Category: Contemporary Art

Artists:
Gabrielė Adomaitytė (Lithuania/Netherlands, 1994); Māris Ārgalis (Latvia, 1954–2008); Milla Aska (Finland, 1993); Marikki Hakola (Finland, 1960); Madlen Hirtentreu (Estonia, 1993); Elvyra Kairiūkštytė (Lithuania, 1950–2006); Miska Kukkohovi (Finland, 2001); Daria Melnikova (Latvia, 1984); Rait Prääts (Estonia, 1952); Anna Škodenko (Estonia, 1986); Viktor Timofeev (Latvia/US, 1984); Justinas Vilutis (Lithuania/France, 1991)

Co-authors:
Anders Kreuger (Sweden/Finland, 1965); Jaakko Pallasvuo (Finland, 1987); Miša Skalskis (Lithuania/Finland, 1994)

Kunsthalle Kohta, Helsinki

Opening 12.04, 6pm

“For some reason they thought this exhibition should be titled Amber. Amber could be a natural resource, a souvenir, a wall colour, or a way to accidentally preserve mosquitos full of dinosaur blood, making Jurassic Park possible. 

They are imagining this curator. Her name is Amber. She is on a Baltic-Nordic tour, taking the long trip from LA to Vilnius, making her way through Riga, Tallinn and Helsinki to look for inspiration. Afterwards – Ibiza, for fun and romance.

Maybe Amber is from a tiny spa town with an air of mystery. Shallow Springs, Wyoming. Shallow Springs, Arizona. She has left town, she has made it in the art world, but what happened in Shallow Springs is haunting her dreams.

On her way across the Baltic-Nordic zone Amber sees what other curators were not able to see. This survey of the region is not giving her the typical post-Soviet archive, austere-but-cozy Lutheran interiors, mystified relationships to lichen or strained X-is-the-new-Berlin coolness.

Amber is having a great time. These sites appear lavish and bewitching to her. Maybe it is her presence that makes them so. She is dancing. People think too much, she tells herself. Her new Baltic friends offer her a super-slim cigarette. Is it a Vogue? she asks. No, a Glamour, her friend responds.”

Info

Entropy Gauntlet
Zody Burke, Taylor “Tex” Tehan, Joonas Timmi, Lauri Raus April 6 – April 28, 2023
Opening: April 6, 6pm–9pm

“There is nothing more mysterious than a TV set left on in an empty room … Suddenly the TV reveals itself for what it really is: a video of another world, ultimately addressed to no one at all, delivering its images indifferently, indifferent to its own messages. You can easily imagine it still functioning after humanity has disappeared.”

— Jean Baudrillard, America

Entropy Gauntlet invites you to pass a threshold into a transmutation of space. Inspired by wide-eyed summer night visits to amusement parks and roadside motels, laden with the nostalgia of childhood & playing with the expectations generated by the psychogeography of such spaces, the exhibition leads viewers to contemplate the tension between fantasies of the world we’ve inherited versus the reality of a warming planet.

Solastalgia, a concept which describes a form of emotional or existential distress caused by environmental change, presents itself materially through an amalgam of works and artifacts set inside a narrative. Within the Entropy Gauntlet is a contemporary apologue; using architecture as archetype, exploring the porousness of post-western notions of national identity and its haunted histories. Here, utopia and dystopia become uneven categories in the realm of the anthropocene.

In the tradition of transformative environmental-architectural works such as Gregor Schneider’s “Totes Haus u r” and Jonah Freeman’s “Hello Meth Lab in the Sun”, and hearkening to Robert Ashley’s operatic compositions of late capitalist melancholia, the Entropy Gauntlet manifests as a linear series of archaeological sites undergoing perpetual excavation. It is a narrative of motion and placelessness tropifying the notion that invisible, emotional environs can be injected into the visible sphere to create a sense of longing, dread, and even abject horror.

A note from the artists…

The roadside motel is a ubiquitous feature upon the sprawling face of the continental USA, but it is entirely absent in Estonia. It is taken for granted as a place where small tragedies may or may not occur. It is a location for repressed emotions to manifest due to its invisible status, despite its ubiquity in the flyover states. Within the Entropy Gauntlet, our aim is to engage with the surreality that permeates the line where memory and history interact, in an unexpected location in Tallinn; creating a hauntological simulacrum of a space that exists between destinations. The poetic transmutations of culture that occur when countries on opposite sides of the globe mirror and refract one another are acutely fertile terrain for our work.

