Open Talk: Sara Gunnarsdóttir “Making Independent Animation Art Within The American Film Industry”

10 November 6 p.m. in EKA auditorium A101

Sara Gunnarsdóttir “Making Independent Animation Art Within The American Film Industry”

Sara Gunnarsdóttir was born and raised in Iceland where she studied fine art. She went to The United States in her late twenties to study Experimental Animation at The California Institute of the Arts, where she lived and worked for fourteen years before turning back to her home country. During the decade and a half in the States, Sara managed to establish her own voice as an independent animator within the American industry.

In her lecture, she will talk about how remaining true to her own voice and way of approaching animation has helped open doors to various meaningful collaborations within different types of filmmaking, such as live action features, documentaries and TV series.

Q&A will follow after the event.

PÖFF Shorts events

Article on Cartoon Brew: https://www.cartoonbrew.com/know-your-indie-filmmaker/know-your-indie-filmmaker-sara-gunnarsdottir-227855.html

“The Life and Death”

Miradonna Sirkka and Sofi Häkkinen have worked together for 8 years – and counting. The pair has created the artistic world of Recover Laboratory, a Finnish pioneer of immersive performances. Sirkka hails from experimental contemporary circus and Häkkinen from fine arts; together they explore the space of performance art with their signature way of looking at the world, where the mundane becomes surreal, and humor and vulnerability are present simultaneously. 

Sirkka and Häkkinen’s performance “the Life and Death” brings together elements of performance art, DJ & VJ gigs, and having grown up in the 00’s. The performance can be seen as criticism of hetero- and mono-normativity, along with capitalistic perfectionism. Queerdos Häkkinen and Sirkka build a shared moment of fun, weirdness, horror, play, love and tears, while probing around the space they occupy right now both mentally and physically.

In the performance, the hypersexualization afab bodies are subjected to in everyday life is made visible and reclaimed. The duo takes matters into their own hands with the imagery of popular culture, movies and music. The performance rises from pure enjoyment. One of the kindles for the piece is the many incidents when the artist’s work has been criticized for showing boobs on stage.

CW: sexual movement, childbirth, death, tattoo needles, nudity

Visual artist Sofi Häkkinen (b 1990, Oulu, Finland) brings an assortment of sculptures and video works to Vent Space project space.

Häkkinen is a Master of Arts from Aalto University, and has a very multi-artistic approach to her work. The sculptures Häkkinen shows in Vent Space are mostly made out of dry pasta. The video pieces also explore the theme of food – along with death, the body, the Internet, humor, pop and doom scrolling.

EKA Young Artist Award 2022 laureate Chun Au Yeung has his solo exhibition “You’ve Been in My Mind” in Hobusepea gallery open until October 30th.

“It was a chilly night, so I went home after a long walk at dawn. I was sitting on the couch, covering myself with a blanket and listening to a song. The lyrics kept lingering in my head…”that’s me in the corner, that’s me in the spotlight, losing my religion…” That night, I was not the only one in the spotlight. Suddenly, I heard a big bang noise that came from the corner. It was so dark in the room, all I could see was all of my jackets falling off on the ground. At that moment, I was thinking about someone…”
Chun Au Yeung

You’ve Been In My Mind arises from the innermost state of discrete moments to explore the tension between hope and fear, and to translate into art how the two feelings fall together, are voiced and formed. Chun creates meditative drawings and installations based on his personal experience from a living place, presenting it as an intimate but also alienating situation through fusing together the household objects and elements.

The new series of works in the exhibition develops and enlarges feelings and lived situations from Chun’s own experiences, mostly influenced by his current displacement from his original homeland. “I am bearing my soul, seeking hidden signs of hope and meaning, but the process is holding me back, somehow it makes me feel fear” Chun said. Hellos, Goodbyes (2023), is a work transformed from a cloth hanger stand. By removing all the original hanging hooks, Chun subtly attached an archery to the body of the cloth hanger stand, as if it was shooting by someone from somewhere, vaguely hinting towards something reminiscent of the archery target, revealing a wounded and destroyed relationship.

In You’ve Been In My Mind, Chun continues his exploration of the relationship between domestic elements and human nature, combined with both personal and collective emotions. Specific furniture becomes the medium that allows the artist to construct the complicated feelings of daily experiences, where each object opens a dialogue, which can be both decadent and hopeful at the same time, around the notion of home.

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

Photography artists Peter Fraser and Esther Hovers will hold their artist talks at 18:00 on Tuesday, October in A-501 at the Estonian Academy of Arts. Both artists are in Tallinn to hold a week-long masterclasses in the department of photography, Estonian Academy of Arts.

Peter Fraser is a fine art photographer who has been at the forefront of colour photography as artistic enquiry since the early 1980s. His works involve an intense philosophical focus on the matter and materials encountered in the everyday, frequently addressing the question ‘What is Real?’ in conjunction with changing societal preoccupations.

