Category: Library

EKA library, 6.03.–15.05.2026

Dear friend,

It has been a long time since we last heard from you. Last time we spoke, you were working on some prints in the graphic arts workshop with a roller in your hand and ink on your fingers. How is it going? We would love to see some trials or progress pictures. At the moment we are also in the process of doing some tests. I have added a sample in the envelope. Check it out and tell us what you think!

Let’s keep in touch.

The exhibition shows works from the EKA Print Exchange project initiated by the department of Graphic Art at the Estonian Academy of Arts. Printmaking students from different universities were invited to take part and submit an original print edition. Each print was shipped to Tallinn, sorted and sent back to participants, so everyone received a random selection of ten prints.

The vision of this project was to create new connections between printmaking departments and students through collaboration and sharing physical works. So, we wrote to our penpals and were curious what students of other universities were up to. Depictions of current ideas, projects or any experiments were warmly welcomed as a response.

Four universities participated in the exchange: Estonian Academy of Arts (EKA),
Oslo National Academy of the Arts (KHiO), University of the West of England (UWE), The Eugeniusz Geppert Academy of Art and Design in Wrocław.

Exhibitions of the Print Exchange have taken place at the universities participating in the exchange, and the first presentation in Estonia took place in June-July 2025 at the TYPA Balcony Gallery in Tartu.

We would like to thank EKA graafika, TYPA, Anna Kodź, Aleksandra Janik and Angie Butler.

Organisers of the EKA Print Exchange: Alona Chuprina, Margarita Feofanova, Chantal Gerschuetz, Merit Himmelreich, Triin Mänd, Helena Pass, Marten Prei, Sandra Puusepp and our supervisor Charlotte Biszewski.

Exhibition design at the EKA library: Sandra Puusepp and Marten Prei. 

3rd-year Graphic Art students are showcasing the artists’ book as an independent medium of visual art and an original artwork. The authors draw from personal experiences and memories, exploring themes of physicality, history, and ethical boundaries:

• Aliisa Ahtiainen presents a grandfather’s life story in risography and a “breathing” book inspired by her grandmother’s experience in a tuberculosis sanatorium.
• Jacqueline-Desiree Rosenthal exhibits a piece made of tattooed pigskin rawhide, raising questions about morality and the parallels between animals and humans.
• Olga Dubrovskaja utilizes her background as an intensive care doctor to explore the experience of death through her own and her colleagues’ perspectives. In her second book titled “Delight”, she focuses on the moments of life.
• Adriana Jinmao Biosca Sánchez examines the volatility of memory through materiality and layers of printing.
• Robin August Vöörmann deals with gender identity, drawing parallels with changes in nature.

Supervisors: Eve Kask, Eve Kaaret (binding) and Viktor Gurov. 

Exhibition dates: 6.03.–15.05.2025

12 Jan – 28 Feb 2026

In the exhibition “Gouaches and Other Graphic Notes,” animator-trained artist Francesco Rosso translates the technological world into a dreamlike, deeply self-reflective inner universe. The world he depicts is guided by disciplined meditation, manual control, and a far-reaching perspective that traces paths laid down by both his predecessors and future generations.

The Estonian Academy of Arts Library, with its atmosphere dense with thought, provides a safe and fitting environment for materials that are intimate by nature. The exhibition’s miniature format is introduced by an electromechanics study cheat sheet from the artist’s personal archive, dating back to his secondary school years. As a coping mechanism while obtaining the field of study, Rosso cultivated meticulous graphic models and writings to break through the curriculum.

Building on this experience, he developed a refined visual handwriting which, across twenty years of diary entries, forms a kind of knitted fabric. Alongside drawings depicting metaphysical matter on the pages of his diaries, he transforms the mental and physical notes of everyday life into visual material that becomes the seed for new techniques.

The gouache paintings in this exhibition serve as a means of testing ideas and developing seriality. Working with material for an animation film currently in progress, Rosso depicts environments gathered during expeditions through human-shaped landscapes. In these paintings, he addresses the accountability in transforming our living environment, the new sensations that accompany it, and its impact on our perception of the world.

