Category: Vent Space

The exhibition space of the Estonian Academy of Arts, VENT Space (Vabaduse väljak 6/8) ends its series of exhibitions with a surreal fairy tale that you either believe or not.

The exhibition “Believe it or not” opens the door to a world where familiar stories can turn into something completely new in the blink of an eye.

Kirke Ross, an artist who graduated from EKA as an animator, interweaves audio and visual art to bring to life strange and imaginative scenarios where the heroes of modern stories meet surreal elements – perhaps here you will come across a bootless cat struggling in the clutches of evil, or you will instead meet Jüri wearing a red cape, following in the footsteps of the lovely Little Red Riding Hood.

The opening of the exhibition will take place on January 30 at 18:00. There is something to drink for the first visitors.

 VENT Space’s last exhibition is open from January 31 to February 9, 2025. Every day 12:00-18:00.

Author: Kirke Ross

Curators: Kirke Ross and Katariina Kesküla

You are warmly invited in the exhibition “Respiratory Rate” by Chloé Geinoz and Eleftheria Irene Kofidou opening on the 12th of December at 19.00 in Vent Space.

The artists are interested in the poetical connotations that draw inspiration from the space’s prior use as the ventilation room of the Tallinn Art Hall Gallery (Tallinna Kunstihoone). A week long residency period creates the possiblity to work on site and bind together the room’s history with the artists’ personal experiences and memories. The goal is to build a sound installation that reflects their thoughts regarding controlled airstream, breathing as a right and its violation. The installation consists of a collage of previously recorded sounds and site specific recordings, as well as sculptural pieces intertwined with ready made objects. The artists wish to create a space that enables and encourages interactive relations between the viewers and the installation.

Exhibition is open 12-23.12 and 27-30.12
12-15

Chloé Geinoz (b. 1998) is a Tallinn-based interdisciplinary artist from Switzerland, Fribourg. Her main areas of interest are video-performance, video installation, photography and performance.
The subjects that particularly attract her attention revolve around the occult, spirituality, nature, witchcraft and mystery.

Her work is based on a series of investigations and reflections combining art, literature and science, prior to the production of her video work.

In 2022 she graduated with a BA in Visual Arts in Ecal (Lausanne, Switzerland) and since 2023 she is currently studying Contemporary Art MA at the Estonian Academy of Arts.

Eleftheria Irene Kofidou (b. 1995) is a Greek artist based in Tallinn, who is mostly working with installations, performance art and text. Her art practice is often interconnected with poetry and focuses around processes of layering meanings, sociopolitical connotations related mostly to her background and exploring ways that language triggers movement.

Eleftheria obtained an MFA in Visual and Applied Arts from Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (Greece) in 2021 and she is currently studying Contemporary Art MA in the Estonian Academy of Arts (2023 – ).

On Thursday, 21.11, at 19.00 Yujie Zhou will open their solo show White Shadow at Vent Space, all welcome! 

On Friday, 22.11 at 17.00 they will give an artist talk at EKA in room A302.

The exhibition White Shadows interweaves personal memory and political identity with collective ideologies. Featuring a series of handwoven Jacquard tapestries and video works, the artist Yujie Zhou explores the complex interplay between their autobiographical experiences and systems of discipline. Through these works, Zhou seeks to transform what once symbolized uniformity into something deeply personal and reflective.

White Shadows is centered around the notion of shadow. In Chinese, the etymology of the word photography has it translate as the action of capturing shadows, in contrast to that of drawing with light. It is on this regard that shadows hold great significance in the work of the artist, these are the lens through which they conceive an alternative way of seeing –one symbolizing both erasure and shelter. This duality heightens the tension of pairing an urge to resist with the subtle self-cersorship that is present in/all-throughout their body of work.

Yujie Zhou is a Chinese visual artist based in Helsinki, Finland. They navigate performativity and a decoded notion of language through photography, textiles, video, and publishing. Based on the juxtaposition between their nationalist upbringing and their current life, their practice interrogates dominant historical narratives and power structures while reframing collective individuality.

