estonian-Russian background who spent the past five years studying in Tallinn. Returning to Riga after a long time away, she found herself feeling like a stranger in her own home.

Her solo exhibition “Riga, My Love” explores this sense of distance through film – capturing the city both as it lives in memory and as it exists today.

The work is also shaped by her participation in a series of protests in Riga advocating for women’s and migrants’ rights, where she created a new artistic action each time. These experiences brought a political dimension into her practice.

This new video piece traces the evolution of that politicization, interwoven with personal reflections on loss, identity, and the emotional disconnection from home.
Supervisor: Anita Kremm

Film duration: 96 minutes
Language: English

Exhibition is supported by the Faculty of Fine Arts, Estonian Academy of Arts.

“A prairie dog town refers to the vast underground networks of tunnels and chambers constructed by prairie dogs across the grasslands. At the surface, these colonies appear as little more than a dispersed field of cone-shaped mounds. Beneath this modest topography, however, lies an extensive and highly organized architecture: a labyrinth of tunnels connecting nesting chambers, waste disposals, listening bays, nurseries, and bolt holes, before branching into distinct wards and family burrows.

Prairie Dog Town takes this subterranean architecture as both structure and allegory. The exhibition turns toward other underground networks—such as those operating within the logic of cartoons—where the burrow becomes a conceptual passage. Moving below the visible surface, tunnels open onto chambers of a more devious nature: spaces where  logics conceal themselves, circulate, and multiply.” – H.D.

“Prairie Dog Town” is Hayden Daughtry’s inaugural show in Estonia. Originally from South Carolina, entering the European art scene through the Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam, Hayden lets the uncanny constructs of the outside seep into the gallery, places where it might not otherwise allow. Sometimes a playful veneer might be a scratchcard  with an inverse prize. His work takes shape to its surroundings.

Opening March 27th at 18:00, then to be visited 28.03 – 05.04

M-T By appointment

F-S 14:00 – 18:00

Artists: Rover Indigo Bertels-Andréa, Þórey Björk Halldórsdóttir, Denis Kudrjašov, Ivor Mikker, Daniil Musesovs, Elise Marie Olesk, Kertu Rannula, Lotta Karoliina Räsänen, Éric-Olivier Thériault, Kail Timusk, Lume Tuum, Elo Vahtrik, Ats-Anton Varustin, Maria Wrang-Rasmussen

Metamorphosis – simultaneous disintegration and formation; melting, bending, flowing, estrangement from function.

Emerging sculpture explores transformation, transitions, and continuous, uncertain in-between states – in the body, in material, and in space. Traditional techniques and materials encounter synthetic, industrial, and technological elements, generating tension between the organic and the artificial, the rural and the urban, the past and the present.

The works address questions of perception and adaptation: how to find direction in fog, in subterranean layers, or within internal transformations? How do we orient ourselves in a world where the visible is no longer the primary source of knowledge? Can disintegration and fading serve as prerequisites for creation and becoming? What role do ritual, tradition, and vanishing skills play in a technologically charged everyday life? Where does the body end and the environment begin – or does such a boundary still exist?

Established in 2012, the award aims to highlight and recognize emerging sculptors and installation artists currently pursuing their studies. The exhibition presents works created during the 2025/26 academic year by the 14 shortlisted artists. The exhibition is organized by the Sculpture and Installation Department of the Estonian Academy of Arts. A Grand Prix as well as second and third prizes will be awarded.

The exhibition is open to visitors at ARS Project Space from 7–22 March, 12:00–18:00. At the opening of NSPN on 6 March at 4:00 PM, the Grand Prix as well as the 2nd and 3rd prizes will be awarded. A special prize will also be presented by the Estonian Association of Young Contemporary Art.

Exhibition team: Laura Põld, Kirke Kangro, Taavi Talve, Visa Nurmi, Eva Mahhov

Supported by: Estonian Cultural Endowment, Estonian Academy of Arts, Estonian Artists’ Association, Põhjala, Vaskjala Creative Residency

Special thanks: Kunst.ee magazine, ARS Project Space

Jakobson’s solo exhibition Downloads Folder creates a personal digital archive from random, hastily taken screenshots by preserving them on canvas.

The exhibition approaches painting as a way of remaining in continuous dialogue with a personal digital archive that was not originally intended for display. Through rapid circulation, the original purpose of downloaded files disappears; they persist more out of habit than meaning. The exhibition is concerned less with the images themselves than with their unsystematic accumulation and their slowing down through the act of being fixed in paint.

