“I Got a Great Lick of It Before It All Melted” at ARS

The exhibition “I Got a Great Lick of It Before It All Melted” is an exhibition by students of Graphic Design and Product Design at the Estonian Academy of Arts, which reflects on choices and experiences.

Opening 24 April 6 PM
ARS Art Factory – Studio 53 ja 98

Entrance from the courtyard

We all have a certain number of experiences in life, on which we build the next one. It is like an archive. You can’t ever experience anything without the latter.. And then we end up with those choices that we unconsciously and finally consciously make every day again and again. We are faced with something that is self-evident, like putting one foot in front of the other when walking or inhaling and exhaling.. we don’t notice these actions, but yet we do them constantly. Our choices shape our experiences and, when combined, our dance through life.

Artists: Riko Smirnov, Richard Vainola, Gabriella Tarja, Laura Sööt, Katriin Saulus, Anna Elisabeth Remmelg, Kenneth Pert, Hanna Milk, Anett Elis Männil, Brit Maripuu, Paula Maria Mengel, Stella Maris Liiva, Kelli Kütt, Helen Kärt Käbin, Martin Kislõi, Mark Kokotov, Teele Kiisk, Grittel Kastan, Greg Mikael Juhanson, Daria Titova, Johannes Adrik, Aries Puusepp, Rebecca Lopez,
Graphic Design: Mark Kokotov

Dance like this is the first of its kind for the students and they have been guided to this by Kristel Saan.

Supported and sponsored by Estonian Academy of Arts and Põhjala Brewery

At the seminar ‘Contemporary Higher Art Education: A Dialogue with the Future,’ leaders from five Nordic art academies will share ideas and exchange perspectives. In addition, faculty members from the Faculty of Fine Arts at the Estonian Academy of Arts will discuss these challenges.

Advocating for art and art education has never been an easy task. This seminar focuses on key issues in contemporary higher art education here and now, at a time when critical thinking, ethical approaches and the independent power of art are more important than ever. The development of higher art education is closely connected with contemporary art movements – it’s not easy to say which influences the other more. Art must be able to engage with a vast range of phenomena and questions.

Art must maintain creative freedom, independence and autonomy, while also integrating more and more with other fields. A significant portion of contemporary art is exploring research-driven paths. In the education landscape, art education must offer comparability with research-based universities. Art and artists must manage themselves, communicate, and market their work. At the same time, art higher education must remain an attractive choice for the new generation. How can art academies offer all of this and meet these expectations?

PROGRAMME

11:30 –12:00 Coffee, Gathering and Welcome Words
12:00–12:20 – Maj Hasager (Rector of Malmö Art Academy) – Higher Art Education and the Political Gaze
12:20–12:40 – Jacob Jessen (Head of Department, Trondheim Academy of Fine Art) – Art and Research in the Creative University
12:40–13:00 – Kirke Kangro (Dean of Fine Arts Faculty, Estonian Academy of Arts) – Art Education between Freedom and Frameworks

13:00–13:20 – Coffee break

13:20–13:40 – Bjarki Bragason (Dean of Fine Art, Iceland University of the Arts) – environments in art education – a few thoughts
13:40–14:00 – Leevi Haapala (Dean of the Academy of Fine Arts, University of Helsinki) – Art Education and the Professional Art Field

Event will be held in English.

Please register to the seminar through the following link: https://forms.gle/wYxHjxZ8GiAiQkiWA

More info: Kati Saarits, kati.saarits@artun.ee

The peer-review of Kim Morgan’s exhibition Blood and Breath, Skin and Dust, will take place on April 28th at 15:30, at EKA in room A502. This presentation is the first review of her practice-based doctoral artistic research titled Examining, Diagnosing, and Creating, Public Art Installations for Complex Spaces.

The peer-reviewers are Dr. Maiju Loukola (Uniarts, Helsinki) and Pan Wendt, Curator (Confederation Arts Gallery, PEI, Canada).

The thesis supervisors are Dr. Tüüne-Kristin Vaikla (Tallinn, Estonia) and Jan Peacock, Professor Emerita (NSCAD University, Halifax, Canada).

Kim Morgan invites you to her public presentation on her exhibition Blood and Breath, Skin and Dust, curated by Susan Gibson Garvey, currently showing at the Confederation Art Gallery, Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, Canada, Feb 1 – May 11, 2025.).