Zhou completed a Master’s Degree in Arts with a Major in Photography and a Minor in Textiles—Materials and Structures at Aalto University in 2023. Selected solo exhibitions include QWERTY at Photographic Gallery Hippolyte, Helsinki, Finland (2023), Four Women at Photographic Centre Peri, Turku, Finland (2023), and White Shadows at Taidekeskus Mältinranta, Tampere, Finland (2024). Group exhibitions include MoA 23 at the Finnish Museum of Photography, Helsinki, Finland (2023); Make Me Find You at alpha nova & galerie futura, Berlin, Germany (2023); and Disrupted Narratives at the Singapore International Photography Festival, Singapore (2024). Select awards include the FUTURES Photography Talent 2024 nomination by Fotogalleriet, Oslo, Norway; the Finnish Art Society’s Young Artist Grant (2023); Shortlist of PhMuseum 2024 Photography Grant’s Main Prize; nominated artist for Plat(t)form 2023 at Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland. Selected Residencies include Kone Foundation’s Saari Residency Fellowship (2024); and an 11-month Artist-in-Residence at HIAP (2024).

There is a lunchtime opening this Saturday at Vent Space, 05. October 13.30 – 15.30. The exhibition will then be open until 13.10 – by appointment, DM @ventspace.project on instagram or email yvette.bathgate@artun.ee to meet at the space.

“Transmissions” by Caitlyn Holly Main

Caitlyn Holly Main is an interdisplinary artist, working with and between text, drawing, moving image, sculptural artefact and printmaking. She is concerned with care and intimacy, notions of emotional labour, consumption and desire. Her recent work is focused around modes of communication – the physical embodiment or remnants of connection.

Expect things like… Mating dances & traffic signals. A medium translating words and sentences and histories from a distant spirit and a Whatsapp message that reads ‘omg NO way!!!!’. A post-it with a lopsided smiling face, echolocations, an act of transcribing, and a sign held above a head during a protest. An enthusiastic gesture, my friends hands point and turn and twist, & the movements punctuate the story that they’re telling me.
Morse code, smoke signals, a phone number written on a napkin with a lipstick kiss. People like echos because they want to hear a familiar voice rippling back to them from the void or the cavern or the tunnel. A lighthouse, a radio antenna, first words and ironic slogan t-shirts. Clicking fingers, waving through the window of a moving vehicle. A kiss blown, a salute, a postcard pinned to the fridge.

Vent Space project space

6/8 Vabaduse Square, Tallinn

Vent Space is an experimental project space of EKA, which offers EKA students a public exhibition space and collaboration opportunities. Many students have had their first solo exhibition at Vent Space, as well as numerous group exhibitions, discussion groups, workshops, concerts and other events.
The international team brings together different disciplines, media, practices and skills, encouraging collaboration, spontaneity, courage and experimentation. 

FB:

https://www.facebook.com/ventspace.project

BLACKOUT

Opening 17th January 2024 at 7pm (EET)
Running until January 26th 2024

Scattered around the world, Nua Collective are a group of professional visual artists that collaborate together to create, share and support one another in their journey as artists. Blackout marks their first physical exhibition and they are delighted to continue their international tour in Vent Space.

Presenting the works of 13 Nua Collective artists, the Blackout series looks at climate change through a particular lens—blackout. Or the loss of self security that comes from our reliance on unreliable energy. The works wrestle with our human responses to the insecurity inflicted by the anthropomorphic blackout. This exhibition of lino prints that are unique and in their creation and processing have already travelled the globe and will also feature the premiere of the Blackout Documentary screened at the space throughout the exhibition run.

Together Nua Collective artists make an inquiry about our climate catastrophe and the energy crisis that we continue to face.

EET/GMT+2 is a reflection on the Israel-Palestine conflict from Estonia.

The artworks featured represent the dual relations of artists and students as both insiders and outsiders to Estonian society and as insiders and outsiders to the Israeli Palestine conflict.

Navigating through the themes of war, identity, migration, local laws and the Estonian media landscape, this exhibition attempts to raise our collective political as well as social awareness.

We open up Vent Space as a space for learning, empathy, and discussion in order to lay the groundwork for building solidarity.

Collaborators:

Augustas Lapinskas
Community in EKA for Palestine
Ditiya Ferdous
Fatima-Ezzahra El Khammas
Karolis Lasys
Kush Badhwar
Lara Brener
Martha Liise Kapsta
Nabeel Imtiaz
Noah Morrison
Rok Ifko
Rose Magee
Ryan Galer
Shubham Aggarwal

All the artworks in the exhibition “Total Jellification” are made of the same material – agar, a type of jelly that is made from seaweed. It is a natural material used for making desserts, puddings and custards, it is also used in microbiology for cultivating bacteria.

