Brenda Purtsak’s “Distant veils” at Artrovert Gallery

Brenda Purtsak’s solo exhibition “Distant veils” will open at Artrovert Gallery on 24th of September from 6pm.

Brenda Purtsak’s artistic practice has reflected themes related to human biological body, birth, death, family and kinship. The exhibition at hand combines all themes mentioned above through the lens of contemporary painting with the keywords of desacralized Christian art, compassion and self-sacrifice.

The exhibition addresses people as cultural artifacts and draws parallels between works created especially for the exhibition and well-known historical artworks such as Michelangelo’s Pietà sculpture and Madonna and Child paintings. The desacralization of these symbols allows the artist to address a wider range of personal and cultural meanings that are not associated with religion. 

Paintings, ceramic works and charcoal drawings are displayed within Brenda’s exhibition. The ceramic series derive from My Little Pony toy series that she remembers from her childhood. They consist of colorful ponies with unique symbols on the sides of their bottoms called “cutie marks.” These marks represent the unique talent of each pony and its connection to and the relationship with it. The ponies, people, and charcoal drawings in Brenda’s paintings may at first glance seem unfinished and somehow collaged together. However, human memories are mostly not crystal clear or possible to freeze to take a deeper look the same way as photography or film enables to do. As time passes new layers are added or we might discover some that we had not realised existed before.

The exhibition team

Location: Artrovert Gallery, Ristiku tn 10, Tallinn

Opening: 24.09, from 6pm

Open: 24.09–01.11.25, Tue-Sat 12am–6pm

Curator: Liisi Kõuhkna

Graphic design: Rainer Kasekivi

Support and thanks to: Cultural Endowment of Estonia, Artrovert Gallery, Brenda’s family, Maria Elise Remme, Keithy Kuuspu, Ian Simon Märjamaa

GreenCcircle Living Lab invites creatives, policymakers, researchers, and communities to co-create sustainable and regenerative solutions for the cultural and creative industries. This EU-supported initiative brings together local and international participants to address pressing sustainability challenges through hands-on collaboration.

Our Local Living Lab in Tallinn offers a unique opportunity to:
– Join a series of three expert-led workshops focused on sustainability and creative innovation
– Explore and test the GreenCcircle Toolkit and GreenCcircle Academy—two new resources for greener practices
– Share your ideas and experiences with a growing European network of changemakers
– Collaborate in an open, creative, and participatory environment

Why take part? Your contribution can influence not only local outcomes but also European-level innovation. The most engaged participants will have the chance to attend the GreenCcircle European Living Lab in Venice in December 2025—a three-day event bringing together inspiring voices from across Europe to shape the future of the cultural and creative sector.

Participation is free, but pre-registration is required: riina.oun@artun.ee
More information: Riina Õun

The meeting will take place as part of Design for All on 3 October 2025, from 1:00 – 3:00 PM (Kopli 70, Remonditsehh).
Design for all 2025 program.

web: https://greenccircle.eu/
IG: https://www.instagram.com/greenccircle/

Eugenio Marini & Ingrid Helena Pajo
THE DAY THE LINE BENT INTO A SPIRAL
Second floor of EKA Gallery 27.09.–19.10.2025
Open Tue–Sat 12–6 pm Sun 12–4 pm
Opening: Friday, September 26 at 6 pm

We don’t know the exact day the line bent into a spiral. At some point, it was simply happening—twisting ever forward, spinning as it turned. In the beginning, perhaps it all moved a little slower—the bending and the spinning—and already then, we were inside it.

“The Day the Line Bent into a Spiral” brings together works, material experiments, and found objects created and collected over the course of nearly a year by artists Eugenio Marini and Ingrid Helena Pajo. The main principle for building this collection of fragments was to work with a single idea for no longer than a week—both in parallel and in collaboration. Another key aspect was the associative threads that emerged while working with the materials: allowing these to carry the artists along, and pausing from time to time somewhere in the middle of the process. While the material may suggest a direction, in the end each form speaks about the artists’ themselves and their temporary states. The exhibition becomes a kind of diary, written in an unknowable order, along curved lines. Now, the artists invite you to turn with them along this line—summoning memory, and rowing your way back to the starting point through the spiral labyrinth.