Born in 1953 in Cardiff, Wales, Fraser graduated in photography from Manchester Polytechnic in 1976. He began working with a Plaubel Makina camera in 1982, which led to an exhibition with William Eggleston at the Arnolfini in Bristol in 1984. Fraser went on to travel to the USA in the same year, spending nearly two months with William Eggleston. It was during this time that he decided to commit his life’s energies to exploring the expressive possibilities of colour photography.

Fraser was shortlisted for the International Citibank Photography Prize in 2004, and in 2014 awarded an Honorary Fellowship by the Royal Photographic Society. He has exhibited internationally for nearly 40 years, with notable solo exhibitions held at the Photographers’ Gallery, London in 2002, PhotoEspana 2017, Camden Art Centre 2018, and Tate St Ives, which was the first Tate Retrospective for a living British Photographer in 2013 accompanied by a major Tate Monograph.

Recent major exhibitions include Mathematics, Photo Espana, Madrid 2017, and at Camden Arts Centre, London in 2018. In 2021 he received a Pollock Krasner Foundation Award to make new work across Europe in a time of increasing anxiety and apprehension for the future, and has been photographing in Germany, France, Spain, Portugal, Crete and Estonia for this series. He has had 12 books of his work published since 1988, referenced on his website. His works are held in many public collections including the Arts Council of England, Tate, London, the British Council, Fondation A Stichting, Bruxelles, Mast Foundation, Bologna, Yale Centre for British Art, USA and Private Collections worldwide.

https://www.peterfraser.net
INSTAGRAM peter_fraser9

Esther Hovers investigates how power, politics and control and exercised through urban planning and the use of public space in her artistic practice. She was trained as a photographer but creates installations in which photographs, drawings, text and film play an equal part.

Esther Hovers has exhibited at Aperture Foundation in New York City; Lianzhou Photo Festival in China; and Foam Photography Museum of Amsterdam, et al. Her work has been published in The New York Times; The Washington Post; M – Le Magazine du Monde and Wired, among other publications.

In 2019 Hovers was an artist-in-residence at NARS Foundation (The New York Art Residency and Studios) in Brooklyn, New York. She is currently based in the Netherlands.

https://estherhovers.com
INSTAGRAM estherhovers

David K. Ross and Rebecca Duclos (EKA Visiting Lecturers, MACA, Museum Studies) recently travelled across northern Ukraine to visit 8 arts schools in Lviv, Kharkiv and Kyiv. 

David will be showing images from this trip and discussing some of the pressing issues facing arts eduction in Ukraine at this moment.

On 20 October at 11.00 4th-year Art and Design PhD student Taavet Jansen will present his third doctoral project „Held in Human”.
Reviewers: Dr. Raivo Kelomees and Andrus Laansalu
Supervisor: Dr. Anu Allas

Public peer-review event will take place in the Zoom, please find the link to participate HERE (Meeting ID: 928 1284 1579, Passcode: 964549).
The event is held in Estonian.

“You enter the exhibition hall like a body cave, the actions only express treachery. One searches for a singular and all-determining meaning from within. No one wants to be dead, but one wants to touch the brain from the inside. Beauty no longer counts. Pain is not taken into account; the precision of repetition decides everything.”
Ene Mihkelson “Ahasveeruse uni” pg 110

“Held in Human” was a staged installation / durational performance that premiered during the SAAL Biennial festival on August 21st and lasted until September 13th, 2023, at the EKA Gallery in Tallinn and on the website human.elektron.art.

The artists aimed to create an environment where a person would feel safe and warm, like in a mother’s womb. They explored how to evoke this feeling using the “bare” gallery space and theater technical means. The artists’ desire was to foreground contemporary “intestines” and “vasculature” (web space, cables) that keep and nourish us in life, and connect us to each other. Thus, a “safety bubble” was created in the physical space where sound and lighting design, video installations, objects, and the augmented reality layer allowed spectators to spend time, find connections between different parts of the work, and co-create and perform its dramaturgy.

“Held in Human” allowed the audience to visit the physical space via a website, send messages there, and seek contact with visitors present. A visitor in the physical space could simultaneously be a mediator, an experiencer, or an online viewer. In this way, one could present imaginative images, memories, and thoughts to each other, give a voice to those far away, and be heard yourself. All world languages could be used. All messages entered on the website were saved in an augmented reality layer; everything whispered was recorded. The gallery had a live camera, which every visitor could access freely. At the end of each day, the artists asked the artificial intelligence to summarize all the messages in haiku form, combined with a single shot captured from the live camera – thus creating a collective diary of the time and people who participated and shaped this work. Additionally, the audience could stay updated via a WhatsApp group.

As much as the finished artwork, “Held in Human” embodied a concept, a model to be explored and played out with the audience. The artists spent 21 days in residence, parallelly with the audience and the artwork, observing people’s behavior and reactions and placing themselves in the audience’s role. The process was also followed and interpreted by two young actors. During the exhibition period, four performative special events took place – all to explore the potential future of such hybrid spaces.

