“Läbiv Dissonants”

If history were to end today, as who would you be left standing in the following static oblivion? The exhibition “Läbi dissonants” contrasts five audiovisual artworks, with the goal of taking a deeper glance at the tools and mechanisms that neoliberalism, as a system, uses to enforce and recreate its modern political hegemony.

Abstraction can be found everywhere, from long, seamlessly blending beaches to industrial megastructures. From strong outlines around hollow bodies to misleading wordplay that those shapes espouse. From the foggy beginnings of a human’s existence to their last interrupted movement.

The exhibition includes works from the artists Inna Tarakanova, Artjom Jurov, Aksel Haagensen, Marto Mägi, and John Smith.
Open from the 13th of May till the 19th of June. To visit, we ask that you contact the gallery a day ahead of time to organize your visit.

Curator: Kaur Järve

Metropolkapp – https://www.instagram.com/metropolkapp/?hl=en

Curated by Rebeka Põldsam

15.05.-14.06.2026

Opening Thursday, May 14 at 6 pm at Draakon Gallery 

Mara Kirchberg’s solo exhibition explores the technologization of care, focusing on how the automotive sector has shaped care work. Moving between garage and medical settings, Kirchberg examines the metaphor of the body as a machine, tracing how petromodern systems designed for efficiency come to structure how we carry, support, and maintain one another.

At the center of the exhibition is a hanging installation assembled from industrial materials forming a fragile organism—lifting slings, artificial membranes, lubricants—requiring ongoing maintenance to remain functional. During “Service Hours,” the artist activates the pulley system, performing a public maintenance while wearing a PVC “Sweat Suit”. 

Performances: 30 May and 13 June at 5 PM

Performed by Mara Kirchberg

Curator: Rebeka Põldsam

Graphic design: Kert Viiart–Õllek

Technical support: Gisèle Gonon, Marko Odar

Outside Eye: Gisèle Gonon

Supported by The Cultural Endowment of Estonia, Goethe-Institut Estland

Special thanks to: Eesti Kunstnike Liit, Hans-Otto Ojaste, Mari Volens, Sandra Ernits

On Thursday, 14 May at 6 PM, Viktoria Martjanova’s first solo exhibition Biomaterial will open at the Hobusepea Gallery.

Working with installation, video and photography, the artist regards the body as a resource: a currency that can be optimised, controlled, used and categorised according to political, military and economic interests.

At the centre of the exhibition is a large-scale installation made of hair, transforming this intimate and personal material into a spatial experience. From this enchanting, yet repellent approach to material and form, Martjanova moves on to the media of photography and video, creating a more direct link between organic matter and human life. The exhibited bodies and materials have lost their autonomy and function rather as units in a broader socio-political system, where their value is determined by their usability and purpose.

Viktoria Martjanova is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice includes video, installation, sound, text and performativity. Her work focuses on the formation of identity in conditions where the personal experience is inextricably linked to social and political mechanisms, perceiving the body as a tension field where these power dynamics are manifested.

Martjanova uses bodily experience, memory and language as materials to examine how personal tension and social structures intertwine in the body and how these relationships become perceivable. Her works move along the axis of tension and interruption, looking at identity as an unstable construct that is constantly rewritten. Martjanova highlights the human and young author’s position in conditions shaped by external pressure, visibility and the requirement to create one’s self-image.

Her works have been shown at the Performa Biennial in New York, the Riga Art Week’s (RAW) opening event, the Alma Gallery in Riga and the Vilnius Art Week. She is the laureate of the 2025 Young Artist Award granted by the Estonian Academy of Arts.

Curator: Lilian Hiob-Küttis

Graphic design: Maxim Nikanorov

Installation of the exhibition: Polina Kaaiko, Tõnis Tallermaa, Madis Eek, Hans-Otto Ojaste

Metalwork: Märt Vaidla

Special gratitude to Eesti Kultuurkapital, Eesti Kunsti Aakadeemia, Valge Kuup Studio, Anita Kremm, Ksenia Verbeštšuk, Juri Krutii, Todd Richter, Dmitry Gubin, Aksel Haagesen, Viktoria Arapina, juuste doonorid, kunstniku perekond, Villem Varik, Liisi Kõuhkna, Kaisa Maasik-Koplimets, Anna Mari Liivrand, Jordi Hin, Andrei Kazakov, Meraki Testa Dell’Acqua, Compose.

