Asmus Soodla “Tool Room, Gallery” at EKA Gallery 4.–26.04.2026

Asmus Soodla
“Tool Room, Gallery”
EKA Gallery 4.–26.04.2026
Open Tue–Sat 12–6 pm Sun 12–4 pm, free entry (NB! EKA Gallery is closed on Good Friday, April 3 and Easter Sunday, April 5!)
Opening: Thursday, April 2 at 6 pm
Guided tours: Fri, April 10 at 1 pm (est) / Sun, April 12 at 2.30 pm (est) / Sun, April 12 at 3.30 pm (eng)

Asmus Soodla’s exhibition “Tool Room, Gallery” focuses on the art gallery as an ecosystem, where value-based distinction between the result and the process doesn’t exist. The conceptual starting point of the project is the internal conditions and work processes of the gallery as an institution, as well as its spatial logic. The exhibition focuses on activities that are usually hidden from the visitor’s gaze, but which play a decisive role in how the artwork and the viewer meet.

The project includes a spatial intervention that occupies the entire gallery, highlighting the spaces of EKA Gallery and its contents. The conceptual framework also includes the group exhibition “Field Notes from Immediate Proximity”, the curation of which Soodla entrusted to artist Riin Maide. This role-playing gesture treats the form of collaboration as a separate artwork.

Asmus Soodla (b. 2003) is a Tallinn-based artist and art technician. Soodla’s practice is conceptual and spatially sensitive, often employing sculpture, text, and photography. His work is primarily inspired by the existing environment and objects, unraveling their operational logic and history. Through his installative interventions, invisible systems and traces of human thought are brought into focus. Soodla earned a Bachelor’s degree in Installation and Sculpture (2025) from the Estonian Academy of Arts and completed a preparatory course in architecture and interior design (2022) at the EKA Open Academy. Additionally, he has furthered his studies at artist Simon Starling’s studio in Copenhagen.

Technical support: Mattias Veller
Graphic design: Sunny Lei
The exhibition is supported by the Cultural Endowment of Estonia, Tallinn City and Sadolin Estonia.
Opening drinks from mirai™ and Põhjala Brewery.

FIELD NOTES FROM IMMEDIATE PROXIMITY
EKA Gallery storage room 4.–26.04.2026
Open Tue–Sat 12–6 pm Sun 12–4 pm, free entry (NB! EKA Gallery is closed on Good Friday, April 3 and Easter Sunday, April 5!)
Opening: Thursday, April 2 at 6 pm
Guided tours: Fri, April 10 at 1 pm (est) / Sun, April 12 at 2.30 pm (est) / Sun, April 12 at 3.30 pm (eng)

The exhibition “Field Notes from Immediate Proximity” provides an insight into artists’ work and creative spaces. In addition to documenting the studios and homes of six creators, they also become windows into their inner world.

Postcards, tools, potted plants and piles of books that have been captured on the artist’s canvas or photograph, reveal moments from the artists’ everyday lives, from the spaces where the artist spends the most time doing their work – on the one hand, it is an opportunity to see inside the creative processes of contemporary artists, into their different practices, on the other hand, these works are simply interpretations of personal space, ways of seeing everyday life.

The narrow and cramped architecture of EKA Gallery’s storage space brings the viewer closer to the works and their details. Together with the unusual exhibition space, the works form a new spatial whole in which different visual languages ​​and perspectives can meet and merge.

The exhibition was initiated within the conceptual framework of Asmus Soodla’s solo exhibition “Tool Room, Gallery”.

Riin Maide (b. 1997) is an artist and scenographer based in Tallinn, Estonia. Maides practice centers around the connection and comparison of two- and three-dimensional media and creation of staged environments. Maide Maide has obtained a MA degree in scenography (2025) and BA in Graphic Art in the department of graphic art at the Estonian Academy of Arts. In addition, she has studied at the Department of Alternative and Puppet Theater at DAMU in Prague and in the Performative Arts class of Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. She has received several scholarships and awards, including the Wiiralt scholarship in 2023 and Young Artist award of Estonian Academy of Arts in 2020.

Artists: Kristi Kongi, Joosep Kivimäe, Ann Pajuväli, Anu Vahtra and Lieven Lahaye, Mattias Veller
Curated by: Riin Maide
Technical support: Mattias Veller
Graphic design: Sunny Lei
The exhibition is supported by the Cultural Endowment of Estonia, Tallinn City and Sadolin Estonia.
Opening drinks from mirai™ and Põhjala Brewery.