Eugenio Marini (IT) and Ingrid Helena Pajo (EE) are artists based in Tallinn and Rome. While both artists have individual artistic practices, they have been combining their backgrounds in sculpture and textile by collaborating regularly since 2022. Pajo’s works explore early textile technologies through gathering and weaving, trying to make sense of the experience of human life. Marini reflects on the idea and meaning of utility in today’s living. Found materials are an integral part of this shared journey of exploration, highlighting the importance of the path and the process, often encouraging improvisation.

Graphic design: Daria Titova
Technical support: Erik Hõim
The exhibition is supported by the Cultural Endowment of Estonia, Sadolin Estonia and Tallinn City.
Opening drinks from mirai™ and Põhjala Brewery.

On Thursday, September 25th at 18.00, Ron Verlin’s first solo exhibition that which I was in life, I am in death will open at Draakoni Gallery. The exhibition brings fashion into the gallery context in a distinctive way, framing it through existential and social perspectives.

The spatial installation presented in the gallery integrates fashion, light, and sound to create an environment that invites visitors to engage in existential reflection. Central to the exhibition are garments conceived as symbolic objects, embodying themes of decadence, decay, and transition as metaphorical states of weariness that precede redemption or rebirth. These motifs unfold through a language of symbols and allegory. At the root of the project is the artist’s dream of navigating a city with a bottomless pit at its core. The artist later found echoes of this haunting dream in the pages of Dante Alighieri’s Inferno, and together with Purgatorio, these seminal texts served as foundational sources of inspiration.

Ron Verlin is an emerging fashion designer whose work draws upon faith, mythology, and the psyche. The works engage with existential concerns against the backdrop of a world marked by scientific progress and technological advancement, yet spiritual depletion, raising questions about the possibility of redemption and renewal. The exhibition interrogates fashion’s role in contemporary society, questioning whether it functions solely as aesthetic expression or whether it can also serve as a conduit for critical inquiry.

The curator of the exhibition is Sten Ojavee (Estonian Center for Contemporary Art), and the project manager is Olivia Soans.

Supported by: Cultural Endowment of Estonia
Partner: Center For Contemporary Arts, Estonia

The exhibitions at Draakoni Gallery are supported by the Cultural Endowment of Estonia, the Ministry of Culture, and Liviko AS.

Fashion designers Ron-Jonas Verlin (Ron Verlin), Maria Roosiaas, Jaagup Kaiv, Kristiina Tali and Hanna Tiina Pekk from the Estonian Academy of Arts’ Fashion Department will present the best works from their successfully defended graduation collections in the spring of 2025 at the Solaris Centre.

The works selected by the designers will be on display on the Solaris Centre’s Design Street from 29.09-12.10.2025.

On September 17 at 16:00 in room A501, Leyla Acaroglu will give a public lecture titled “Design as Tool for Systems Intervention”. 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.

Designer, sociologist, and educational entrepreneur Leyla Acaroglu brings a wealth of creative flair to sustainability and the circular economy. As a provocateur in these fields, she invites audiences to rethink the challenges we face. This public lecture highlights how Acaroglu has built a career by leveraging her design practice as a powerful tool for change.

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

Dr. Leyla Acaroglu is an internationally respected expert in sustainability and the circular economy, an educational entrepreneur and an award-winning creative change-maker. As a designer and sociologist, she weaves systems thinking, sustainability sciences, and creative approaches to develop global interventions in education, communication, business, and design. For her work in advancing science and innovation in sustainability, she was named Champion of the Earth by the United Nations, a Change-Maker by LinkedIn, and is a mainstage TED speaker who leads presentations with leaders around the world on activating positive change for a sustainable, circular and regenerative future. As an educational entrepreneur, she founded The UnSchool, an experimental knowledge lab for adults, Circular Futures, a circular economy sustainability training platform and developed the Disruptive Design Method. Leyla also created the Circular Classroom for Finland and the Anatomy of Action in collaboration with the UNEP.

André Malraux’s Museum without Walls (1947) aims to “destroy” art history through the production of an eternal present of art in continuous metamorphosis. I will focus on the mimetic uses of Malraux’s Opus by various different artists in the 1950s and the 1960s, in order to show an important anti-historical shift not only in art, but also in the thought and politics of this period.
Maria Stavrinaki is Professor of history of contemporary art at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland.

Lecture is held in collaboration between KVI and Estonian Doctoral school of humanities and Arts.

Public program at the exhibition “30×30” at EKA Gallery
Participation in the events is free!

Thursday, September 11 at 4–6 pm
Event “And this is not all…”
Drawing lesson with Malle Jürgenson, head of the Interior Architecture Department (on the second floor of EKA Gallery, in Estonian)
NB! The number of participants is limited, register here.