PS! The celebration of the exhibition opening will continue at Paavli Culture Factory starting from 8:30pm.

Exhibitions in the Hobusepea Gallery are supported by the Cultural Endowment of Estonia, the Estonian Ministry of Culture and Liviko AS.

The gallery is managed by the Estonian Artists’ Association.

On Friday, May 15 at 1:00 PM, the Patarei Sea Fortress will host the opening of an exhibition titled “Alone Together” curated by the second-year students of the Estonian Academy of Arts Jewellery and Blacksmithing department. The exhibition will present works of contemporary metal and jewelry art which examine the inner world of a person, exploring how the desire to belong shapes our choices, ideologies, and prejudices. 

As humans, we are frightened by loneliness – the need for communication, touch, and a sense of belonging is natural. Although it is easier to make new connections today than ever before, reality seems to indicate the opposite – people are experiencing increasing loneliness. 

Participating students: Alexander Matthias Saage, Karl-Erik Eeriksoo, Barbara Põldmaa, Kirsika Kaljuste, Stiina Marie Sarevet, Johanna Maria Maripuu

The student’s work was supervised by Eve Margus and Nils Hint.

Graphic designer: Mattias E. Tiik

Patarei Sea Fortress

Kalaranna tn 28

May 15 – 24, 2026

Mon-Sun, 13-19p.m.

Date: Tuesday, 12 May 2026, 13:30–15:00
Venue: Estonian Academy of Arts, Room A202
Admission: free and open to the public

The MAKK&MACA programme (Master of Contemporary Arts) at the Estonian Academy of Arts invites students, artists, educators, and the wider public to an open lecture by contemporary artist, performance maker, and curator Pankaj Tiwari on Tuesday, 12 May 2026.

In the lecture, Tiwari will introduce TENT: A School of Performative Practices — not as a proposal, but as an intervention. TENT is a nomadic, collective, and deliberately unfinished institution that refuses permanence, refuses neutrality, and refuses to wait for permission. Emerging from lived experience and structural exclusion, TENT is built from the ground up: without fixed walls, without inherited authority, and without the illusion that change can happen from within the same frameworks that produced the problem.

“Contemporary art institutions speak the language of inclusion, while their structures remain largely unchanged,” says Tiwari. “This is not a conversation about reform. It is an attempt at construction.”

The lecture moves between dream and reality, critique and action, asking a simple but urgent question: if institutions cannot change, what does it take to build new ones — and who gets to build them?

TENT operates as a temporary, mobile space of mutual learning and collective imagination. It uses interactive formats such as talks, residencies, dinners, and temporal togetherness at host institutions for specific durations to engage with their politics and practice. It is a space for imagining, thinking, listening, and responding to social injustices.

TENT at Kumu Art Museum and Rehearsals for Solidarity
In May 2026, to mark Kumu Art Museum’s 20th anniversary, TENT is erected in the museum’s inner courtyard. Around it, a twelve-day programme titled Rehearsals for Solidarity runs from 9–20 May 2026. The programme responds to a growing need to find common ground at a time when wars and geopolitical and ecological crises are deepening. The challenges affecting our shared lives have grown so large that they demand collaboration — yet we face an increasingly polarised society that undermines our very capacity to cooperate. Rehearsals for Solidarity tackles exactly this: practising the skill of finding common ground in an era when doing so feels ever more difficult. The programme encompasses performances, workshops, reading circles, lectures, communal meals, and more.

Rehearsals for Solidarity is organised collaboratively by Pankaj Tiwari, Kumu Art Museum, Kumu Youth Club, Lasnaidee, and students of the Estonian Academy of Arts’ MA Contemporary Art programme, and is curated by Frederik Klanberg. The initiative is supported by the City of Tallinn.

TENTative Practices — A Satellite Programme by EKA Students
As part of Rehearsals for Solidarity, students of the Estonian Academy of Arts have devised their own satellite programme, TENTative Practices, which unfolds across several days within and around the tent.