“Carmen Electra” – like a bolt from the blue!

The band ants1 will perform their musical “Carmen Electra” at EKA Gallery three more times in March! The act combines contemporary dance, colorful costumes, disturbing music, and scandalous statements into its magical world. The libretto was collaboratively written by members of ants1, with the lead role performed by the eternally young and immortal Anumai Raska.

“Carmen Electra explores themes that feel both familiar and melancholic to a generation coming of age in a time when Europe is once again at war. It is a time when leaders of great nations won’t acknowledge climate change, when carrots cost more in Estonian grocery stores than in Belgium – even though the average income here is three times lower,” says a rabbit who wished to remain anonymous, commenting on the background of the production. “What will become of us like this?”

The band ants1 is a collective that emerged from the Estonian Academy of Arts, whose members work in various fields of contemporary art. When they come together, the collective is called ants1, whose music connects contemporary social problems with the painful yet fun language of punk music.

The musical “Carmen Electra” is not recommended for children under 12.

Performers: Ekke Janisk, Ats Kruusing, Andreas Kübar, Eke Ao Nettan, Anumai Raska, Henri Särekanno, Mattias Veller
Costumes by: Lisette Sivard
Light design by: Leon Allik
Sound design by: Roman Belov
Co-producer: elektron.art
Supported by: Estonian Cultural Endowment, City of Tallinn

Performances will take place on March 25, 26 and 28 at the EKA Gallery (Põhja pst 7, Tallinn). The performance is in Estonian with English subtitles. Entrance through the EKA lobby (from Põhja puiestee).

Tickets are available at Fienta:
https://fienta.com/ants1-muusikal-carmen-electra-156400

More info: https://elektron.art/projects/carmen 

On 17 April at 5 PM, the exhibition “Big Hall, Small Town: Postmodernist Cultural Centres in Estonia” will open in the ground-floor foyer of the Paide Music and Theatre House. The exhibition is part of the bachelor’s thesis of Anete Raabe, a student of cultural heritage and conservation at the Estonian Academy of Arts.

The exhibition presents the architecture of 1980s cultural centres and their role in local communities. It focuses on three outstanding examples from the period — the cultural centres in Paide, Põlva, and Lihula — while also examining smaller cultural centres across Estonia that reflect the ideas of the same era.

The exhibition invites visitors to notice these buildings in the urban landscape, appreciate their distinct character, and reflect on their role as focal points of local life.

The exhibition will remain open until 15 May 2026.

The 2025/2026 academic year open lecture series will be held in collaboration with the Institute of Art History and Visual Culture and the Faculty of Architecture. The theme of this academic year is “Architecture and the Ethics of Care” and the lectures will be curated by KVI Senior Researcher Dr. Ingrid Ruudi.

On April 9 at 6 pm Katarina Bonnevier will give a lecture “Living Organisms – Queerying Architecture with Trolls and Clay” at EKA lecture hall A-101.

She says: Let’s go on a date with my Heartlands. The talk will depart from a Pit of Clay, wander through the Secret Garden and into the Living Legend of the former casino in Malmö. A site that me and my pack MYCKET are courting right now. In my practice I engage with folklore, legends, and the unhuman to imagine relational futures – because the visions of trolls are sometimes helpful to overcome the technocrats’ devastating business as usual.  

Dr. Katarina Bonnevier practices through the art and architecture collective MYCKET working with co-creation across species, across disciplines, and across realities. Their practice blends artistic research (supported by Swedish Research Council and Linnaeus University) with hands-on making of public places, installations, and social situations. An architect by training, Bonnevier connects queer and feminist perspectives with ecological care and spatial justice through storytelling and hands-on crafting.

MYCKETs work has received national and international recognition, including the Ganneviksstipendiet (2021), and Architectural Review’s and the Architects’ Journal’s joint W-award (2024) for Heaven by MYCKET at Oslo National Museum. Her dissertation Behind Straight Curtains: Towards a Queer Feminist Theory of Architecture (Stockholm: Axl Books, 2007) from the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), Stockholm, is available open access (DiVA portal, more than 35 000 downloads). In her early career she was engaged in Kalamaja, Tallinn, and was awarded the National Endowment of Estonia’s Cultural Prize for Young Architects (1995).

Within the framework of a series of open lectures, the Faculty of Architecture of EKA presents a dozen unique practitioners and valued theorists in the field in Tallinn every academic year.

The lectures are intended for all disciplines, not only for students and professionals in the field of architecture.

