“We Need More Indoor Spaces” at EKA Gallery 9.01.–15.02.2026

WE NEED MORE INDOOR SPACES
Ground floor of EKA Gallery 9.01.–15.02.2026
Open Tue–Sat 12–6 pm Sun 12–4 pm, free entry
Opening: Thursday, January 8 at 6 pm

The group exhibition “We Need More Indoor Spaces” is catalysed by the moving process of Krulli Skate Hall, bringing together local and international artists from Tallinn’s skateboard scene, framing skateboarding as an art form. The makers of the exhibition want to draw attention to the availability of indoor skate parks in the inner city, in the hopes of opening more spaces for skaters.

Jaagup Mägi and Éric-Olivier Thériault, two artists studying installation and sculpture at the Estonian Academy of Arts, came together with the idea of temporarily transforming the gallery space into a gathering hub in honour of the perseverant local skateboarding culture. Working within the constraints of the gallery, their aim is to demonstrate how skateboarding, as an artistic practice, parallels contemporary art in many ways: through experimentation, resilience, and a strong DIY ethos. The exhibition seeks to channel that energy into a broader conversation: What could happen if greater awareness of indoor skateparks was fostered? If these creative environments built by skateboarders for skateboarders were more actively supported?

As part of the exhibition, in collaboration with the interactive video game museum LVLup! and Camille Laurelli, there will be an opportunity to play skateboarding-themed video games in the video box area of ​​the EKA Gallery during the opening times of the gallery.

You are welcome to ride the course with your personal skateboard at your own risk until February 11 on Wednesdays from 6 to 9 pm and Sundays from 4 to 8 pm.

Artists: Frank Abner, Nicolas Bouvy, Maik Grüner, Daniil Južaninov, Andrew Kuus-Hill, Kaisa Maasik, Jaagup Mägi, Reigo Nahksepp, Éric-Olivier Thériault, Raul Ulberg
Curators: Jaagup Mägi & Éric-Olivier Thériault
Graphic design: Sunny Lei
Technical support: Ats Kruusing
The exhibition is supported by the Cultural Endowment of Estonia and Sadolin Estonia.
Opening drinks from mirai™ and Põhjala Brewery.

On 9 January, from 15:30 to 17:00, Kadri Liis Rääk will have her third peer-reviewed event as a part of her doctoral studies with the creative project “The artist’s body as a sensory threshold” at the Estonian Academy of Arts (EKA), in room A202.

The peer-reviewers of the exhibition are Laura Põld and prof Esa Kirkkopelto.

The doctoral supervisor is dr Liina Unt.

Kadri Liis Rääk’s research is situated at the intersection of expanded scenography and speculative practices, offering an in-depth exploration of touch, affective attunement, and body–space relations. The third creative project, “The artist’s body as a sensory threshold”, focuses on embodied and sensory experience as a means of knowledge production within artistic practice.

The creative project unfolds the artist-researcher’s process through a heuristic unpacking presented in the form of a video journey. Rather than documenting a finished artwork, the video makes the movement of the research visible: introspective thought processes, forms of attunement shaped by neurodivergence, and the dynamic interplay between discovery and failure. At the core of the project is the artist’s performative withdrawal into a natural environment. The collapse of initial plans shifted the focus from expectation to the investigative activity itself, transforming the artist’s body into a sensory threshold where material-based making and spatial engagement converge. This approach places the creative process at the methodological centre, where negotiation with materials and sustained presence in a liminal in-between state give rise to unique, immediate forms of embodied knowledge.

On 9 January at 13.00 the peer-review event of Aman Asif’s exhibition Algal Phycosphere, will take place in EKA Valge maja, material lab. Exhibition is part of Asif’s practice-based doctoral thesis.

Supervisor. Kärt Ojavee
Reviewers: Marie Vihmar and Julia Lohmann

Aman Asif is an interdisciplinary designer and PhD-researcher interested in sustainable design practices that cultivate ecological wellbeing. The exhibition Algal Phycosphere marks the first peer review of her doctoral research.

Phycosphere frames the event as an inquiry into algal-centred relations. Asif’s research explores creative design practice as sites for attuning to microbial others. The works presented here emerge from her practice-led research, developed through ongoing encounters with algal in her home, the laboratory, and coastal environments in Tallinn. The exhibition includes material-led experiments and hand-crafted artifacts, as well as sensory probes developed in relation to algal.

Through this research, Asif traces a process in which meeting another living microbial presence reshapes how design is practised, and how relational negotiations at this scale can inform the values and conditions of designing amid concerns for ecological wellbeing.

Acknowledgements

Aman Asif would like to thank the many human and more-than-human collaborators who made this work possible.

She would like to thank Kärt Ojavee and Valentina Guccini for their guidance and sustained support.