On Monday, 11 May, TENTative Practices opens with a communal pillow-making workshop. Instructions, materials, and tools are provided on site; the finished pillows will furnish a cosy reading nook inside the tent, complete with a small library that remains open for the duration of the programme — a space for quiet encounters and playful exploration. That afternoon, artist Ming Zhu presents the performance OOOcarina, an invitation to slow down, attune to one’s breathing, body, and the ground beneath, and to enter a shared space of resonance.

On Wednesday, 13 May, the programme turns to mending and washing — an activation of the tent’s surroundings and the museum’s “backyard” through communal care. The result is a temporary clothesline exhibition to which visitors are invited to contribute their own everyday garments, becoming co-authors of an evolving collective composition. The evening closes with an adapted game of football on the hill beside the museum courtyard — a team-building exercise with the shared goal of getting the ball uphill.

On Monday, 18 May, a new week brings a new format: TENT Radio, featuring interviews, experimental sound works, radio theatre, essays, and more. Local and international artists discuss the relationship between artist and institution live on air. TENT Radio can be listened to at https://oh.eka-gd-ma.ee/.

On Tuesday, 19 May, the programme gathers the texts, drawings, and photographs produced over the preceding days into a collectively made zine — a document of all that has been shared during Rehearsals for Solidarity. The day continues with communal cooking: each participant chops one onion, one carrot, and one clove of garlic, and everything goes into the pot. Many small contributions make one shared meal, enjoyed together.

The full programme is available at https://kumu.ekm.ee/en/syndmus/pankaj-tiwari-tent-school-rehearsals-for-solidarity/.

About Pankaj Tiwari
Pankaj Tiwari is a contemporary artist, performance maker, writer, and curator from Balrampur, India. Currently based in Amsterdam, he holds a Master’s degree in Theatre & Curation from DAS Theatre Amsterdam. Since 2026, he has been working as a trajectory artist with the international arts centre CAMPO in Ghent.

His works bring Eastern perspectives into Western discourse on socio-political issues. Tiwari is the winner of the 3Package Deal Award (2021–2022) from Amsterdam Funds for the Arts and served as a curator for Gessnerallee Zurich from 2020 to 2024. He is currently the artistic director of Stichting Studio Current in Amsterdam.

Tiwari’s work has been invited and supported by numerous international festivals and production houses, including Thalia Theatre Hamburg, Romaeuropa Rome, Steirischer Herbst Graz, MC93 Bobigny, Theater Rotterdam, Frascati Theatre Amsterdam, Kaaitheater Brussels, DE SINGEL Antwerp, Grand Theatre Groningen, SpielArt Munich, Holland Festival Amsterdam, Zürcher Theaterspektakel Zurich, University of Minnesota Minneapolis, Radialsystem Berlin, Santarcangelo Festival Italy, and performingborderslive UK, among others.

We are happy to announce the Urban Studies Exhibition at 18.04 in Logi Sauna. 

Exhibition “Ebbs and Flows, Perspectives on Baltic Sea and Beyond”
Opening: May 18, 6pm
Open: May 19–20, 12am–7pm
Location: Logi Saun  

This exhibition presents work from Urban Studies Studio 2, developed through a semester-long inquiry into the Baltic Sea and its wider urban, socio-political and ecological relations. Rather than treating the sea as a blank blue void beyond the urban, the works invite us to look again at what remains unseen: the seabed and the inbetween, the information and goods that travels across, the ruins, the privatised territories and the labour. What appears distant or abstract becomes close, material and lived.

The exhibition brings together works by Catherine Lavrik, Claudia Jung, Emely Bobsien, Giacomo Alberto Rescia, Kadri Haugas, Mihkel Uku Karindi, Muhamudul Hasan, Nabid Hasan Shovon, Nika Khalus, Shariful Islam and Zsofia Helka Molnar, developed within the studio led by Miina Pohjolainen and Nabeel Imtiaz.

“Moments Held” is a group exhibition by second-year students from the Department of Graphic Art at the Estonian Academy of Arts.

The title refers to nostalgic or meaningful fragments of time that each artist preserves through their work in their own unique way. The exhibition explores human memory and its fragility, the act of holding onto memories, and the attempt to capture moments that would otherwise vanish all too quickly.