The fact that the USA exists partially as a fantasy informed by media is intrinsic to our concept. Two out of four of us are American; despite this, the two of us have experienced our home country in ways that run contradictory to the America that exists in the imagination of the cultural status quo. The other two of us are Estonian and have spent a considerable amount of time formulating fantasies about America & weighing these fantasies against facts. To honestly engage with the USA is to deal with omnipresent shadows that resist truth & dominate the country’s emotional cartography, and with an endless deluge of popular fantasies that provide alternative images to the USA that exists.

Artist Bios:

With an eye towards the complicated nature of inherent and enforced structures, American multidisciplinary artist Zody Burke criticizes the absurdity of late capitalism and the mythologies and archetypes it generates, while leaving a liminal space for larger ways of being together.
Working with sculpture, illustration, sound, and other media, Burke has sought to establish that societal concepts of identity, symbolism, brutality and hierarchy are as tenuous as we see to craft them, and yet they paradoxically shape practically every facet of our lives.

Taylor “Tex” Tehan is an M.A. Graphic Design student from the United States and an interdisciplinary practitioner. Working with textiles, sound, metal, wood and film, his work is influenced by the landscape, nostalgia, speculative futures, mythology and romanticism of the American West. Previously working in the fashion industry, Tehan has worked as a designer for various brands, including a recent traineeship on the Menswear Design Team at Louis Vuitton in Paris. His interests meet at the cross section of fashion, music, contemporary art, film and graphic design, with a strong emphasis on experiential-environmental themes.

Joonas Timmi is an Estonian artist & designer who explores the contemporary identity of craftsmanship by combining traditional woodworking techniques with VR-modeling, 3D-printing and CNC-milling. In his work, he expresses the relations between functionality and sentimentality in objects using furniture as the main medium. Each piece aims to be a somewhat functional artifact with an emphasis on biomorphic form with anthropomorphic charisma. A recent work, “Traction” chair, was exhibited in the exhibition “Present Yet-to-Be” (Tallinn, Hobusepea gallery) in January 2022. The installation combined meandering forms of plywood with textile to create throne-like structure, inspired by the idea of alternate realities.

Lauri Raus is an Estonian songwriter & guitarist, most notable for his work in contemporary country/shoegaze ensemble Holy Motors. Through his work, he engages with western musical tropes from a distance, transfiguring his own interpretation of Americana into something subtly different and altogether unique. His band is signed to New York-based indie label Wharf Cat which has enabled him to tour the USA, allowing him to rupture, expand, and transform his relationship with the musical tradition he uses as a foundation for his art. He studies anthropology at Tallinn University.

Histories and memories of the 20th and 21st centuries in the Baltic States with its different colonialisms are entangled with the uneasy relations between the past and present. How can we acknowledge this history as layered and nuanced? And which methods could help us to address its blind spots and silences as well as solidarities?

In this presentation, Margaret Tali will introduce the transdisciplinary project “Communicating Difficult Pasts” (2019-2024) and focus on its different ways of engaging artists to answer these questions. At the heart of this collaborative project has been creating synergies between humanities scholarship, artistic research and curation in order to learn from each others’ methods and approaches in order to sharpen and enrich our perspectives to history writing. The exhibition “Difficult Pasts. Connected Worlds” co-curated with Ieva Astahovska in its framework at the National Gallery of Art in Vilnius (2022) and in the Latvian National Museum of Art (2020) presented its results to a broader public. During the lecture, Margaret Tali will introduce some of the works included by Lia Dostlieva and Andrii Dostliev, Jaana Kokko, and Quinsy Gario & Jörgen Gario.