She is grateful to Rameez Husnain, Pia Lindberg, Kim Janssen, Jaakko Kokko, Anjali VIjayan, Nashwa Attallah, Ero Kontturi and Sarvin Sefatyar for their collaboration and generosity at various stages of the work. Special thanks to Rando Tuvikene and his team at Tallinn University (TLU) for providing space, access, and support during the early stages of this research.

She would also like to acknowledge her colleagues Maria Kapajeva, Joanna Kalm, and the members of the EKA PhD cohort for feedback and shared thinking.

Finally, she would like to thank her family: Asif Latif Lone, Saima Asif, Shehryar Asif, and Danish Lone for always supporting her wellbeing and endless curiosities.

Photo credits: Sarvin Sefatyar

Exhibition “Where u at? We in the know”

Contemporary Art Museum of Estonia (EKKM)

Kursi 5, Tallinn

Mon – Sun 12.01. – 18.01.
13:00 – 19:00

Starting Monday, January 12th, the exhibition “Where u at? We in the know.” will open in the Contemporary Art Museum of Estonia (EKKM). The opening ceremony will take place a day later on Tuesday the 13th of January at 18:00

“Where u at? We in the know.” Meaning we’ve been allowed access to EKKM with it’s three floors. We’ve been offered help and benefits. Enough but not too much. Just enough to ward off fear in these spacious cold rooms.

And we in the know in the sense that we know what’s up. But are we IN the know? We would like to think we are. But who even is IN the know? A contemporary artist should be (by all rights). The president too. And the prime minister. But they have advisors. We don’t. We only have each other and this big cold building. And lots of thoughts. Concerning gender, taboos, underwear, the economy, childhood, hockey and refusal.

Participating artists:

Mari Karjus

Mikk Keis

August Kilmi

Olesja Prants

Rasmus Puksmann

Gen-Horret Rand

Katarina Kuningas

Greta Sauter

Grete Tuiken

Kaur Tõra

Gleb Volodtšenko

Viktoria Weiszova

The EKA Institute of Art History and Visual Culture is part of the Visual Arts in Europe: An Open History (EVA) project that brings together more than 150 art and heritage historians representing the 46 member countries of the Council of Europe. The project is led by an Editorial Board, composed of six European specialists, and supported by the International Association of Research Institutes in the History of Art (RIHA). Its scientific and operational coordination is provided by the Institut national d’histoire de l’art (INHA) in Paris.

Launched in 2019, this scientific and editorial project results in the publication of a digital platform, documenting the history of the visual arts on the European continent, from prehistory to the present day. This platform will be structured around a collection of 475 objects and images, selected in consultation with all of its institutional partners. It is developed within the framework of an international dialogue, remaining attentive to the plurality and richness of scholarly traditions, accessible to all audiences, and providing an account of current research in the discipline of art history.

This seminar will examine the principles that inspired the launch of this project, the methodology used both for the selection of objects and the attribution of associated texts, as well as the challenges encountered during the development of the digital platform. The presentation of the project and platform prototype will be followed by an open discussion with colleagues from the EKA Institute of Art History and Visual Culture, host of this seminar and Estonian project partner. With INHA director Anne-Solène Rolland and project coordinator Margot Sanitas present, the seminar will be an opportunity for all the Estonian representatives to share their reflections on the selection of objects and how the project contributes to reshaping our common history of European visual culture.

Students of EVA Lab, the Experimental Video Games in Art laboratory of the Estonian Academy of Arts New Media Department, present their exhibition in a new gallery space inside the National Library of Estonia. Although the National Library or RaRa building itself will only reopen to the general public in 2027, this exhibition offers an early glimpse into a yet unnamed art space that has not previously existed and is being opened temporarily for this occasion.

*Important! Visits are only possible with a guide. Gathering takes place at the main entrance of RARA at the following times:

17.12 at 17:00, 17:30, 18:00 and 18:30

During the autumn semester, EVA Lab students explore video game and interactive art theory, engaged in conversations with artists and game makers, and were given an optional workshop for learning a game engine to support their development. Through these encounters, students were questioning how video games occupy an enormous role in global popular culture, yet discussions of “games” can still meet a complicated reception within the field of visual arts.

Within art education, students are expected to devote themselves to understanding and critically navigating visual culture. Meanwhile, their personal experiences with gaming often belong to the realms of leisure, hobbies, and everyday play. Activities not always granted the same artistic legitimacy. This tension informs the exhibition’s title, “I’m not playing games, I swear”, a statement that is both slightly defensive and quietly humorous, acknowledging how the vocabulary of games can feel out of place in certain art discourse.