In a late-capitalist world oriented towards economic growth, productivity has become a sacred cow. Living within a constant flow of information, an ever-increasing pace of work, and social pressure demand more and more from us, without allowing time for reflection or interpretation. Transferring casually taken screenshots onto canvas is a conscious choice to slow down rather than rush, offering the possibility to organise what has been produced so far in a meaningful way and to take a pause.

The randomly selected images that form the basis of the paintings function as source material that is reworked through the artist’s process. The repetition of anonymous and temporary images through multiple layers of irony and subjectivity creates new images that no longer carry their former meaning and have lost their original, quickly consumable function.

Curator: Adrian Abner
Design: @gertworld

Anu Jakobson (b. 2005) is an Estonian visual artist currently in her second year of studies at the Estonian Academy of Arts. Her practice focuses on exploring online culture and its visual language, which she approaches through experimental painting methods, primarily using an airbrush. This technique allows her to capture the haziness and ephemerality characteristic of internet imagery. She works with images saved as screenshots from the internet and edits them according to her vision, in a way similar to how memes circulate, transferring this process onto the canvas. This method situates her work within the context of collective culture, as the circulation of memes reflects current events and broader value systems.

The exhibition is supported by the Cultural Endowment of Estonia.

On Thursday, 29 January at 6 PM, we will open the exhibition Greetings from Kanepi! Wish u were here by Birgit Kaleva, Keiu Maasik and Mark Raidpere at FOKU gallery.

A father’s diary from the 60s, postcards from Kanepi, Colin McRae Rally 2.0. Abstracted movements, run down household appliances, a ghost car. Driftwood Songs, a spider plant, a life stored in virtuality.

The works of Birgit Kaleva, Keiu Maasik and Mark Raidpere open up insights into the stories of family lines, or rather into fragments or excerpts of these stories. The (auto)biographical is intertwined with fiction, perhaps we cannot know for certain what is based on real life and what is imaginary – and maybe it doesn’t matter either.

In Birgit Kaleva’s photo series Weizenbergi 51 (2025), we see views of the artist’s birthplace in Kanepi – a parish in South Estonia – where she still lives with her parents. To work through the shame that stems from living with her parents, Kaleva directs her gaze to the space around her instead of hanging her head in embarassment. Keiu Maasik’s video work A Ghost Story (2022) tells the story of a son and father that took place in an old rally game. A story where after his father’s death, the son at some point found his father’s ghost car in the game – a seemingly living part of his father stored in virtuality. Mark Raidpere’s video Lachrimae/Driftwood Songs (2017) combines abstracted movements with the longing diaries of a young man written in the 1960s, Tõnu Kõrvits’s arrangement Driftwood Songs and seven tears, e.g John Dowland’s Lachrimae from the late 16th century.

The title of the exhibition is borrowed from the accompanying text of Birgit Kaleva’s work Weizenbergi 51 (2025).

The exhibition will remain open until 28 March 2026.


Birgit Kaleva (b. 1996), working under the artist name motoerotica, uses herself and her immediate surroundings as the basis of her artistic practice. Through a spontaneous and angular approach, she reframes autobiographical material, creating distance from personal experience and offering a clearer perspective on its underlying structures. Her work is informed by an interest in visual rawness and awkwardness in unexpected compositions. Kaleva graduated from the Pallas University of Applied Sciences with a degree in Photography (2024).

Keiu Maasik (b. 1992) has degrees in Photography (BA) and Contemporary Art (MA) from the Estonian Academy of Arts. In her work, she has explored themes such as the impact of documentation on memory, identity and interpersonal relationships. In her recent projects, Maasik has focused on the virtual world, using computer game recordings or similar aesthetics in her video works and installations to reveal the different aspects of virtual life. She is one of the nominees of the Köler Prize 2026. 

Mark Raidpere (b. 1975) is a photographer and video artist, exploring the dilemmas and fears of the human soul, insurmountable loneliness and the tragedy of fate with great sensitivity and insight. Raidpere’s research often draws on his family’s universe, but sometimes takes on a social dimension, focusing on the marginalized, urban violence and street life. In 2005, Raidpere represented Estonia at the 51st Venice Biennale. His works have been exhibited in numerous international group and solo exhibitions and he has received several prestigious awards both in Estonia and abroad.