Margaret Tali is an art historian and curator, who works as a postdoctoral research fellow at the Estonian Academy of Arts, Institute of Art History and Visual Culture. Her research interests include exhibition histories, curating difficult heritage, relationships of visual art and handicraft, and histories of the art museum. She holds a PhD from the Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis, University of Amsterdam. She is the author of Absence and Difficult Knowledge in Contemporary Art Museums (2018) and co-editor, with Ieva Astahovska, of the Memory Studies special issue Return of Suppressed Memories in Eastern Europe: Locality and Unsilencing Difficult Histories (2/2022). Together with Astahovska she has initiated the project Communicating Difficult Pasts, and as a part of which she co-curated the exhibition Difficult Pasts. Connected Worlds in the Latvian National Museum of Art (2019) and Lithuanian National Gallery of Art (2022).
margarettali.net

Kasia Fudakowski does an artist talk in which she talks about artist talks which she has done in the past, thereby dissecting and examining both her work, and her approach to speaking about her work, while commenting on the unwritten contract between performer and audience. At least, that is very much her intention.

Kasia Fudakowski (b. 1985, London, UK) lives and works in Berlin. She studied at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, Oxford University, graduating in 2006 before moving to Berlin. Her diverse and playful practice, which includes sculpture, film, performance, and writing, explores social riddles through material encounters, surreal logic and comic theory. Her ever-expanding, life-long sculpture Continuouslessness, (2017–ongoing), employs a fixed modular system of connecting panels to allow for complete sculptural freedom within its rigid framework, and is intended to reach completion only in the event of the artist’s death. Often referring to the allure and danger of binary categorization and the subsequent absurdity that it unfolds in our political and social climate, her work reveals the discrepancies amongst cultural norms.

Her interest in the limitations of language is explored through her ongoing film series Word Count, (2016–ongoing) which takes as its premise a globally limiting law on the amount of permitted spoken words. Where she employs comic mechanisms, the tragic is never far behind, so that her work often hovers between the horrific and the comic. Frequently the target of her own attacks, she explores her own role as an artist and the stereotype thereof with both a seriousness and irreverence typical of her approach. Her long-term infatuation with failure, and redefining success, has resulted in a number of tragi-comic performances and pieces of writing.
kasiakasia.com

The talk will be in English. Kasia Fudakowski is in EKA to give a workshop to the Contemporary Art MA students and have tutorials with students from Graphic Design MA.

On Tuesday, March 14 at 17.30, Amsterdam-based artist Riet Wijnen will speak about her current research into the life and practice of painter and sculptor Saloua Raouda Choucair (1916–2017), one of the first abstract artists in Lebanon.

Choucair’s interests included genetic science, the infinite, the Arabic poetry form Qasida and Sufi philosophy. According to her, the Islamic rejection of the pictorial image led to the essential search for what one wanted to express, and was for her a fundamental way to understand Arabic intellectual thinking which she translated a.o. into abstract sculptures and paintings.

Wijnen visited the estate in Choucair’s last apartment in the Qatari neighbourhood in Beirut. There she was confronted by a large amount of works, photos and documents in French and Arabic, languages she does not speak, write nor read. This visit led to her development of non-linguistic research methods, an inquiry into how one might “speak nearby”* and position themselves in the work. Wijnen will share works and tools currently in development: a publication, sculptural dinnerware and a series of fermentation pots. These works will also feed into a fictional conversation with Choucair, which is part of a long term cycle, since 2015, titled Sixteen Conversations on Abstraction.
*Trinh T. Minh–ha

Riet Wijnen (b. 1988, Venray, NL, lives in Amsterdam) is an artist whose practice involves sculpture, photograms, text, woodcuts and more recently type design. She is interested in incomplete histories of abstraction, what and who are already registered in history, along with the known and unknown ways of making history. To do this, she looks to elders, and in her work hosts practitioners from the past and present who have been active in the field of art during early modernism, or in science, philosophy, education and activism. She brings the practitioners together in fictional conversations and sculptures to reconsider histories and better understand what comes next. Wijnen uses perception, language and organisational structures.

This research comes together in the cycle Sixteen Conversations on Abstraction (2015) and publications related to language and biographies of female identifying modernists that provide sources for Wijnen’s practice while functioning independently. Publications include: Saloua Raouda Choucair (2023), Homophone Dictionary (2019), Grace Crowley (2019), Abstraction Création: Art non-figuratif (reprint and translation) (2014) and Marlow Moss (2013).