The exhibition “Total Jellification” is inspired by a phenomenon of jellification of the seas. A paper called “Jellification of Marine Ecosystems as a Likely Consequence of Overfishing Small Pelagic Fishes: Lessons from the Benguela” studies the consequences of overfishing in South Africa. Overfishing small pelagic fishes increases the biomass of jellyfishes. These small fishes can eat parts of jellyfish when they are not yet fully developed, but as they grow bigger, jellyfishes have virtually no predators. Thus the small fishes are important in managing the population of jellyfishes. The marine ecosystem has been completely transformed from the start of commercial fishing. But this isn’t only a problem for South Africa, the same processes have been discovered all around the globe and encounters with jellyfishes have also increased in the Baltic sea.

In this exhibition, jellification has been taken literally. Vent space has been transformed into an experimental space, where the possibilities of agar are explored. Agar jelly has been casted, moulded, dried, cut and for the opening the artist herself will also be jellified. The exhibition is an exploration of a quickly changing future, how to deal with the rapidly jellifying world.

The exhibition is supported by the Cultural Endowment of Estonia, Põhjala and Karksi Brewery.

Don’t you wonder what’s inside? I have an idea. It appeared in the last dream. I changed something, but you can change it back. Where does the sun go? It tends to hide between the lines.

Pauline Creuzé is an artist from France. She works with video and site-specific video installation. With the artist collective À VENIR, she has been producing group exhibitions in empty urban spaces between 2017 and 2021.

kacper krajewski is an interdisciplinary Polish artist based in Tromsø, Norway. Kacper navigates the intricate intersections of biology and technology, compulsively challenging notions of consciousness, perception and corporeality. Guided by a queer perspective, they delve into the depths of embodied existence.

Gregor is a musician and artist from Eupen, a small city in the east of Belgium. Gregor combines different techniques to create immersive changes of perspective, often through compositions dictated by algorithmic approaches.

Py Tenor is an artist from Sweden based in Tromsø. Using installation and wearable sculpture, she works with recognizable material and situations, focusing on sensory and tactile experiences.
Sondre Sjølie is an artist from Nes municipality in Norway, currently taking a bachelor’s in fine arts in Tromsø. His works are often based in narrative and absurd storytelling, inspired by underground comics, humour and tragedy.

where does the sun go? is a collective exhibition by students of Tromsø Academy of Arts.

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Vent Space is at Vabaduse väljak 6-8

Visual artist Sofi Häkkinen (b 1990, Oulu, Finland) brings an assortment of sculptures and video works to Vent Space project space.

Häkkinen is a Master of Arts from Aalto University, and has a very multi-artistic approach to her work. The sculptures Häkkinen shows in Vent Space are mostly made out of dry pasta. The video pieces also explore the theme of food – along with death, the body, the Internet, humor, pop and doom scrolling.

On Tuesday October 17th at 18:00, Noah Emanuel Morrison opens his first solo exhibition NNNNNNNNNNNN at Vent Space, Vabaduse väljak 6/8.

The exhibition is a part of Tallinn Photomonth’s satellite program.

Within this ongoing, site-specific body of work, he considers how and where racist language becomes camouflaged within the city. The exhibition draws attention to the contemporary phenomenon of the NGR/S/Z series of graffiti, present throughout Tallinn. Walking around as a Black, queer-identified individual, he has been deeply disturbed by these. Reactive and self-reflective, the exhibition veers from research-informed to quotidian in its interventions into Tallinn’s racialized public space.

The show’s central sculpture, Substrate, is a chimera of a fence in Tallinn, on which an early 1990’s graffiti, Neegrid Eestist Välja, was written. Amid the global fascist turn, the piece reflects on the stakes of reaction within the graffiti’s wake.

He will show documentation of his 2022 public performance, Harm’s Way, in which he recites an autobiographical narrative from his time in Tallinn at three sites of the NGR graffiti around his home. At the third of these sites, he attempts to interpret the graffiti’s meaning.

These pieces are accompanied by diaristic and self-reflective analogue image series and video works.

It will be open 12-19 every day through October 24th.

Noah Emanuel Morrison (b. 1995) is a lens-based artist from New York City, currently enrolled in the Masters of Contemporary Art program at the Estonian Academy of Arts and the Masters of Photography program at Aalto University. His practice centers on identity, belonging, and the construction of desire.

Graphic Design: Shubham Aggarwal
Project Assistant: Elias Kuulmann
Supported by: The Cultural Endowment of Estonia

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