Kati Müüripeal “Rain Drops, That Did Not Fall from the Paris Leaves”

On 16th of January at 6 pm Tallinn University Academic Library shall open the first substantial solo exhibition of painter Kati Müüripeal. The works presented within the exhibition have been created in 2020-2025 using mainly oil paints.

The works express a unique visual language of the artist that can be described as abstract, disunited with the focus on details and dialogue between specific color combinations. The artist is intrigued by the color blue and its occurrence within different cultures. Inspiration for works have been greatly derived by the nature surrounding the artist birth home. The Paris plant, the autumn smog, “Generation P” by Viktor pelevin (1999), “The Nightingale and the Rose” by O. Wilde (1888) and the time spent in Abisko within KUNO programme have been the main influence on the artists work so far.

The artist has graduated her bachelors programme in Faculty of Fine Arts and Master of Contemporary Arts (cum laude) at Estonian Academy of Arts.

Location Rävala pst 10, 15042 Tallinn

Opening 16.01 from 6pm

Open for visit 17.01.-07.03.2025

Curator: Liisi Kõuhkna

Anneli Porri is a PhD student and junior researcher at the Institute of Art History and Visual Culture from 2023.

She graduated from the Institute of Art History and Visual Culture  of the Estonian Academy of Arts (BA in Art History and VIsual Culture Studies, 2002) and the Institute of Humanities of Tallinn University (MA in Cultural Theory, 2012) and works as a lecturer in art education and as a leader of the joint art teacher training programme at the Estonian Academy of Arts. Porri has written art criticism for the cultural media, curated exhibitions of Estonian and international contemporary art, edited art publications, and compiled teaching materials for both general and higher education.

Porri’s academic research interests are related to art education, teaching methods for the analysis of artworks and the didactics of art mediation. Her doctoral research focuses on teaching methods and strategies that support the development of visual competence, particularly in the interpretation of artworks.

About the seminar:

Conscious and deliberate looking is the basis of visual literacy and the interpretation of visual images is based on both our vision and our knowledge. Thus, image reading requires conscious learning. But how does the learning process establish contact with art and develop the skills that allow the viewer to interpret a work of art?

At the research seminar I will present a study in progress on the teaching of art history in Estonia since the establishment of the first chair of art history at the University of Tartu. I will offer a perspective on Estonian art history and art history studies that focuses primarily on the didactics of the subject, a view on the study and teaching of art history, an additional layer to the study of the science of Estonian art history, which has also been addressed in recent articles by Krista Kodres and Eero Kangor.

The aim of the study is to problematise the choice of traditional teaching methods and strategies in art history in both higher and general education and to clarify attitudes towards them according to art history and educational thought and practice.

I will focus on the following research questions:

1. What are the institutional and educational policy conditions of art history teaching in Estonian higher and general education 1920-1990(?)?
2. How is the teaching of the history of art and the relationship with art aimed at, what competences is it aimed at developing?
3. What are the traditional methods and strategies of teaching art history that have developed and are used in the teaching process?

On Tuesday, January 28, 2025 at 4:00 p.m., open debate of EKA rector candidates will take place.

EKA rector candidate programs (in Estonian):

Rector candidate Hilkka Hiiop’s program
Rector candidate Kirke Kangro’s program

Hilkka Hiiop is the dean of EKA’s Faculty of Arts and Culture from 2021. Hiiop is a professor in the Department of Cultural Heritage and Conservation. Hiiop’s candidacy was submitted by the members of the EKA Council.

Kirke Kangro is the dean of EKA’s Faculty of Fine Arts from 2016. She is a professor at the Department of Installation and Sculpture. Kangro was nominated by the Faculty of Fine Arts and Faculty of Design of EKA.

The EKA rector’s elections will take place in auditorium A-101 on Friday, January 31, 2025, at 2:00 p.m.

At the election meeting, the members of the electoral board will vote by secret ballot. The rector candidate who receives more than half of the votes will be elected.

Information related to the rector’s elections can be found at artun.ee/rektori-valimised.

The term of office of the new EKA Rector will begin on April 4, 2025.

The Estonian Cloud: Extraneous Tongue, Ulterior Print
January 16^th to 31^st
Monday – Saturday (12h – 18h)
ARS Showroom
Pärnu mnt. 154
Lara Brener

‘I am upside down here, as if looking at my own reflection. I am mirrored, how used I am to flipping myself. My tongue gets twisted all the time and people just do not seem to get it right. My friend told me I was not wrong. Clouds were different at a higher latitude. And suddenly there I was, looking for geographical specificity in a cloudy sky.’

The Estonian Cloud: Extraneous Tongue, Ulterior Print dwells on displacement and translation, presenting narratives taken from the artist’s experience of being a Brazilian immigrant in Estonia, and of communicating outside her mother tongue. Examining the Estonian sky through glycerin base prints and text (in English and Portuguese), her work embraces undefinition, while making analogies between the procedures of casting, printmaking, and translation.

