Category: Painting

Join us for the opening of the exhibition “Pretence” by Brenda Purtsak and Eero Alev on Tuesday, February 11 at 6 PM. The exhibition is curated by Holger Loodus.

With this exhibition, two young painters, Brenda Purtsak and Eero Alev portray a person through body and space. Right at the start of the project, the artists reached an agreement that they would not show the face of the person being portrayed. The challenge is to create tension – whether the viewer is able to follow the mystery put together by Purtsak and Alev. We get to know that the person being portrayed is a real human with his or her virtues and flaws. He or she has given artists permission to experiment, allowed them close and opened himself or herself up, as it is generally usual in a portrayal.
The viewers’ task is to be a detective and rebuild the whole from the pieces, so they invited to participate in the Hitchcock-like mystery of painting. The exhibition will remain open until March 7.

Brenda Purtsak (b. 1994) and Eero Alev (b. 1983) are studying painting at the Estonian Academy of Arts. Purtsak has participated in various joint exhibitions – “Let Me Breathe in My Own Way” (2018), “Common Dimension” (2019) and others.
Eero Alev has participated in several group exhibitions, at the Haapsalu City Gallery (“Common Dimension”, 2019) and the Estonian Art Museum (“Open Collections. The Artist Gets the Floor”, 2019). 

Holger Loodus (b. 1970) has graduated from the Department of Cultural Heritage and Conservation (BA, 2008) and the Department of Painting (MA, 2012) at the Estonian Academy of Arts. In 2012 Loodus was awarded the Young Artist Award. In 2018 he received the People’s Choice Award of the Köler Prize and the annual Award of the Estonian Cultural Endowment.

Supported by the Cultural Endowment of Estonia and A. Le Coq.

On this Wednesday, 16th October at 4 PM in room A501 takes place the 7th Open Seminar of the Faculty of Fine Arts. This time we are visited by Canadian multimedia artist Tyler Tekatch. The seminar will be held in English.

Hamilton-based artist Tyler Tekatch creates work in film, video and installation that explores perception and the religious imagination. Influenced by Canadian filmmaker/artists such as Michael Snow, Joyce Wieland, Jack Chambers and Bruce Elder, Tekatch takes an experimental approach to media. He has expanded his practice to combine film and video with emerging technologies, such as projection mapping and interactivity. He has held two solo exhibitions at the Art Gallery of Hamilton and the Ottawa Art Gallery, and has screened films at the TIFF Bell Lightbox, the Canadian National Film Board, and internationally.

https://tytekatch.com

The group exhibition “Lasnamäe?”
will open at Vent Space project space on Friday, 12 April 2019 at 7pm. The exhibition will remain open until 17 April.

Participating artists: Anna Kaarma,
Lee Kelomees, Tõnis Laurson, Tiiu Lausmaa, Janne Lias, Riin Maide,
Vassa Ponomarjova

Considering Lasnamäe, the first things that spring to mind are the rows of prefabricated buildings and the wastelands interspersed between them. As a manifestation of a characterless, purely utilitarian space in the cityscape, it continues to be an important and intriguing environment for us, the young people born in the former Soviet Union or right after its collapse. The impersonal nature of Lasnamäe provides us with breathing space, creating a gap into which it was possible for us to write our story. It is our conceptual playground between the real playgrounds and rows of windows, where memories and the emotions they conjure intertwine with the foreign, thereby making it familiar.

The exhibition does not aspire to be an overview nor a broad research of the given subject, we have selected examples from the work by students at the fine art department at EKA created in recent years. The decisive factor in most of the works is coincidence, the initial task of the artist was not to depict Lasnamäe, these works have been by-products in the processes of other works.

The exhibition will remain open during April 13–17 from 12pm to 6pm.

Anna Kaarma (1992) received her bachelor’s degree in graphic design at EKA (2015) and will graduate from her master’s studies in photography/contemporary art this spring. Concurrently, she is preparing a second solo exhibition, which looks at the architectural aesthetics and ideological frame of reference for Lasnamäe, to which she ascribes a human perspective and dreamlike spatial experience through her own perspective. That said, she is also attempting to work past the anonymity of the district and reach its origin. A lifelong inhabitant of Lasnamäe.