FOKU Gallery is a gallery-showroom focused on contemporary lens-based art. FOKU Gallery is run by the Estonian Union of Photography Artists (FOKU).


Supporters:
Cultural Endowment of Estonia, Peenjoogivabrik Nudist

Partner:
Rüki galerii

Technical support:
Reigo Nahksepp

Thanks to:
Artproof, EKA Gallery, Estonian Artists’ Association, Karel Koplimets, Kaisa Maasik-Koplimets, Madis Kurss, Tõnu Kõrvits

Lisette Lepik’s solo exhibition “Firm & soft. Soft & firm” will open at Haapsalu City Gallery on 5th of February at 7pm.

Inspired by autobiographical material the exhibition deals with themes of gender roles in intimate relationships. Visitors will see emotionally charged paintings accompanied by a soundscape created for the exhibition, representing Lepik’s personal reflections and conversations with her mother and grandmother about their experiences within relationships and general family life.

The paintings are supported floor to ceiling by iron chains handcrafted by Lepik, representing the strongly held cultural and social baggage passed down between generations. The artworks within the exhibition act as a time machine through which one can observe the atmosphere of a 1990s city home in Mustamäe district or perhaps smell freshly cut grass from a recently mowed 1970s lawn in Rapla city.

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“When you think about that era, showing your feelings wasn’t a normal thing to do. Especially for men. My mother showed her feelings more and respected her husband deeply.”

“He had to be obeyed at all times. When getting older, he became very strict.”

“We always had to do everything together with our parents. My mother knew how to properly preserve edibles for the winter. Those who did not have land to tend for lived a different life.”

“It was so nice to live together with my family.”

“I was impressed that he paid attention to me. He brought me flowers.”

“I had come to realize that I could only rely on myself.”

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Gender roles in post-Soviet Estonia were heavily influenced by the Soviet era, where women were expected to be responsible for and maintain their household’s psychological and physical space. Men tended to fulfill active and successful roles outside of the home. However, thought and behavioural patterns within a society transform over time. In response to the rather narrow range of gender roles that were common during the Soviet era, new, more contemporary and free forms have emerged in today’s Estonia, such as the BDSM community. Within this framework individuals can choose a role with a specific character for themselves in a curated context.

Lisette Lepik: “I explore changes in gender roles and power dynamics through personal stories and photos of my family. Throughout the exhibition process I was inspired by BDSM communities. They provide an opportunity to reverse the roles and rethink expectations on different genders. Within this context power relations happen by mutual agreement. Roles — dominant or submissive, firm or soft — are chosen consciously and voluntarily, with prior communication regarding boundaries and desires being the norm. Power, control and submission does not mean oppression here, but rather trust.”

Lisette Lepik (b. 1999, Tallinn, EE) is an artist who creates paintings and installations. She is currently pursuing a master’s degree in Contemporary Art at the Estonian Academy of Arts and graduated with a bachelor’s degree in Painting at the same university in 2022. She has also studied installation and sculpture at the Iceland Academy of the Arts (2019). Her work focuses on topics related to being a woman within contemporary society.

Lisette Lepik has actively participated in group exhibitions in Estonia, Iceland, Austria, and Lithuania. In 2025 she co-organised a duo exhibition with artist Kristina Kuzemko and curator Kaidi Ojasoo at Club Virgin, a strip club in Tallinn. In 2024 she held two duo exhibitions with painter Brenda Purtsak at the Monumental Gallery of Tartu Art House in Tartu and Hobusepea Gallery in Tallinn. She received the Estonian Academy of Arts’ “Õpi ja sära” scholarship in 2024 and the Helju Rossmann scholarship in 2025.

The exhibition team

Location: Haapsalu City Gallery, Posti street 3

Opening: 5.02.2026 at 7pm

Open: 6.02.2026–01.03.2026,Wed-Sun 12am–6pm

Curator: Liisi Kõuhkna

Soundscape for the exhibition: Rene Manivald Tamm

Graphic design: Cristopher Siniväli

Tech support: Agur Kruusing, Mattias Veller

Special thanks to: Virve Lepik, Liana Lepik, Nora Schmelter, Gerda Hansen, Bob Bicknell-Knight, Estonian Academy of Arts metalworking shop, Cultural Endowment of Estonia, Põhjala Brewery

From 3rd to 27th of February contemporary painter Brenda Purtsak’s solo exhibition “One day I shall be an abstract” will open for visit at ARS Art Factory showroom.