“The exhibition Blood and Breath, Skin and Dust focuses on interdisciplinary artist Kim Morgan’s research and artistic production using electron microscopy to explore materiality and the body. Informed by the experience of vibrant matter at the microscopic level these works offer encounters in human-scaled space and time, and an opportunity to bridge the gap between science, medicine, and art.” (Susan Gibson Garvey, Exhibition Catalogue).

Kim Morgan will discuss her artistic research and method of working that resulted in the exhibition installations, public presentations, and off-site interventions. She will situate this discussion within the larger context of her doctoral thesis. With this body of work and ongoing research and activities, Morgan proposes that site-specific relevant art installations situated in health care facilities have the potential to enhance our understanding of the human body, and shift our experience and relationship to these complex spaces. And, hopefully, to promote a new sense of health, care, and well-being.

The artist would like to thank the following institutions for supporting this exhibition:
The Confederation Art Gallery, Charlottetown, PEI, Canada; Dalhousie Art Gallery, Halifax, NS, Canada; Arts Nova Scotia; Canada Council for the Art; and Halifax Regional Municipality. Individual works have received support from Artpace San Antonio, Arts Nova Scotia, Dalhousie Medical School, and Ferno Canada.

Kim Morgan is a doctoral student at the Estonian Academy of Arts and Professor at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University, Halifax, NS, Canada.

Roundtable with Reet Bender (University of Tartu), Karsten Brüggemann (Tallinn University), Tiina-Mall Kreem (Gesellschaft für deutschbaltische Kultur in Estland) and Anneli Randla (Estonian Academy of Arts), moderated by Ulrike Plath (Tallinn University).

The edited volume:
Manors are one of the most well-known and beloved phenomena in Estonian cultural history
– they are widely studied and visited, written and spoken about, photographed and filmed,
restored, bought and sold. In fact, the manor is one of the few elements of Baltic German
heritage that has been domesticated into Estonian national cultural memory and heritage landscapes. However, it could also be argued that all this has flattened their public image.

This book is based on the conviction that the manor is key to a better understanding of Baltic history and culture, as well as of the transfers between Estonian and Baltic German cultures. For this, however, we need to look beyond the manor house and its aristocratic owners, and apply multidisciplinary approaches in order to find new perspectives. In this edited volume, scholars from a variety of disciplines explore the manor as a phenomenon around which many
of the major themes of the transnational history of the Baltic space unfold.

New perspectives are opened up on the early history of the manor, the importance of material culture and art as a source of manor history, the role of research and restoration practices in shaping the meaning of the manor, the cultural imagery and representations associated with the manor, and the ambivalent relationship between Baltic Germans and Estonians.

Editors: Kristina Jõekalda, Linda Kaljundi, Ulrike Plath

Authors: Riin Alatalu, Toomas Hiio, Hilkka Hiiop, Kristina Jõekalda, Inna Põltsam-Jürjo,
Linda Kaljundi, Andreas Kalkun, Marju Kõivupuu, Kadi Polli, Heiki Pärdi, Maris Saagpakk,
Hannes Vinnal

Publisher: Tallinn University Press, 2025

The roundtable is in Estonian. The book is sold with a reduced price during the event.

The seminar takes a close look at one of the most diverse artists in the Baltic art scene, Friedrich Ludwig von Maydell (1795–1846), and asks which kind of new knowledge do his letters to architect Wilhelm Stier (1799–1856) reveal about Baltic art and cultural life in the first half of the nineteenth century, incl. about the contacts with German artists both in Germany and in Italy. Their correspondence, stretching over several decades, was recently found in the archive of the Berlin Technical University’s Architecture Museum. It enables fresh insights into several topics of Baltic history, also beyond art history.

The seminar’s four roundtables feature discussants from Estonian Academy of Arts, Tallinn
University, University of Tartu, Art Museum of Estonia, Gesellschaft für deutschbaltische Kultur in
Estland et al. The seminar is organised and moderated by Kristina Jõekalda and Tiina-Mall Kreem. The
program is in Estonian.