Lee Kelomees (1995) is a photographer with a bachelor’s degree from the Estonian Academy of Arts and has lived in Lasnamäe since her early childhood. The inspiration for Lee’s previous work has been the industrial romance unfolding from the window of her 11th floor childhood home, which can be considered her emotional shelter and carrying force, based on her previous work.

Tõnis Laurson (1996) is studying graphic art at the fine art department of the Estonian Academy of Arts. He has lived in Lasnamäe for the past two years, but was not born there nor did he grow up there, therefore, it would be an exaggeration to claim he is from Lasnamäe. That said, living deep in Lasnamäe, the peculiarities of the district have influenced his work in many ways.

Tiiu Lausmaa (1989) graduated from the bachelor’s studies at the painting department of the Estonian Academy of Arts in 2018. She was 2 years old when she moved to Lasnamäe and, for her, it was her first home. She thinks, it was a good place to grow up: it wasn’t too sleek or safe, instead, you could experience real life. There were playgrounds meant for children, but the little woods and wastelands, where you could create your own world, were much more interesting.

Janne Lias (1981) is studying painting at the fine art department of the Estonian Academy of Arts. She was 10 years old, when her family moved from a Mustamäe dormitory room to a 3-room apartment in Lasnamäe with all the conveniences. While she was trying to acclimatise to Lasnamäe, Ivo Linna sang “Stop Lasnamäe!” on the radio. Janne moved away from Lasnamäe already at the beginning of the 2000s, but the awkwardness of living in the wrong place has remained.

Riin Maide (1997) is studying graphic art at the fine art department of the Estonian Academy of Arts. Riin has lived in a prefabricated building, although, in Keila, where there were precisely three buildings tall enough to require a lift. All those “Lasna” and other “mäed” (hills) seem utopic, because the buildings there really are full of people.

Vassa Ponomarjova (1984) is studying painting at the fine art department of the Estonian Academy of Arts. Vassa lived in Lasnamäe for 2 years, now she lives in Õismäe. She considers Lasnamäe to be an area separated from the rest of Tallinn – a city within a city, where the mentality is a little different to that which exists in the rest of Tallinn.

Shahar Marcus(1971) is an Israeli based artist who primary works in the medium of performance and video art. He is an active artist for over a devade and has exhibited at various art institutions, both in Israel and around the world, including: Tate Modern, The Israel Museum, Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Petach Tikva Museum of Art, Charlottenburg, Copenhagen Kunsthalle, Moscow Biennale, Poxan Biennale, Moscow Musuem of Modenr Art and other art venuse in Poland, Italy, Germany, Georgia, Japan, USA and Turkey.

http://shaharmarcus.com/

Avi Milgrom (1978) is an artist and a lecturer. His work often addresses the intersection of art and technology – either by the use of digitally processed images and videos, or by applying electrical and mechanical apparatuses to the artwork itself. His work has been exhibited in internationally established galleries all over the world.

http://www.avimilgrom.com/

On Wednesday, 5 September at 17.00 EKA Gallery and the Faculty of Fine arts invite you to a public lecture on radical digital art by visiting artist Jeffrey Alan Scudder (USA). The lecture is in English and takes place in room A302.

Lecture “Radical Digital Painting” groups and presents several ideas and artifacts related to contemporary painting and contextualizes its connection to historical processes and digital technology. It is inspired by and is a continuation of Radical Computer Music. Through demonstrative, interactive performance lectures, American artist and educator Jeffrey Alan Scudder presents homegrown software inventions and new theories about painting and picture making. A Google search for “digital painting” today mostly brings up Photoshop tutorials related to translating age old representational painting techniques to computational media, but the topic of digital painting has much more to offer fine arts in terms of poetry and theory. Jeffrey has created several programs that highlight abstract expressivity, play, and improvisation over production quality and technical control.