For this exhibition, the supervisors invited students to articulate their own relationships with gaming and game culture. The works on display, spanning interactive and non-interactive formats, transform personal memories, play habits, aesthetic intuitions, and critical reflections into artistic responses that reimagine what games can mean within contemporary art. From introspective narratives to speculative systems, the exhibition presents a variery of approaches to thinking through games as more than pastime.

Rather than insisting that we are not playing, the exhibition asks what becomes possible when play, experimentation, and game culture are allowed to enter artistic practice on their own terms.

Participating artists: Lotta Karoliina Räsänen, Maria Cecilie Wrang-Rasmussen, Irmak Semiz, Sarah Riley, Robert Kapanen, Kimathi Agbanu, Filémon Aufort, Paul Rannik, Triin Mänd, Edward Mcgeorge Allport-Bryson, Rover Indigo Bertels

Supervisors: Camille Laurelli, Sten Saarits

Exhibition is supported by RaRa, EKA, EVA Lab, LVLup! Museum

On January 13 at 16:00 in room A-501, Alison J. Clarke will give a public lecture titled “Design Anthropology: Its History and Its Discontents”. The lecture is part of the Faculty of Design’s public lecture series “Public Lectures in Design: Adjusting Perspectives,” curated by Stella Runnel and Taavi Hallimäe.

This talk explores the emergence of design anthropology as an approach that has gained popularity over the last two decades by melding social science and design practice. Clarke will argue the need to understand the phenomenon’s origins in the Cold War geopolitics of US expansionism, whereby it was applied as a political force to decolonized nations, in order to cast a critical eye over a contemporary practice that has come to operate as the invisible hand behind multiple facets of global life from health care provision, through to governance and data harnessing.

The public lectures are open to students, faculty, as well as anyone else interested in design!

​​Alison J. Clarke is a professor at the University of Applied Arts Vienna and the director of Papanek Foundation. As a design historian and social anthropologist, Clarke’s research deals with the intersection of these disciplines, specifically in terms of their shared focus on the politics of material culture and social relations. Her most recent monograph Victor Papanek: Designer for the Real World (MIT Press, 2021) explores the controversial origins of social design, casting a critical perspective on the origins of a movement that has claimed to promote social justice through people-centred approaches. Her present book and research project Design Anthropology: Decolonizing and Recolonizing the Material World (MIT Press) explores the blurred historical boundaries between design practice and anthropology, and the social consequences of the uptake of this melding in the contemporary corporate sector. Clarke’s research has been supported by the Graham Foundation, the Smithsonian Institution, the Austrian Science Fund and the Arts and Humanities Research Council, among others.

EKA Graphic Design MA program invites prospective students to join the online info session on Thursday, January 29, 2026 at 17:00 EET (local Estonian time).

This will be an opportunity to hear more about the program, to meet and ask questions directly from the faculty.

The online info session will be hosted on Zoom, the link will be e-mailed to all registrants 2 hours before the start of the event.

Please register by Wednesday, 28 January 2026, 15:00h EET. A zoom-link will be e-mailed out to all registrants a few hours before the event starts.

Register HERE

More information about the Graphic Design MA programme:

• https://eka-gd-ma.ee/
• https://www.artun.ee/ma-gd/
• https://www.instagram.com/ekagd_ma/

Admissions period starts on the 1st of February 2026 and application deadline is 2nd of March 2026 at 3pm EET (local Estonian time).

Admissions information here

EKA Interaction Design MA programme invites prospective Master’s students to join the online info session on Tuesday, January 27, 2026 at 17:00 EET (local Estonian time).

You’ll have an opportunity to hear about the mission and philosophy of the programme, learn about student experiences and see their projects, take a virtual tour in our studios, and meet and ask questions directly from the faculty, students and alumni.

The info session will be hosted online over Zoom. If you would like to attend, please register online through the form below. A link to attend will be e-mailed shortly before the event begins.

Register HERE

More information about the Interaction Design MA (IxD.ma) programme:

• https://www.ixd.ma
• https://www.artun.ee/ixd
• https://www.facebook.com/IxD.ma
• https://www.instagram.com/ixd.ma/

Admissions period starts on the 1st of February 2026 and application deadline is 2nd of March 2026 at 3pm EET (local Estonian time).

Admissions information here

EKA Contemporary Art MA program invites prospective students to join the online info session on Monday, January 19, 2026 at 17:00 EET (local Estonian time).

This will be an opportunity to hear more about the program, to meet and ask questions directly from the faculty.

The online info session will be hosted on Zoom, the link will be e-mailed to all registrants 2 hours before the start of the event.

If you would like to attend, please register online through the form below.

Register HERE

More information about the Contemporary Art MA programme:

• https://www.artun.ee/maca
• https://www.instagram.com/eka_maca/

Admissions period starts on the 1st of February 2026 and application deadline is 2nd of March 2026 at 3pm EET (local Estonian time).

Admissions information here