The works address the transformation of the mind under societal pressure, the shifting of memories with every recollection, and the stories carried by objects. Some artists draw on family heritage, others on the experience of adapting to a new environment, yet almost all look inward during the creative process to interpret and visually depict the moments that hold personal significance. Together, they form a cohesive whole defined by craftsmanship, experimentation, and materiality.

Participating artists: Anastasija Šteinle, Anna Weidebaum, Ronja Jõgi, Sadhbh Connolly, Selene Taur.

The artists would like to thank their supervisors Viktor Gurov and Eve Kask, and the EKA Department of Graphic Art.

Exhibition dates: 11/05.–30/05. Opening: May 11 at 17:00. Location: GÜ Gallery, Pärnu mnt 154, Tallinn. Opening hours: Mon–Fri 12–18, Sat 12–16

The 2026 graduation ceremonies will be held on Friday, June 19th in the EKA Assembly Hall (room A101, Põhja puiestee 7).

• At 11:00 AM, the ceremony will begin for graduates of the Faculty of Architecture, the Faculty of Fine Arts and the Faculty of Art Culture
• At 3:00 PM, the ceremony will begin for graduates of the Faculty of Design

Dear graduates, please arrive 15 minutes early to the lower door of the EKA hall, where you will be guided to your designated seat. This year there is a record number of graduates (for the first time over 300) and unfortunately most of the congratulators will not be able to sit in the hall, they can watch the ceremony on the screens in the lobby or online via EKA TV.

More info:
Elisabeth Kuusik
elisabeth.kuusik@artun.ee

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 May 1that 6 pm Iulia Statica will give a lecture “Landscapes of care with wildflowers: Women, plants and domesticity in (post)socialist Romania”.

This research project examines the ways in which women’s domestic and ecological labour under state socialism reshaped urban landscapes in Romania, revealing care as an environmental and gendered spatial practice. It focuses on two semi-domestic spaces of housing blocks—balconies and urban courtyards—tracing how generational knowledge of plants and flowers enabled women to reimagine these spaces in ways that contradicted state planning and pronatalist regulation. Drawing on archival and ethnographic research, the talk explores the ways in which “care” was redefined within this repressive context, mediated in women’s everyday practices linking natality to landscape-making through the intimacies of what we might term “clandestine care”. The project experiments with multiple media, including installation, video and photography, to document and explore the multiple layers of these gendered networks of care.

Iulia Statica is Senior Lecturer at the School of Architecture and Landscape at the University of Sheffield, UK and the 2025/26 Mellon Fellow in Democracy and Landscape at Harvard University’s Dumbarton Oaks Institute in Washington DC. She previously held postdoctoral positions at The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, and Cornell University. Her research focuses on the legacies of socialist-built environments in Eastern Europe, particularly mass housing, and the gendered experiences of these spaces. Statica uses documentary film in her research; her film My Socialist Home premiered in her exhibition Archiving the Home in London in 2021. She is the author of Urban Phantasmagorias: Domesticity, Production, and the Politics of Modernity in Communist Bucharest.

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:

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

Opening on Thursday, 21 May at 6 pm in the Great Hall of the Kumu Art Museum
(Weizenbergi 34 / Valge 1, Tallinn).
 
Chromatic Drift creates a cohesive perceptual and spatial experience centred on colour, a defining element in the oeuvre of the Estonian painter Kristi Kongi. Works created specifically for this exhibition over the past couple of years, together with the surrounding installation-based environment, evoke both chromatic richness and a poetic mode of being in unmapped territory.
 
At the opening, the launch of the book accompanying the exhibition will also take place.
 
The opening will take place in Kumu’s courtyard, weather permitting.
 
Opening programme on Saturday, 23 May:

Exhibition tours with curator Ann Mirjam Vaikla and artist Kristi Kongi: 12 noon (in English) and 2 pm (in Estonian)
Artist talk with Kristi Kongi at 3:30 pm

The exhibition will remain open until 11 October 2026.

Curator: Ann Mirjam Vaikla
Exhibition design: Mari Hunt, Grete Daut (MARIHUNT architects)
Graphic design: Brit Pavelson
Exhibition installation manager: Tõnis Medri
Coordinator: Anastassia Langinen