Francesco Rosso’s solo exhibition “Gouaches and Other Graphic Notes” at the Estonian Academy of Arts Library presents works created since 2023 that have not previously been publicly exhibited. It is an exhibition that places time-resistant manual skills at its centre, within a context increasingly saturated with automated means of production. The exhibition is curated by Marika Agu from the Estonian Centre for Contemporary Art.

More information:


Rene Mäe


EKA Library

Francesco Rosso (b. 1987) is an animator and artist living and working in Tallinn. His practice explores the mental and physical aspects of everyday life, transforming them into visual material. Rosso devotes a great deal of time to hand-made animation and detailed drawing. He merges animated material with filmed footage collected during exploratory journeys in urban and natural environments. Over the past decade, Rosso has worked across numerous artistic fields, including illustration, film, analogue photography, painting, printmaking, poetry, video art, and various animation techniques. His short animated films have been shown to international audiences, including at festivals in Clermont-Ferrand, Hiroshima, L’Étrange, Hamburg, Seoul, Interfilm, and the Encounters Short Film Festival.

Marika Agu (b. 1989) is a curator and archive project manager at the Estonian Centre for Contemporary Art. Having studied semiotics, art theory, and library and information science, her curatorial practice focuses on creative work with archives, emphasising site- and time-specificity, interdisciplinarity, and symbolic as well as material shifts in the creation and perception of contemporary art. In addition to her curatorial work, Agu publishes articles in both Estonian and international outlets and works as a lecturer at the Estonian Academy of Arts.

This exhibition features handmade books by EKA students as the culmination of a course in which they worked with photographs in book format. They explored the similarities and differences between artist books, self-publishing, and book dummies. In addition to creating and editing visual materials, students tried their hand at design, pre-press, and binding by hand. 

The books contain both analog and digital photos in the form of collages, typologies, narratives, and archival materials. The subjects explored include personal themes such as hometown, friendship, family, and childhood, as well as everyday life, the inexpressibility of feelings and perceptions, and mundane architecture.

Artists participating in the exhibition: Mikk Keis, Olesja Prants, Gleb Volodtšenko, Mari Karjus, Viktoria Weiszova, Tobias Tikenberg, Jana Mätas (MACA), Kristiina Aarna (DKT).

Supervisor Mirjam Varik.

From December 2 to December 11, EKA Library will be open from Tuesday to Thursday from 10am to 10pm.

On December 3 and 10, the library will also open its Emergency Writing Assistance Department (EWD) in half-hour flash feedback sessions from 18 to 20. Bring along your texts and presentations and ask for advice on referencing and finding sources. Appointments will take place on a first-come, first-served basis.

Free coffee, tea, and gingerbread cookies to students and readers!

Sven Mantsik, a master’s student in Contemporary Art, has explored various disciplines such as installation, printmaking, self-publishing, animation and video games, while always nurturing his primary passion: drawing.

Sometimes fictional, sometimes autobiographical, his drawings present a social satire of an all-too-common daily life, blending melancholy, dreamlike elements, sharpness and humour. His exhibition “Timeline”, offers an in-depth look at his narrative and visual approach. The EKA Library’s showcase space features a selection of his graphic works.

The exhibition is open until December 19.

Julia Maria Künnap, “Travelling Light. A Study on the Movement of Light in Experimentally Cut Gemstones”

EKA Library 21.10-4.11.2025

This artistic research explores the fundamental principle of gemstone faceting — the refraction and reflection of light – in the combination of faceted and freeform elements. The aim of the exhibition is to demonstrate how individual reflective elements, through their mutual interaction, create the brilliance of a gemstone. To illustrate this theory, the exhibition presents both work in process and finished gems set in jewelry. The Exhibition is the First Creative Project of Doctoral Thesis “Playing with fire. Possibilities for designing four-dimensional gemstones by combining traditional faceting and free-form engraving. Time as a design element.” Supervisor Prof Krista Kodres

Julia Maria Künnap is a PhD student and junior researcher in Art and Design.

From 6 March, exhibition by artist and graphic designer Andrew Hill, titled “Scaled Views. Details from CCA Archive”, showcasing findings from the archive of Estonian Centre for Contemporary Art will be open at the library of Estonian Academy of Arts.