Wijnen has had solo exhibitions at venues including Kunstverein Milano (2022), Manifold Books, Amsterdam (2019); Lumen Travo, Amsterdam (2018); P/////AKT, Amsterdam (2016) and Dolores, Ellen de Bruijne Projects, Amsterdam (2015). She was a resident at the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten (2017–18), the Van Doesburg Huis in Paris (2022), EKWC in Oisterwijk, NL (2023) and has participated in groups shows at, among others, SculptureCenter, New York; 21st Biennale of Sydney; John Hansard Gallery, Southampton; The Center for Contemporary Art & Culture at PNCA, Portland; Casco Art Institute: Working for the Commons, Utrecht; and Index – The Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation, Stockholm. Wijnen teaches in the Graphic Design and TXT department of the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, Amsterdam.
rietwijnen.nl

The lecture is in English. Riet Wijnen is in EKA to have tutorials with students from Contemporary Art MA and Graphic Design MA programs.

Maria Izabella Lehtsaar & Sarah Nõmm open their duo exhibition Beauty in the Belly of the Beast in Draakon gallery at 18:00 on Wednesday, March 8th, 2023. Curators of the exhibition are Anita Kodanik and Brigit Arop. Exhibition will be open until April 1st, 2023.

With their duo exhibition Beauty in the Belly of the Beast, Maria Izabella Lehtsaar & Sarah Nõmm focus on their shared interests towards intimacy, sexual self-expression and various representations of love and violence between people. Current exhibition is based on the concept of bedroom as a place where one can rest, dream, feel pleasure and fear. It is also a place where one reads texts that shape us as human beings and creators and the place where meetings for this collaboration have taken place. The “bedroom activities” form a socially controversial subject. This place is intimate and reveals the nuances about us that are private and make us vulnerable. It is something that entirely belongs to oneself and at the same time is completely shared with the dearest ones. And yet, not all bedrooms are safe – besides softness, there could also be violence experienced under the roof of love.

The artworks at the present duo exhibition have been inspired by the contradictions related to the intimacy of a bedroom where the expressive means of tenderness and harshness are intertwined. For instance, Nõmm’s artwork “Little Switch” refers to a whip as an object with the purpose of hurting, that can be read in several ways. On one hand, it is an object of power and violence that is used for punishing disobedient bodies; on the other hand, the whip has its place in sexual practices where harshness, care and pleasure are combined. Lehtsaar’s new linocut works “Pillow Princess” and “Unknown Pleasures” continue expanding the artist’s visual queer vocabulary. “Loveless V” is their final addition to the series on the subject of boxing as self-defense and self-love, while also referring to their attempt to challenge gendered stigmatization of extreme or violent sports. Nõmm’s installation “Untie My Ribbons” is inspired by non-normative romantic relationships that won’t classify under the seemingly obligatory relationship form of monogamy. Through the cuddly weapons from the series “The Softest Touch” and the pictures completed by manual typesetting titled “Queer Scissors I II III”, Lehtsaar observes the world of signs related to lesbianism while in some cases using it for self-empowerment and in other cases ironically repeating uniform stereotypes to absurdity.

The stories of the interwoven destinies of a beauty and a beast are as old as our civilization. These usually begin with the imprisoned princess and end with marrying the prince who has killed the dragon. Sometimes these stories have also been told from the point of view of a princess with a higher agency, revealing for instance that the prince might be even more monstrous than the dragon, or that the princess could save herself on her own, or will choose another partner in life. Yet these stories won’t tell us anything about the daily life of the new couple nor the fact that there are beasts sleeping underneath their bed. Beauty in the Belly of the Beast attempts to offer more diverse narratives about intimacy and to enrich the common ground for mutual understanding while emphasizing the importance of safe experiences to people’s welfare.

Maria Izabella Lehtsaar (they/them) is an artist based in Tallinn who combines textiles, graphics, drawing, installation and text in their work. Their works deal mainly with the themes of queer experience and mental health, often playing on the fragile border between reality and fantasy. Lehtsaar graduated from the Estonian Academy of Arts with a bachelor’s degree in Graphic Art and is currently studying in the Contemporary Art MA programme. In 2021, they were awarded the Edmund Valtman scholarship and in 2022, they were nominated for the AkzoNobel Art Prize with Sarah Nõmm.