The self-portrait exhibition combines fragments of the artists selected family photos and and images of humans biological body collected into her mobile phone over the past years.

The artist and the concept of the exhibition has been influenced by the anatomical wax Venuses created by an Italian neurologist and wax artist Clemente Susini and Brenda’s personal complex challenges in recent years related to her physical health. The beautiful and adorned females internal organs created in the 18th century have been “cut open” in detail layer by layer for educational purposes. Ian Shank has written that such Venuses at the time were viewed as a microcosm of the Universe.

J. L. Borges has pointed out that the labyrinth is a metaphor for man and the universe, associated on a macro level with the center of the world and on a micro level with the human heart. The better you know the anatomy of the human body, the better you understand God’s own thoughts and his world. As if the eternity has been written into the human soul – every atom of oxygen in our lungs, carbon in our muscles, calcium in our bones, and iron in our blood was created in the stars before Mother Earth was born.

The main piece of the exhibition is a large-scale fragmented painting showing parts of the artist’s body, which describe the processes of healing and decay of the human body. The theme was born after years of battling physical illness and thoughts that arose after several operations. The paintings in the exhibition encourage viewers to think about what is the essence of a soul and what remains of us in the physical world after we pass. Within the paintings the environmental and physical landscapes that have surrounded us and will continue to do so will be at display. This provides input for creating connections between the two that are inevitable in our lives.

Brenda Purtsak (1994) has graduated her Master of Contemporary Art program in 2022 and a Bachelor’s degree in Painting (2020) both at the Estonian Academy of Arts (EKA).

The central point of her creation is human and playfulness between the borders of abstraction and reality. Purtsak mainly uses painting as a medium of self-expression, and in this exhibition also uses oil pastels.

At the end of 2023, a large-scale personal exhibition “Birth” was held in the Project Room of the ARS Art Factory and an overview exhibition of of works in four years called “Incision” in Haapsalu City Gallery (2024). The last major solo exhibition took place in September 2025 at Artrovert gallery under the title “Distant veils”. Purtsak’s works have been featured in various exhibitions abroad, and her paintings and stained glass windows have been exhibited in the premises of the Estonian Embassy in Hague several times.

The exhibition team

Location: ARS Art Factory showroom, Pärnu mnt. 154

Open for visit 3.02-27.02.2026, Mon-Fri from 12am–6pm

Curator: Liisi Kõuhkna

Graphic design: Rainer Kasekivi

Support and thanks to: Cultural Endowment of Estonia, Estonian Artists Association, Indrek Köster, Ian Simon Märjama

You are warmly invited to the opening of the exhibition Imprint of Vulnerability on Friday, 16 January at 6 pm at Tallinn City Gallery.
 
The joint exhibition by Mari Männa and Maria Erikson approaches material as an active participant. Fragility and delicacy operate here as working methods: form emerges through cracking, breaking, and acts of care. Drying, deformation, and the formation of imprints are not deviations or failures, but part of a process through which material remembers, transforms, and shapes its own rhythm. The exhibition is curated by Madli Ljutjuk.
 
“Imprint of Vulnerability approaches fertility beyond biological or gender-defined terms. Here, fertility is understood as an existential condition: the capacity to change, to be receptive, and to remain within uncertainty. The exhibition invites viewers to experience fragility and delicacy not as weakness, but as sources of vitality and renewal, fostering a sense of connection to a bodily, cyclical understanding of life,” explains curator Madli Ljutjuk.
Working together for the first time, the artists approach the same question from different angles. In Männa’s works, a logic of emergence unfolds: the world is born from disintegration and transitional states in which life has not yet settled into its final form. Erikson begins with the wound – the moment when a surface is opened and forced to remember. For both artists, form is not an end point but a temporary condition, something still in the process of becoming.
 
Through sculptural and printmaking processes, the exhibition reveals how form emerges where something is broken or unfinished. Cracking, drying, imprinting, and deformation do not signify rupture, but a generative dynamic. The exhibition speaks of two modes of becoming – emergence and the wound – as different manifestations of the same process.
 
The exhibition is set against a world in which fixed boundaries are dissolving. The human no longer stands at the centre, but exists as one participant among bodies and materials in an entangled network. In such a world, fertility becomes receptivity – the ability to remain open even when the outcome is uncertain. Imprint of Vulnerability invites us to slow down and notice how life emerges precisely through interruption.
 
The exhibition will remain open until 5 April 2026.