Spring programme:

• 26.02 at 18:00 in A-101 Kaisa Karvinen “From Care to Concrete: Exhibiting Architecture”
• 26.03 at 18:00 in A-101  Jos Boys “Doing Disability Differently in Architecture”
• 9.04 at 18:00 in A-101 Katarina Bonnevier (Stockholm)
• 30.04 at 18:00 in A-101 Emma Cheatle (The University of Sheffield) “Lying in the Dark Room: Architectures of British Maternity”
• 14.05 at 18:00 in A-101 Iulia Statica (The University of Sheffield)

All lectures are held on Thursdays at 6 pm in the EKA main auditorium. All lectures are in English and free of charge.

The 2025/2026 academic year open lecture series is organised in collaboration between the Institute of Art History and Visual Culture and the Faculty of Architecture, and is connected to the research project Built environments of care from the late Socialist to post-Socialist Estonia (PSG 2025–2029).

The lecture series is supported by the Cultural Endowment of Estonia.

Previous open architecture lectures can be viewed at www.avatudloengud.ee

On Wednesday, the 18th of March, a series of written thesis presentations by the graduating students of Craft Studies will be held across different workshops at EKA. 

There are 8 texts as part of the components required for graduation, reflecting on a diverse range of topics and approaches relevant to students’ individual practices and the expanded field of design and craft, with links to making and to the relations of legwork, handwork, and headwork. In intimate reading sessions around the studios, graduates share fragments from their research and creative practice.

All texts were composed through research, writing and editing supervised by Else Lagerspetz, Lieven Lahaye and Taavi Hallimäe.

17:00 The silent hovering of forks by Lyly Letzer, Smithy, B106.4.

17:30 Fit olemise kunst: Kehaloomepraktika by Joanne-Heleene Sõrmus, Prototyping Lab, B204.

17:45 Hidden in Plain Sight by Marite Kuus-Hill, Graphic Design Department, C305.

18:00 That Which is Carried by the Spaces in Between by Mariam Mestvirishvili, Weaving Studio, D505.

18:15 Orienting Home: exploring the resonance of home in a post-colonial world by Sylvia Burgess, Jewellery Studio, B504.

18:30 Beyond Wearability: Accessories as Fluid Signs by Peixuan Lin, Accessory Studio, B510.

18:45 Held in Suspension: Ceramic Reproduction and The Lives of Found Objects by Maia Hellman, Ceramics Workshop, B602.

19:00 Moulds for the Wilderness: From the Borders to the Void by Odie Lap Chun Chow, Plaster Workshop, D602.1.

19:15 Gathering with food and refreshments, A200.

Nairobi, a city of close to five million people, congregates many hopes, experiences and struggles. Yet, across the colonial archive, its challenges have been defined primarily as those concerning ‘vagrants’ and ‘squatters,’ for instance; identities that congregate in the figure of the African. Following independence, the targets of formal city management lament and destruction remain similar: the ‘slum,’ ‘informality’ and urban ‘vice,’ whose geographies map onto the homes and bodies of those long targeted by colonial authorities. Informed by the “abolition ecology” community work of many of this city’s residents, and long-term research in its ontological margins, in this presentation I think about Nairobi’s dynamics through water. Ultimately, my argument is that while the “problem” of the “native,” squatter, vagrant or slum is seen to be defining of this urban agglomeration across the years, when Nairobi is thought from its experiences of water, coloniality and disobedience emerge as its primary dialectical currents, allowing for more (un)just histories to come into view that can allow us to vision more equal belongings and materialities in this East African city.

The Open lecture is being organized by EKA Urban Studies and TLU School of Humanities. 

Wangui Kimari is an anthropologist based at the American University Nairobi Abroad Program. She is also a research associate at the African Centre for Cities (ACC), University of Cape Town. Her work draws on many local histories and interdisciplinary theoretical approaches – including oral narratives, assemblage theory, urban political ecology and the black radical tradition – to think through urban spatial management in Nairobi from the vantage point of its most marginalized residents. Wangui is also a regional editor of the online publication Africa Is a Country (AIAC), an Urban Studies Foundation (USF) trustee, on the editorial collective of Antipode and Urban Political Ecology journals, and a co-organizer of the UTA-Do African Cities Workshop.

On March 19, from 11:30 a.m. to 1:00 p.m., Joanna Kalm’s 2nd artistic research project, Spacetuning. A practice of co-becoming will take place via Zoom (LINK, Meeting ID: 650 0507 1283, Passcode:  902366)

The doctoral thesis supervisors are Liina Unt, PhD (University of Tartu) and Leena Rouhiainen, DA (University of the Arts Helsinki).
The project reviewers are Ilmari Kortelainen, PhD (University of the Arts Helsinki) and Giacomo Veronesi, PhD (Estonian Academy of Music and Theatre).