Sarah Nõmm (she/her) is an artist based in Tallinn who works primarily with sculpture, installation, video and performance. Her work deals with the female body and the spaces surrounding it. Nõmm’s works are often based on personal experiences and look at themes of the body through popular beliefs, myths, taboos and everyday rituals. She has a bachelor’s degree in Sculpture and Installation from the Estonian Academy of Arts. In 2021, she was awarded the Young Sculptor Prize, in 2022 she was nominated for the AkzoNobel Art Prize with Maria Izabella Lehtsaar, and won the Eduard Wiiralt scholarship.

Anita Kodanik (she/her) is an Estonian-Ukrainian freelance art worker based in Tallinn. Her research and curatorial practice focus on the visual cultural expressions of collective and personal identity politics. Kodanik graduated from the Estonian Academy of Arts with a bachelor’s degree in art history and is currently doing her master’s in curatorial studies. Her recent curatorial projects include exhibitions Imageries in Blanks (2022) at Maardu Decennial and Exercises for Dreamkeeping (2022) organised together with roam Berlin residency program.

Brigit Arop (she/her) is a freelance art worker based in Tallinn with a background in semiotics, who mainly curates and writes. She is interested in artistic practices that use poetry, material-sensitive approaches and humour to shift stale values. Arop has a bachelor’s degree in Semiotics and Cultural Theory from the University of Tartu, and is currently studying for a master’s degree in Curatorial Studies at the Estonian Academy of Arts. Her last curatorial project was the group exhibition Greetings, and Whatever Customarily Restores a Bond About to Break in Kogo Gallery, Tartu (2023).

Graphic design: Kertu Klementi

Supporters: Cultural Endowment of Estonia, Student Council of Estonian Academy of Arts
Special gratitude goes to: Anton Serdjukov, Karl-Christoph Rebane, department of graphic art at the Estonian Academy of Arts, Eda Urmet, Kristi Kongi, Marge Monko.

Exhibitions in Draakon gallery are supported by the Cultural Endowment of Estonia, Estonian Ministry of Culture and Liviko Ltd.

Beyond the Blue Yonder

Denisa Štefanigová in collaboration with Johanna Ruukholm and Marleen Suvi, curated by Yilin Ma.

16.02–16.03.2023
Opening: 16.02, 5 pm

In Štefanigová’s Beyond the Blue Yonder exhibition, humans are melting, becoming tides into other creatures to coexist together, in the same body. Culture historian Astrida Neimanis writes on ”Hydrofeminism; Or, On Becoming a Body of Water”, how the space between ourselves and our others are at once as distant as the primaeval sea, yet also closer than our skin. 

Current in Štefanigová’s practice, is the fluidity between human and nonhuman subjects, where no living being is separated nor untouched from others. Like water connecting us all and ensuring we are always in a state of becoming as it travels in our bodies, in Beyond the Blue Yonder Štefanigová’s works are blending into new boundaries. Through works especially made for the exhibition, Beyond the Blue Yonder studies the possibilities of fluidity and fusing into each other, very much like boundless water crashing into itself in our bodies. 

When looking at Štefanigová’s work through connections, you can see how they are formed and how unavoidably they reach out to every corner of our own private lives in good or in bad. Neimanis writes how “Despite the fact that we are all watery bodies, leaking into and sponging off of one another, we resist total dissolution, material annihilation. Or more aptly, we postpone it: ashes to ashes, water to water”; this is evident in Štefanigová’s work where water, air, or anything that bounds us together, works as a communicator between our bodies, connecting us and facilitates bodies into being. Doing so, it shows all the things from the past to the present. Our bodies are holding the past, and simultaneously are on the verge of the future. The space of constant becoming that is trying to find its own, but without the naivety of being born again. 

There is also something queer about the way Štefanigová’s approach to challenge boundaries between human and nonhuman, and everything that sets them apart socially and environmentally. As bell hooks writes ”queer as not who you’re having sex with, that can be a dimension of it, but queer as being about the self that is at odds with everything around it and has to invent and create and find a place to speak and to thrive and to love”. 