PROGRAM

12.00 Maydell’s correspondence and travels against the background of art history
Kristina Jõekalda, Maris Saagpakk, Liisa-Helena Lumberg-Paramonova, Tiina Abel

13.15 Maydell, church art and the status of an artist
Anne Untera, Reet Pius, Kadi Polli, Triin Kröönström

14.00-14.30 pause

14.30 Maydell in Tartu (Dorpat): drawings, prints and everyday life
Moonika Teemus, Kristiina Tiideberg, Reet Bender

15.30 The letters’ significance for history and cultural history
Kairit Kaur, Linda Kaljundi, Tiina-Mall Kreem

Pablo Ignacio Hermansen Ulibarri – Visiting Lecturer at the Estonian Academy of Arts

Pablo Ignacio Hermansen Ulibarri is a designer with a PhD in Architecture and Urban Studies. He teaches and conducts research at the School of Design at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile. His work focuses on co-design, interaction design, socio-natural ecosystems, photo-ethnography, performative politics in public space, more-than-human prototyping, and public services as public space.

He will be visiting the Estonian Academy of Arts from April 14–16 and will give a public lecture, “Counter Designing: Animals and Algorithms as Creative Agents,” on April 16 at 18:00 in room A501.

In January, EKA Interaction Design students visited his university in Chile to develop collaborative projects and academic exchange.

In this seminar, we will discuss the results of the EKA research project ‘Art Historical Contact Zones: Popular and Fictional Mediations of Art History in Estonia’ (2023–2024).

Our aim was to explore different ways of representing art (and its history), i.e. to investigate how art has been presented by media external to the art world, and whether and how this has changed the meanings of art, compared to the interpretations of academic researchers. Each of us dealt with a different “medium”: fiction, film, journalism, heritage construction, schematic and photographic narrative, television programs, art criticism.

At the seminar we will also present the final product of our project – a special issue of journal Vikerkaar (2025/4–5), our section edited by Johannes Saar. In addition to him, the authors of the articles are Epp Lankots, Kädi Talvoja, Liisa-Helena Lumberg-Paramonova, Tiina Abel, Kristina Jõekalda and Krista Kodres.

On April 17 at 13.00 Marta Konovalov’s second peer-reviewed process “Designer, the resilient gardener”, will take place in room A-501.
The reviewers of the process are Dr Marium Durrani and Prof Danielle Wilde (Umeå University, University of Southern Denmark).
Supervisors are Dr Kristi Kuusk ( EKA) and Dr Julia Valle Noronha (Aalto University).

Marta Konovalov invites you to view her garden and her research artefacts. She presents the second phase of her doctoral research on repair and regenerative textile design.
With her practice-based research she investigates how a designer can promote emotional durability and support the development of the aesthetics of affect in the context of fashion and textiles. To better understand the potential of regenerative textile design Marta Konovalov discusses the common values of my textile repair and gardening practice from the overlapping perspective of a designer, mender and an amateur gardener. She has set out to explore how a designer can address crises and encourage response-ability resilient practice through the interconnected activities.
With this work she aims to promote the discussion over interfering in the standardised, growth oriented processes of textile production and to empower the individual and nature in the multifaceted crises.

Marta Konovalov is a designer-researcher, craftivist and educator focusing on repair and regenerative textile design. She is a lecturer and doctoral student at Estonian Academy of Arts.

On April 16 at 11.00 Kadri Liis Rääk’s second peer-reviewed exhibition “Morphogenesis”, will take place in the ARS Project Space, Pärnu mnt 154.

The exhibition’s peer reviewers are Dr. Erik Alalooga and Professor Esa Kirkkopelto.
The supervisor of the doctoral thesis is Dr. Liina Unt.

The second creative project is part of Kadri Liis Rääk’s doctoral thesis, “Touch and Tactility as a Means for Shared Immersion in Art” which focuses on embodied, multisensory experiences within the exhibition context. Using methods of expanded scenography, Rääk explores how to create immersive spaces for alternative encounters through interactive bodily sculptures, atmospheric mood, and tactility. Through sculptures grounded in her own bodily experiences, Rääk examines the singularity of experience and the boundaries of self and the Other. She is initerested in what beliefs and values are carried with oneself and the surrounding world, and how these are expressed through the experience of touch.

Kadri Liis Rääk is a multidisciplinary artist and researcher, focusing on creating immersive and tactile environments. Operating simultaneously in the expanded fields of art and design, she investigates how tactile interactions with artworks shift perceptions and foster dialogues extending beyond the visible. She studied scenography (BA) and contemporary art (MA) at the Estonian Academy of Arts and autonomous design (MA) at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Ghent (KASK, Belgium). Her works engage with bodily and symbolic narratives, addressing entanglements and dialogues between humans and other life forms. She has participated in exhibitions and residencies in Peru, Czech Republic, Belgium, Denmark, Iceland, and Estonia.