Why is this important?

Jeanette Winterson writes in her book “12 Bytes” that we’ve reached a time where, due to digital technology and the web, the meaning of being human has changed. She writes: “… the uniting link between the operations of matter and abstract mental processes is to reimagine – completely – what we call ‘real.’ This reimagined ‘real’ will soon be what we call the world.”

Technological device connected to the digital network acts as an extra limb for humans, helping them to touch and perceive the world. The reality of the modern human is still perceived through the physical body. Yet, one is also constantly online and connected to every other body in the world, whose extension of reality is a screen or smart device.

The authors have devoted the last five years of their creation to reimagining and playing out this new “real”. They believe that art should keep pace with societal progress and be the field that shows the way to incorporate technology into our lives meaningfully. Instead of focusing on what we have lost, Taavet Jansen and Liis Vares are interested in what we have to gain in the future.

Authors, directors: Taavet Jansen, Liis Vares
Light designer: Jari Matsi
Sound and video designer: Taavet Jansen
Dramaturgs, choreographers: Liis Vares and AI
Performers: Germo Toonikus and Liisbeth Kala
Software developer and web designer: Kristjan Jansen
Producer: Kati Saarits
Photos: Alana Proosa, Xenia Kvitko
Co-producers: EKA, e⁻lektron

On October 25, as part of the EKA Ceramics 100, the lecture From Hand to Hand by professor Yukinori Yamamura, a multidisciplinary artist with Japanese ceramics education, will be held for a wider audience in room A-501.

The lecture is held in English.

Yukinori Yamamura is an artist born in Kobe, Japan in 1972 and a professor at the Osaka University of Art, who has gained fame and recognition both in Japan and on the international art scene with his prolific exhibition activities.

Yukinori Yamamura: “Up until now, I have visited and created works in various countries and regions, Norway, Finland, Estonia, America, Thailand, Iran, Kenya, Germany, South Korea, China. I have searched for matreials and expression methods based on the history and culture of the land, and through encounters and exhanges with people and with the help of many people, he have realized my works. I value the process and the diverse relationships and connections that are created through my works.”

On October 23, as part of EKA Ceramics 100, it will be possible to watch the 2020 documentary film 972 Breakdowns by Daniel von Rüdiger, which shows the 2.5-year trip on motorcycles through Siberia by five young artists (among whom Kaupo Holmberg, an alumnus of the ceramics department).

On the colorful journey, which starts in Germany and is planned to go through Georgia, Mongolia, Siberia and New York, Canada, the group also experiences many setbacks, which are overcome with the help of friendship, creativity and youthful enthusiasm.

The film is in English, German and Russian, with English subtitles. It lasted 110 minutes

Place: A-501, start at 17.00

On Thursday, October 19 at 18.00 Eva Weinmayr will talk about her practice and the social and political agency of artists’ publishing. Speaking from an intersectional feminist perspective the talk’s focus is not on the commodity genre “art publication”, but on the collective processes, exchanges, and relationships such critical publishing practices can enable.

The lecture will take place at the Contemporary Art Museum of Estonia (EKKM).

Eva Weinmayr conducts practice based research at the intersection of art, critical pedagogy and institutional analysis. In 2020 she published her doctoral thesis, titled Noun to Verb, on a MediaWiki. This research is concerned with the micro-politics of publishing and entangled notions of authorship from an intersectional, feminist perspective. (HDK-Valand, University of Gothenburg, SE)

As interims chair of faculty Art and Education at Munich Art Academy (2022-23) she co-initiated together with students kritilab, an open source platform for discrimination-critical teaching in the arts. From 2019 to 22 she co-led the EU-funded collective research and study programme “Teaching to Transgress Toolbox” inspired by US activist, teacher and theorist bell hooks (with erg, Brussels, BE). She is currently Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Postdigital Cultures, Coventry University (UK) with Ecologies of Dissemination​​​​​​, a collaboration with artist Femke Snelting seeking strategies for dissemination and a politics of re-use that acknowledge the tensions between feminist methodologies, decolonial knowledge practices and principles of Open Access (HDK-Valand, 2023-24).

Eva Weinmayr lectures widely and works with art and activist spaces (SALT Research Istanbul, MayDay Rooms London, Showroom London, Kunstverein München, Steirischer Herbst Graz) as well as established art institutions (National Art Gallery Warsaw, Contemporary Art Museum Saint Louis, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia Madrid, Biennale di Venezia).

Recent artistic research-based projects include “Teaching the Radical Catalog – a Syllabus” (2021-22, with Lucie Kolb), “Library of Inclusions and Omissions” (2016-20), “The Piracy Project” (2010-15, with Andrea Francke), AND Publishing (2010-ongoing, with Rosalie Schweiker).

Eva Weinmayr’s lecture is co-organized by MA Graphic Design and MA Contemporary Art programs.