Štefanigová’s technique holds water in an important role — from working with acrylics that water controls from how the water dries to the canvas, Štefanigová’s one line technique awakes something watery in the paintings; a reflection, that’s on a constant move. Installing these 31 pieces of paintings next to each other, Štefanigová is creating a wave that flows through the space. 

The exhibition consists of paintings and an installation by Denisa Štefanigová, as well as sculptures by Marleen Suvi. A limited amount of catalogues that examine the exhibition through a dialogue between the artists Denisa Štefanigová and the curator Yilin Ma is designed by Johanna Ruukholm. 

Denisa Štefanigová (she/her) (b.1995) is a Czech artist who mainly works in painting. She recently graduated from the Master’s Program in Contemporary Art at the Estonian Academy of Arts (EKA). She also holds a bachelor’s degree from the Technical University, Faculty of Fine Arts (FaVU), during her studies she also attended the Faculty de Bellas Artes in Bilbao. In 2021, Štefanigová was one of the 15 finalists for the Young Painter Award for the Baltic countries. Her recent exhibitions include MO Museum, Vilnius, and Hobusepea, and Hoib Gallery, both in Tallinn. Her works are represented in the KogArt collection based in Hungary and in SYNLAB based in Tallinn. This year, she will have a solo exhibition in Tallinn, Prague, and then one group show with the Hungarian artist Asztrid Csatlós in Brno. 

Marleen Suvi (b. 1998) (she/her)has graduated from the department of painting in the faculty of fine art at the Estonian Academy of Arts (2020) and is currently acquiring a MA degree in the contemporary art program at the Estonian Academy of Arts. Marleen Suvi is examining the interwovenness between the body and the human soul. At the moment she is working with ideas such as whether it is possible to meet yourself, how to let go of your selfishness and what it means to depict yourself in a sexual way. Most of her works are autoportraits. While writing haikus, the artist contemplates empty phrases, which arise from subconsciousness that sometimes seems to belong to someone else. She prefers to work with oil on canvas and glass. Among her recently held exhibitions are ‘‘A Visitor’’ (Hobusepea Gallery, 2022) and ‘‘So That the Body Does not Forget’’ (Vent Space Project Room, 2021). 

Johanna Ruukholm (she/her) (b. 1996) is a graphic designer and artist. She is part of a design duo Jojo&me. Her graphic works vary from websites to illustrated visuals and she enjoys telling stories through characters in colourful and enigmatic worlds. Besides working with a computer and pencils, she creates ceramic sculptures and everyday objects under a brand called Nestworkers. She is also one of the curators of the club event series HoneyCombat, which takes place in Tallinn. 

Yilin Ma (they/them) (b.1995) is a Helsinki based curator and writer, who works in intersections of literature and visual culture with a focus on East-Asian queer diaspora narratives and queer- feminist way of understanding the spaces in between lyrical and material. Currently they are attending The Praxis Master’s Programme in Exhibition Studies at The University of Arts in Helsinki. 

The exhibition is supported by the Cultural Endowment of Estonia and the Estonian Academy of Arts

Opening drinks by Punch

The international sound-art festival, held every two years at the ARS Art Factory, will showcase sonic creations by various artists. The festival aims to introduce and promote sonic culture through a variety of exhibitions and live performances. The exhibitions, held in three spaces simultaneously, will feature interactive, participatory, perceptual, site-specific, and conceptual pieces.

Artists

Participants in the sound art exhibition of 2023:
Therese Frisk (SE), Kaisa Maasik & Gerda Nurk (EE), Kat Austen (DE/GB), Katrin Enni (EE), Madlen Hirtentreu (EE), Mari-Liis Rebane, Jaanika Arum & Helen Västrik (EE), Taavi Suisalu (EE)

Performing artists:
Sabotanic Garden (FI), Yuri Landmann (NL), Simonas Nekrošius (LT), THRVS (Matthias Kampf, AT), Sister Clara (IT), Katrin Enni (EE), SSSS (Sten Saarits ja Sven Sosnitski, EE), Mari-Liis Rebane, Jaanika Arum & Helen Västrik (EE), Erik Alalooga (EE), Janno Bergmann (EE)