The exhibition constitutes the artist’s thesis project for the Contemporary Art MA, from Estonian Academy of Arts (EKA).

Lara Brener is an artist and educator from São Paulo, Brazil, currently based in Tallinn. She holds a Bachelor’s and a teaching degree in Visual Arts from Fundação Armando Alvares Penteado, São Paulo, and has participated in exhibitions in Brazil, Estonia, Norway, and Lithuania. Lara works through breaches of media, translating and mixing processes, building ambiguous, cavernous images, mostly with printmaking, texts, and photography, and presenting dissolving narratives that are formed with images boiling up, but never being fully uncovered. Recently, she has been exploring translation of language, media, and context through narratives of hybrid, displaced identities.

WHISPERING WITH EYES CLOSED
EKA Gallery 10.01.–02.02.2025
Opening: 9.01.2025 at 6pm
Open Tue–Sat 12–6 pm Sun 12–4 pm, free entry

Artists: Victor Flavell (FR), Minni Havas (FI), Kadri Joala (EE), Tõnis Jürgens (EE), Ats Kruusing (EE), Sanna Nissinen (FI), Marc Sauvageot (EE)

The international group exhibition “Whispering with Eyes Closed” deals with being asleep and dreaming, and the unlimited possibilities experienced during this time. The main characters depicted in the works have suddenly fallen asleep or are already dreaming, embarking on journeys into the unknown. The viewer experiences a foreign world through someone else’s hazy gaze, letting go, giving up control. The boundaries between the imaginary and the real blur and a leap into the void is made, creating sometimes conscious, sometimes unconscious images.

Curator: Kaisa Maasik
Exhibition design: Kaisa Maasik
Graphic design: Fatima-Ezzahra Khammas

Technical support: Ats Kruusing

Exhibition is supported by the Cultural Endowment of Estonia and Sadolin Estonia.
Opening drinks from Põhjala Brewery.

There will be two curatorial tours part of the exhibition:
– on Thursday, January 9 at 5pm, with the artists, in English
– on Wednesday, January 15 at 2pm, in Estonian

See photos of the opening here.

“Throw Ratio”
EKA Gallery 20.12.2024 from 5 to 9 pm, free entry

We warmly invite you to the final exhibition of the course “Moving Image in Space” by EKA Visual Communication students.

During the semester, the students have delved into the technical and creative aspects of projection art, creating three stylistically different works that expand the boundaries of projection art.

Participants: Paula Hõbe, Marie Kanger, Marianne Lapin, Kristi Markov, Kadri Raudmägi, Greta Ruga, Inna Rõžihh, Siim-Aoum Villido, Kert Väljak, Karolina Kapinus

Supervisor: Alyona Movko-Mägi

Discover visual music techniques in abstract visuals, experience animations inspired by historical patterns, and immerse yourself in an installation inspired by the world of video games.

Each work offers a unique perspective and invites visitors to think along and discover new worlds created by moving images in space.

See you at the gallery, where art and technology meet in an exciting way!

On 20 January at 15:00 Risto Paju will defend his thesis “The Art of Late Medieval Stone Carving in Tallinn: Fragments – History and Interpretation” (“Tallinna hiliskeskaegne raidkivikunst. Fragmendid – ajalugu ja tõlgitsemine”).

The public defence will be held in EKA (Põhja pst 7), room A501. The defence will be broadcast on EKA TV.
The defence is in Estonian.

Supervisor: Dr. Anneli Randla (Estonian Academy of Arts)
External reviewers: Prof. Kersti Markus (Tallinn University), Dr. Erki Russow (Tallinn University)
Opponent: Dr. Erki Russow

Thesis is available HERE.

There are works of art and architecture that draw attention with their exceptional state of preservation, but there are also many that have survived only as fragments. This thesis examines the 15^th– and 16^th-century carved stone fragments from Tallinn, which are located in the collections of the Tallinn City Museum and the Tallinn City Urban Planning Department, as well as in situ within the city.

The main body of the thesis consists of published articles, each focusing on a selected fragment and aiming to reconstruct its original whole based on existing data, and place it into its historical context. The final part of this thesis discusses the exhibition of fragments in the Carved Stone Museum, which opened in 2016 under the Tallinn City Museum, and suggests approaches for future exhibitions. The analysis is based on the studies by Jacqueline Lichtenstein and Cesare Brandi concerning the relationship between the fragment and the whole.

Defence Committee: Prof. Hilkka Hiiop (Head of the Committee), Dr. Anu Allas, Prof. Krista Kodres, Prof. Juhan Maitse, Prof. Kurmo Konsa

On Friday, January 3rd 2025 at 17:00 the group exhibition “Abundance” opens on the second floor of T1 shopping center (next to the central atrium).