In addition to software demos, new theoretical models of image resolution, computer literacy, and picture making are presented and described, and connected to the history of abstraction in drawing and painting. He presently spends all his time traveling, performing, and continuing to develop his software and media performances.

As of summer and fall 2018 he is traveling and lecturing with the Danish composer Goodiepal and his band throughout Europe. Jeffrey’s work Ten Minute Painting is now a part of the permanent Goodiepal collection at the SMK Statens Museum for Kunst in Copenhagen, Denmark.

Interview with Jeffrey on Rhizome: http://rhizome.org/editorial/2017/dec/05/Artist-Profile-Jeffrey-Alan-Scudder/

Premiere at cinema Sõprus
Monday, 2nd of April, 6.30 pm
Free entrance!

The film “Screen Tests for Köler Prize 2018” accompanies the 7th Köler Prize exhibition of the nominees at EKKM, open during 31.03.–20.05.2018.
The nominees for Köler Prize 2018 are: ANNA ŠKODENKO, HOLGER LOODUS, TAAVI TALVE, TANJA MURAVSKAJA and TARVO VARRES.

Idea: EKKM & Nora Särak
Cinematographer: Nora Särak
Editing: Raul Tõnurist, Epp Kubu, Nora Särak
Sound recording: Antti Mäss, Dmitry Natalevich, Siim Skepast, Tanel Kadalipp
Sound design: Jevgeni Berezovski
Colour correction: Epp Kubu
Graphic design: Ott Kagovere

Thank you:
Cultural Endowment of Estonia, Estonian Ministry of Culture, AS Smarten Logistics, family Kruuse, Baltic Film and Media School, Estonian Artists’ Association, Estonian Contemporary Art Development Center, Tõnu Talpsep

Köler Prize is an art award established in 2011 by the Contemporary Art Museum of Estonia (EKKM). Its main objective throughout the years has been to give recognition to important artists and art collectives that are active in Estonia and to popularise contemporary art in general. Five artists or art collectives of Estonian origin or who reside permanently in Estonia are nominated for the Köler Prize on the basis of their creative work over the past three years.

More information:
info@ekkm.ee
www.ekkm.ee/en
+372 53305449

System & Error

Exhibition: 23rd February / 4th March

Off-season Contemporary Art Museum of Estonia (EKKM),

Opening Party: 18:00 / Friday 23rd

Ordinary life is made of eventful junctures, constant surprises and adjustments that go beyond all attempts to rigorously plan and design things. Infrastructures crack, smart phones make errors, printers print funny stuff, states fail and the financial market fall into cyclical crises; Also our body can react strangely. All these failures have an aura though: they do not occur twice in the same way and produce the adrenaline of edges. Paraphrasing Tolstoy, all the families are successful alike, but failed in their own unique way.

The artworks of this exhibition have been produced honouring the meaning of collaboration, since the groups of artists are composed with MA students from Aalto University and from the Estonian Academy of Arts, which adds to the exhibition a reflection about the risks, potentials and failures of cooperation between artists and between institutions. For the exhibition, students have engaged with how misbehaviours and things out of place constitute a terrain of experimentation, addressing different meanings of systems, randomness and dead ends, and facing questions such as:

• Do failures need an excuse?
• What does an error look like?
• What is the benefit of being part of a system?
• How much tolerance for the non-perfect do our societies have?
• Is a list of failures more revealing than a list of successes?
• Are gaps, holes, tricksters and hackers part of the system or the error?
• In which ways systems are organised by defining some practices as normal and some others as deviant (noise, dirt, queer…)?
• And does anything right might come from pursuing wrong practices?

Curator: Francisco Martínez

Graphic designer Heleliis Hõim

Artists:

• Madis Kurss & Martha Jessen
• Mirka Sulander & Elina Saat
• Hanna Perälä & Heleliis Hõim
• Sandra Schneider, Anu Jalas & Kadi Reintamm
• Uzair Amjad, Aman Askarizad & Aap Jaapan
• Ana Fernandes & Mark Antonious Puhkan
• Solveig Lill & Tuomas Lehtomaa
• Elham Rahmati, Danai Anagnostou & Heidi Paju