Programme

Sound Art Exhibition 11 – 18.02.2023. Every day 13:00 – 19:00

Friday 10.02
Sound Art Exhibition opening at 18:00 (Exhibition will remain open 10 – 18.02.2023)
Opening performance/installation at studio 98 by Erik Alalooga & Janno Bergmann

Tuesday 15.02 / Performance night vol. 1
Sister Clara (PT/DE) – ARS Project Space

Friday 17.02 / Performance night vol. 2
SSSS (EE) – Studio 98
Helen Västrik (EE), Jaanika Arum (EE), Mari-Liis Rebane (EE) – ARS Project Space
Katrin Enni (EE) – Studio 53
Simonas Nekrošius (LT) – Studio 98
After event at Burgerbox: Katja Adrikova (EE)

Saturday 18.02 / Performance night vol. 3
Yuri Landmann (NL) – Studio 98
THRVS (Matthias Kampf, AT) – Studio 98
Erik Alalooga (EE) – Studio 53
Sabotanic Garden (FI) – Studio 98
After event at Burgerbox

Organisers: Erik Alalooga, Sten Saarits
Graphic design: Kert Viiart
Installation assist: Ian Simon Märjama

The Festival is supported by Cultural Endowment of Estonia, Estonian Artists’ Association, ARS Art Factory

Group exhibition ‘The Weak Fins of My Few Skills’

Pärnu City Gallery
Uus tn 4, Pärnu
2.–25.02.2023

The opening of the group exhibition ‘The Weak Fins of My Few Skills’ will take place on Wednesday, February 1st at 18.00 at Pärnu City Gallery.

The group exhibition ‘The Weak Fins of My Few Skills’ doesn’t seek to give an exhaustive answer to the question of how to live. Rather, it tries its best not to sink while exercising empathy towards its favorite subject – the “water”. According to David Foster Wallace’s famous speech ‘This Is Water’, the “water” in the parable above means nothing more than the most obvious and important realities of our existence, which are nonetheless the hardest to see and talk about. To avoid becoming a living corpse in the daily grind, one must manage the hard-wired human setting of seeing oneself as the center of the world and actively choose to think differently. To choose to look at the “water” anew.

Participating artists: Laura De Jaeger, Joosep Kivimäe, Johannes Luik, Kaisa Maasik, Tiiu Maasik, Eva Mustonen and Mathias Väärsi
Project manager: Elo Meier
Graphic design: Pamela Sume

Supporters: Eesti Kultuurkapitali kujutava ja rakenduskunsti sihtkapital ja Pärnumaa ekspertgrupp, Jaanihanso Siidrivabrik, PERI AS, Pizzakiosk, Pärnu Linn

We thank: Estonia Medical Spa & Hotel, Karel Koplimets, Kusja, Mariel Värk, Nienke Fransen, Pärnu Jahtklubi, Villa Wesset

The joint exhibition by the Design and Crafts MA and MACA students Staying in the Compost: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene.

Opening Thursday, 26.01, 18.00, at Kanuti Gildi SAAL Cellar Hall (Pühavaimu 5). 

Exhibited are the works by the Design and Crafts MA and MACA students, accomplished within the frameworks of the Autumn semester course “Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene” led by Taavi Hallimäe and Sandra Kosorotova. The course kick-started with a short residency at MASSIA (Massiaru, Pärnumaa) and workshops by Sepideh Ardalani and Pire Sova, continued with seminars and individual work and is concluded with this public presentation at Kanuti Gildi SAAL. In addition to the six individual projects by each of the artists there will be presented a work communally produced by the artists and compost microorganisms — the outcome of the workshop by Pire Sova. 

Artists: Siew Ching Ang, Y. Derya Balkan, Zody Burke, Katarina Kruus, Viktor Kudriashov, Elle Kannike

Graphic designer: Agnes Isabelle Veevo

Alcoholic beverages for the opening are kindly offered by Sveta Bar. There will also be a non-alcoholic option in the form of kombucha tea brewed by the exhibition artist Elle Kannike.

The exhibition reading group will take place on Friday, 27.01, 17.00–19.00, led by the exhibition artist Siew Ching Ang.
Please get in touch with Siew if you would like to take part in this event: siew.ang@artun.ee

Opening hours:
27.–29.01, 13.00–19.00