The exhibition includes works by Emily Greenwood, Ulvi Haagensen, Cecile Hübner, Heleliis Hõim, Erki Kasemets, Sandra Kosorotova, Gary Markle and Sigrid Viir.

“Abundance” delves into the themes of invisible systems in the age of consumerism. By organizing an exhibition in a shopping center, a question of dealing with the existing surrounding arises. How do we work both with and against the overwhelming presence of consumerism and capitalism? The exhibition acts as a space to take time, observe and briefly escape from the sea of information. It aims to slow down visitors and make them reflect on their surroundings.

The exhibition is curated by Piret Arukaevu, Sylvia Burgess, Maia Hellman, Kaur Järve, Marite Kuus and Mariam Mestvirishvili as part of the Curatorial Studies Seminar, led by Brigit Arop, at Estonian Academy of Arts.

Exhibition is open from 03.01–17.01.2025.

Open hours:
Tue–Fri 16:00–20:00,
Sat–Sun 12:00–20:00

Finissage event on Friday, January 17th at 17:00, programming will begin at 17:30.

Information about public programming during the exhibition will be announced on the Facebook event – https://www.facebook.com/events/2404807066531874

Graphic design by Andrew Hill.

The exhibition is supported by the Estonian Academy of Arts, department of Art History and Visual Culture and Craft Studies.

Special thanks to T1 Mall of Tallinn and SUHE bar.

Ezio Manzini, a world-renowned advocate for sustainability and social innovation in design, will give a public lecture “Livable proximity. A design-orienting scenario” on Tuesday, December 17, starting at 4:00 PM in room A101.

In the past century, the spatial organization of modern societies has been dominated by the effects of an idea of efficiency based on specialization and the economy of scale. In the name of efficiency, some areas have specialized: those where to work, those where to have fun, those where to study, and those where to go back to sleep. We can refer to all of this as the scenario of distance.

Over time, however, it clearly emerged that the application of this scenario was leading to very serious environmental and social problems. Therefore, for long time some cases appeared in which this model began to clash with other ideas and practices, driven by the need to bring together what had been separated and to reconnect what had been disconnected. That is, to bring services, workplaces and people’s homes closer together. These new ideas and practices, i.e. these social innovations, can be seen as the beginning of a new, emerging scenario: the scenario of proximity.

Although the problems of the society of distance were evident for long time, until 2019, the ideas and practices that had led to the definition of the scenario of proximity have slowly advanced. Then the pandemic arrived and, paradoxically, the same sanitary distancing it required has shown everyone how important physical proximity is: the social role of neighborhood services; the advantage of working close to where you live; the importance of having good relationships with the tenants next-door. In short, the value of the scenario of proximity has been recognized by a growing number of people and institutions

The lecture discusses this scenario of proximity, showing how it has emerged from the grassroots social innovations of the past 20 years, and how, in some large cities, it has become a reference for action, sometimes using the expression “15-minute city”, with the creation of new proximity systems capable of responding to many, if not all, the daily needs of citizens.

Finally, underlining how the strategies for approaching this scenario are profoundly place-based, the lecture also identifies some common traits and focuses on one of them.

The conceptual background on which the lecture is based can be found in: “Design, When Everybody Designs”, MIT Press 2015, “Politics of the Everyday.” Bloomsbury, 2019 (both are also published in China) and Livable Proximity (Egea, 2022)

For over three decades Ezio Manzini has been working in the field of design for sustainability. Most recently, his interests have focused on social innovation, considered as a major driver of sustainable changes. In this perspective, he started DESIS: an international network of schools of design, active in the field of design for social innovation for sustainability.

In 2024, the Design Research Society awarded him the Lifetime Achievement Award.

Presently, he is President of DESIS Network and an Honorary Professor at the Politecnico di Milano. He has been a guest professor in several design schools worldwide, as (in the past decade): Elisava-Design School and Engineering (Barcelona), Tongji University (Shanghai), Jiangnan University (Wuxi), University of the Arts (London), CPUT (Cape Town), Parsons -The New School for Design (NYC)

His most recent books are: “Design, When Everybody Designs”, MIT Press 2015; “Politics of the Everyday.” Bloomsbury, 2019; “Livable Proximity” Egea, 2021, “Plug-ins: Design for City Making in Barcelona” (with Albert Fuster and Roger Paez, Elisava and Actar Publishers 2023; Fare Assieme, Una nuova generazione di servizi pubblici collaborativi (con Michele D’Alena), Egea, 2024

The Design Open Lecture series 2024 is part of Sandra Nuut and Ruth-Helene Melioranski’s Design Issues course. It is public and open to all.