Joanna Kalm’s artistic research draws on somatic co- and self-regulation theory and is grounded in the organism’s capacity for self-organization—manifesting both at the level of the body-self and the group—with the aim of co-creating inclusive, body-based practices and spaces. Kalm approaches somatic embodiment through posthumanist and new materialist philosophy, as well as through theories of cellular consciousness and organism-oriented ontology.
One focus of the research is to examine the possible modes of being-moving of the body-self, grounded in attentive self-listening and the dynamic processes of the body-self (somatic agency). The second focus addresses the intra-active relationship between somatic embodiment and practice under development (approached as an apparatus), asking: which parameters of practice are supportive of somatic co- and self-regulation? how does an artistic-somatic embodiment approach shape the ways the practice and space function-operate?

Kalm’s 2nd peer-reviewed project Spacetuning. A practice of co-becoming is based on somatic self- and other-awareness in support of embodied being-engagement, which in turn grounds the collaborative process in which the practice framework emerges and is developed in relations. One of the key focuses of research and practice is response-ability – to one’s own process and to the group members as well as to spatial dynamics. Given that the body and the environment are co-emergent and in an intra-active relation, to what extent do we allow ourselves to truly participate in this co-becoming? And to what extent is the environment (as a socio-material process) capable of considering and responding to the differences of its participants? Thus, this practice is an attempt to move beyond the invisible and silencing boundary (is it real or habitual?) between oneself and space.

The somatic practice sessions Spacetuning. A practice of co-becoming will take place throughout March 10-14 at ARS Art Factory, daily at 4pm and on Saturday both at 12pm and 4pm.

More information and registration: https://fienta.com/et/ruumitoonimine-kaaskujunemise-praktika 

The 2025/2026 academic year open lecture series will be held in collaboration with the Institute of Art History and Visual Culture and the Faculty of Architecture. The theme of this academic year is “Architecture and the Ethics of Care” and the lectures will be curated by KVI Senior Researcher Dr. Ingrid Ruudi.

On March 26 at 6 pm Jos Boys will give a lecture “Doing Disability Differently in Architecture” at room A-501.

Disabled people are almost always treated as an afterthought in built environment education and practice. But what if we instead start from disability, valuing our rich bio- and neurodiversity as a creative generator for design and as a critical means of challenging normative building and urban design? In this talk, Jos will explore how, over the last 18 years, DisOrdinary Architecture has been collaborating internationally with disabled artists, designers and architects to co-develop innovative and even radical ways of thinking and doing architecture.

Dr. Jos Boys is co-founder and co-director, with disabled artist Zoe Partington, of The DisOrdinary Architecture Project, a UK-based platform which brings disabled artists into built environment education and practice to critically and creatively re-think access and inclusion. Originally trained in architecture, she was co-founder of Matrix feminist architecture and research collective in London UK in the 1980s, and currently leads on the development of the Matrix Open online archive. Always a design activist, Jos has also been a journalist, critic, researcher, consultant, educator, photographer and artist; and has published many books and articles. These include authoring Doing Disability Differently: an alternative handbook on architecture, dis/ability, and designing for everyday life (Routledge 2014); editing Disability, Space, Architecture: A Reader (Routledge 2017) and co-editing Neurodivergence and Architecture (Elsevier 2022).

Within the framework of a series of open lectures, the Faculty of Architecture of EKA presents a dozen unique practitioners and valued theorists in the field in Tallinn every academic year.

The lectures are intended for all disciplines, not only for students and professionals in the field of architecture.

Spring programme:

• 26.02 at 18:00 in A-101 Kaisa Karvinen “From Care to Concrete: Exhibiting Architecture”
• 26.03 at 18:00 in A-501  Jos Boys (London)
• 9.04 at 18:00 in A-101 Katarina Bonnevier (Stockholm)
• 30.04 at 18:00 in A-101 Emma Cheatle (The University of Sheffield) “Lying in the Dark Room: Architectures of British Maternity”
• 14.05 at 18:00 in A-101 Iulia Statica (The University of Sheffield)

All lectures are held on Thursdays at 6 pm in the EKA main auditorium. All lectures are in English and free of charge.

The lecture series is supported by the Cultural Endowment of Estonia.

Previous open architecture lectures can be viewed at www.avatudloengud.ee