Influenced by his experience of working at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design library and archive, Andrew treated the CCA archive as material deposit and shaped his findings to be exhibited in various compositions of the A4 format. Therefore, the showcase focuses on rendering of scale and the indefinite potential of archival material and possible interpretation and not so much on reconstructing past events. In this exhibition, the focal point lies on the infrastructure of the exhibits, on the quotidien information carriers, which shape the material into a bureau aesthetic exposition.

Andrew Hill is an artist and graphic designer from Nova Scotia, Canada, currently based in Tallinn. He is a founder of the Halifax Art Book Fair and OTCHO, a periodical about fingerboarding. His work in public libraries and immigration archives informs his approach to publishing and organizing. He dreams of being illuminated by an Emeralite, next to a stack of yearbooks, sleeping in a banker’s box.

The exhibition is curated by Marika Agu from the Estonian Centre for Contemporary Art.

The exhibition will be open until 6 May 2025.

Exhibition of small-edition books dedicated to the 100th anniversary of the EKA graphic art print studio. 

In 1924, a printing workshop  was opened at the Tallinn Industrial Art School, where Leopold Triumph took up his post as master. Two years earlier (1922), a printmaking department had been established, under the direction of Günther Reindorff until 1943.

For half a century, the face of Estonian book design was shaped by Paul Luhtein, who, after graduating from the Tallinn Industrial Art School in 1930, and after a few years of further training in Leipzig, took up teaching commercial graphics and book design in 1932, a post he held until 1982. Enno Ootsing was then head of the Department and the book studies, with breaks until 2005 (in the meantime, the Department was headed by Aarne Mesikäpp from 1983 to 1988 and Heinz Valk from 1988 to 1989). From 1938 to 1971, typography was taught by the legendary book historian and typographer Hans Treumann. From 2005 to 2023, Aarne Mesikäpp, who taught at the ERKI and the EAA for 55 years, was a master printer and typography lecturer. In the field of book illustration, Vive Tolli, who taught from 1982 to 2005, was a major influence. Urmas Viik, head of the department from 2005 to 2015, gave priority to book illustration.

During the Soviet period, students studied for six years, specializing in either book designer, book illustrator, commercial artist (tarbegraafika), poster designer or printmaker in the third year, with book designer and illustrator being particularly sought after (competitive) The department had its own printing house, but all copies were invoiced and passed through the Glavlit (Glavnaya literatura, in Russian more precisely Главное управление по охране государственного тайн в печати) or censorship. Every evening the master sealed the door of the printing house. 

The division into departments began to disappear in the department in the late 1980s. With today’s curriculum and volumes, the focus of the graphics department is on contemporary art and graphic techniques, but letterpress printing is still popular, and typography and the basics of graphic design are taught. Since 2006, an artists’ book course has been taught by Eve Kask. The binding was taught for many years by Lennart Mänd, from 2023 by Eve Kaaret. With few exceptions, the artist’s books will be produced in one-off editions and in author’s binding based on the idea of the whole. 

This selection of small-edition publications includes examples from the years 1946-2004. The books were produced in the department’s printing house, mostly as coursework or theses by students. There are also group works. There are some books designed by tutors (P. Luhtein, E. Okas, H. Treuman, A. Mesikäpp). Among the teaching works there are works by later prominent artists such as Anu Kalm, Silvi Liiva, Naima Neidre, Enno Ootsing, Urmas Ploomipuu, Andres Tali, Marje Üksine and others.

The book editions in the exhibition range from five to fifty (125 in one case and 300 in another, in most cases between 15 and 25). The student has chosen the literature work, made type-setting, designed and illustrated it himself. In most cases, the illustrations are also printed by the author. The printing techniques used for the illustrations include relief printing (linocut and woodcut), intaglio printing (ofort, aquatint) and lithography. Since the 1950s, the edition has been printed by Mihkel Enn, a master printer, and bound by Elsa Oolma, a typesetter (or a letterpress master), who also taught hand-lettering to students and helped prepare the type-setting for printing. 

The selection was made by Marju Vahter, Head Specialist of the Library, Karin Oolu, Head of the Library, and complemented by Professor Liina Siib, Head of the Graphic Arts Department, and Associate Professor Eve Kask. Exhibition graphics is done by Markus Laanisto.

Text by Eve Kask

Graduated from the Department of Graphic Arts by the degree of Book Design, ERKI, 1984. 

The last student of Paul Luhtein and the first student of Vive Tolli