Film Screening: “Riga, My Love” by Kara Popicon

“I leave
With tears in my throat
To where
The roads are wrapped in mist
Riga, my love remains behind.”
— Vennaskond

Join us on Friday, April 3 at 19:00 for the premiere of Karolina Peterson’s graduation film at Roosikrantsi 8b Gallery.

The film will be screened daily from April 3–13 at: 12:00 · 13:45 · 15:30 · 17:15 · 19:00 · 20:45.

Karolina Peterson (aka Kara Popicon) is a Latvian artist from an Estonian-Russian background who spent the past five years studying in Tallinn. Returning to Riga after a long time away, she found herself feeling like a stranger in her own home.

Her solo exhibition “Riga, My Love” explores this sense of distance through film – capturing the city both as it lives in memory and as it exists today.

The work is also shaped by her participation in a series of protests in Riga advocating for women’s and migrants’ rights, where she created a new artistic action each time. These experiences brought a political dimension into her practice.

This new video piece traces the evolution of that politicization, interwoven with personal reflections on loss, identity, and the emotional disconnection from home.
Supervisor: Anita Kremm

Film duration: 96 minutes
Language: English

Exhibition is supported by the Faculty of Fine Arts, Estonian Academy of Arts.

“A prairie dog town refers to the vast underground networks of tunnels and chambers constructed by prairie dogs across the grasslands. At the surface, these colonies appear as little more than a dispersed field of cone-shaped mounds. Beneath this modest topography, however, lies an extensive and highly organized architecture: a labyrinth of tunnels connecting nesting chambers, waste disposals, listening bays, nurseries, and bolt holes, before branching into distinct wards and family burrows.

Prairie Dog Town takes this subterranean architecture as both structure and allegory. The exhibition turns toward other underground networks—such as those operating within the logic of cartoons—where the burrow becomes a conceptual passage. Moving below the visible surface, tunnels open onto chambers of a more devious nature: spaces where  logics conceal themselves, circulate, and multiply.” – H.D.

“Prairie Dog Town” is Hayden Daughtry’s inaugural show in Estonia. Originally from South Carolina, entering the European art scene through the Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam, Hayden lets the uncanny constructs of the outside seep into the gallery, places where it might not otherwise allow. Sometimes a playful veneer might be a scratchcard  with an inverse prize. His work takes shape to its surroundings.

Opening March 27th at 18:00, then to be visited 28.03 – 05.04

M-T By appointment

F-S 14:00 – 18:00

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.

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.

Guided tours taking place at EKA Gallery:
– on Thursday, March 19 at 5.30 pm, led by the curators Linda Kaljundi and Kirke Kangro and guest lecturers Victoria Donovan and Vlada Vazheyevskyy, in English
– on Friday, March 20 at 4.30 pm, led by the curators Linda Kaljundi and Kirke Kangro with artist Sigrid Viir, in Estonian
– on Sunday, March 22 at 4 pm, led by the curators Linda Kaljundi and Kirke Kangro with artist and exhibition designer Anna Škodenko, in Estonian

Appriximate duration of the tours is 30 minutes. Participation is free of charge.

The exhibition will remain open until March 22.

Read more about the exhibition here:

https://www.artun.ee/en/calendar/image-is-for-illustrative-purposes-only-at-eka-gallery/

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 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.