Sunday, September 14
At 1 pm, guided tour led by curators Madli Kaljuste and Paco Ulman (in Estonian)
At 2 pm, curatorial tour (in English)

Sunday, September 21 at 3–5 pm
A discussion, where topics that arose during the planning of the exhibition and during the exhibition will be discussed.

Read more about the exhibition here.

“30×30. Exhibition on the Graphic Arts Collection of the Faculty of Architecture at the Estonian Academy of Arts”
EKA Gallery 29.08.–21.09.2025
Open Tue–Sat 12–6 pm Sun 12–4 pm
Opening: Thu 28.08. at 7 pm

The Estonian Academy of Arts has been educating architects for 75 years. The exhibition “30×30”, which kicks off the anniversary year, explores the past decades of the Faculty of Architecture of the Estonian Academy of Arts through graphic assignments from the first year.

“Architectural Design I”, “Project Graphics”, “Composition I” – behind the different names lies a preparatory studio that has existed since the 1970s, which has been completed by all first-year students of the EKA Department of Architecture. Also in 2025, new architecture students will be introduced to rapidographs, the materiality of paper, questions of composition, the differences and similarities between plan and section, and the possibilities and impossibilities of graphic imagery. This is the students’ first exposure to the tools of an architect, which are both the means of depicting and creating space, as well as the ways of thinking about space and communicating it on a more abstract level.

The archive exhibition “30×30” opens up an array of graphic works secretly collected in the EKA Museum and the archives of the Faculty of Architecture. The paper and ink and the form of the works seem unchanged, yet the nearly seven hundred sheets reveal the emphases, feelings and tasks that have changed over the course of half a century, on the basis of which the shaping of a person into an architect begins.

The works exhibited at the exhibition belong to the collection of the EKA Museum and the archives of the Faculty of Architecture of the Estonian Academy of Arts.

Exhibition organizers and architecture: Madli Kaljuste, Paco Ulman
Participants: former first-year students of the Estonian Academy of Arts, Tallinn University of Arts and the State Art Institute of the Estonian SSR
Graphic design: Maria Muuk
Exhibition construction: Dream Team (Johannes Säre, Dénes Farkas, Eke Ao Nettan, Paul Säre)
Technical support: Karmo Migur
Lighting design: Mikk-Mait Kivi
The exhibition is supported by the Estonian Association of Architects, the Estonian Cultural Endowment, the Faculty of Architecture of the Estonian Academy of Arts, ETS NORD, Niguliste Museum, Sadolin Estonia and Tallinn City.
We also thank: Ulla Alla, Imbi Hepner, Malle Jürgenson, Tiina Kaljuste, Reeli Kõiv, Laura Linsi, Hannes Lung, Mari Möldre, Andres Ojari, Sille Pihlak, Tarvo Roose, Tarmo Saaret, Mihkel Säre, Merilin Tee
Opening drinks from Põhjala Brewery.

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Public program at the exhibition “30×30” at EKA Gallery
Participation in the events is free!

Thursday, September 11 at 4–6 pm
Event “And this is not all…”
Drawing lesson with Malle Jürgenson, head of the Interior Architecture Department (on the second floor of EKA Gallery, in Estonian)
NB! The number of participants is limited, register here.

Sunday, September 14
At 1 pm, guided tour led by curators Madli Kaljuste and Paco Ulman (in Estonian)
At 2 pm, curatorial tour (in English)

Sunday, September 21 at 3 pm
Discussion

The Estonian artist, who has been living and working in London since 2013, will introduce her work and creative processes.

Angela Maasalu (1990) is a painter who deals with personal and intimate themes in her work. She is interested in the contradictory human experience, which simultaneously acknowledges happiness and unhappiness, the drama and comedy of life. Maasalu came to deal with personal and everyday themes during her master’s studies, and after graduating she has touched on the everyday problems of her generation. In her work she deals with sociality, relationships, personal space and a sense of home.

Angela Maasalu has studied painting and art history at the University of Tartu (BA 2012), painting at the Estonian Academy of Arts (MA 2015) and furthered her studies at UAL Central Saint Martins in England (2013–2014). In 2017 and 2019 she was nominated for the AkzoNobel Art Prize (formerly the Sadolin Art Prize). She has had solo exhibitions in Tallinn, London, Heraklion, Greece and Shanghai.