Open Lecture: Neil Brownsword

Exhibition To Sense the Light, You Must Close Your Eyes, with the works of the painter Kristi Kongi and printmaker Mare Vint, opens in the large gallery of the Tartu Art House.

At first glance, the handwriting of these too very individual authors seems almost contradictory. Mare Vint’s metaphysical, nearly black-and-white landscapes demand that their discreet tension be quietly contemplated. Kristi Kongi, however, yanks the viewer into her endlessly colourful world, where deep dark tonal gradients are interspersed with pastel variations and, by including the space surrounding the works of art, she emphasises the comprehensive nature of her oeuvre.

But colour and its (almost complete) lack have something in common: light. Both artists have used it in their works directly and indirectly. Although light is a shared theme, they offer viewers different ways and opportunities to perceive it. As a result, a wandering rhythm of different times and places is created in the gallery, where colour and colourlessness start to highlight each other in unison.

The curator Peeter Talvistu proposed a joint exhibition to the artists way back in 2018 and both authors enthusiastically agreed. “For me, both of them have a similar immersive approach and I have never felt that their works would compete in the gallery space. Instead, I saw this as an experience where two sides would support each other. Unfortunately, Mare’s health deteriorated and she is no longer with us to shape the final outcome. Kristi, however, has had many years to contemplate Mare’s oeuvre and has been inspired to make new works and to compose the actual exhibition.”

Kristi Kongi (b 1985) has studied in the Tartu Art College and the Estonian Academy of Arts. She has been awarded the Sadolin Art Award (2013, currently the AkzoNobel Art Award), the Konrad Mägi Award (2017) and the Annual Award of the Visual and Applied Arts Endowment of the Cultural Endowment of Estonia (2021). During the period 2022–2024, she is one of the receivers of Estonia’s artist’s salary. Although Kongi has recently had exhibitions in Tartu in the Kogo Gallery, her works last appeared in the Tartu Art House in 2013.

Mare Vint (1942–2020) graduated from the Estonian State Art Institute as a glass artist but is primarily known as a printmaker and drawer. Besides the Kristjan Raud Award and the Fifth Class of the Order of The White Star, in 2019 she received the lifetime achievement award from the Visual and Applied Arts Endowment of the Cultural Endowment of Estonia. In 1987, she held a joint exhibition with Andres Tolts in the Tartu Art House.

The exhibition’s graphic design is by Tuuli Aule.

Thanks: Ahti Lill, Gristel Mänd, Cultural Endowment of Estonia, Akzo Nobel and Eventech.

The exhibition takes place in dialogue with the Kogo Gallery project “Laura Põld with Andres Tolts. Common Threads, Polar Bear and Elephant” (25.11.2022–28.01.2023, curator Šelda Puķīte). On 10 December at 3 pm a walk and talk between the artists and the curators will begin in the Kogo Gallery and conclude in the Tartu Art House.

“To Sense the Light, You Must Close Your Eyes” will remain open until 11 December.

On Friday, 11 November at 6 p.m. Erik Alalooga opens his solo exhibition “Liberated Machines” in the monumental gallery of Tartu Art House.

The artist invites everyone to bathe in an undulating sound array because the monumental gallery is filled with acoustic machines. Large and small, acoustic and amplified, soft and aggressive, fast and slow objects allow you to experience different sound patterns in an unlimited range of combinations.

The artist explains: “During the campaign to liberate the machines, we managed to give a new identity to ten car windscreen wiping engines and five disco ball engines. Never again will they have to perform the dull movements of scrubbing water droplets and bird droppings from the windshield or spinning a silly mirror ball for nights on end for the joy of sweaty and squirming bodies. Monotonous rhythms have been replaced by dynamic ones. Instead of direct or alternating current pulsating incessantly through the grooves, the machine beats in the unpredictable rhythms of a random generator. By forever abandoning the claustrophobia of an engine compartment or the loneliness of a night club ceiling, instead forming systems with their companions and creating kaleidoscopic rhythm patterns in order to dominate the space. Man is only an observer here.”

Erik Alalooga (b 1974) is a visual artist, performer, director, sound artist, teacher and cultural organiser living in Tallinn. He graduated the Estonian Academy of Arts (EKA) with a bachelor’s degree in sculpture and acquired a master’s degree in interdisciplinary arts. Since 2018, he has been studying at the Estonian Academy of Music and Theater doctoral studies. He has worked as an associate professor of the Interdisciplinary Art Department of EKA (2006–2010) and as the head of the Performing Arts Department (2010–2013). He currently works as the head of the EKA sculpture studio. Alalooga has presented exhibitions, performances and experimental concerts in Estonia, the Nordic and Baltic countries, Germany, Portugal, the Czech Republic, Russia, Switzerland, Austria, France, the USA, and Australia.

The exhibition is supported by the Cultural Endowment of Estonia.
The exhibition is open until 11 December.

Public seminar Arts, Crafts, Affects: Documenting HerStories and Worldbuilding at Estonian Academy of Arts and workshop by #FramedinBelarus

Participants: #FramedinBelarus (Rufina Bazlova and Sofia Tocar), Katrin Mayer, Mare Tralla

Discussant: Katrin Kivimaa

Organized by Margaret Tali (Estonian Academy of Arts) & Ulrike Gerhardt (University of Potsdam)

Pre-registration is required. Please register here

Introduction

Handi/crafts have made a visible and present return in contemporary art. Many artists have found their tools of expression in traditional media which require special training and skills that are often passed down through generations. Yet these manual ancestral techniques have complex connotations which can be pinned down to their specific purposes; these range from spiritual to communicative, ecological to existential, and last but not least, economic needs.

The area of handi/craft and textile studies has long been neglected and marginalized in art history writing. Yet textile art often has a strong conceptual and epistemic grounding and the use of crafts and old techniques brings to the fore new possibilities of resistance and alternative worldbuilding. In various Eastern European countries between the late 1960s and mid-1980s, many communities were formed around textile art, transforming the genre into an experimental, progressive, and community-feeding way of art making (Hock 2013). More recently, over the last decade, textile, quilting and embroidery techniques have seen a renaissance that urges us to rethink this research field as an increasingly intertwined and interdisciplinary terrain of art, design, material culture and handi/craft.

Feminist art historians have suggested that embroidery and related media have provided women with weapons of resistance, offering a potential challenge to the boundaries between high and low, gender and class relations, and their intersections with identity, race and diasporic memories (Parker 1984, Smith 2014, Plummer 2022). In this context, embodied herstory can be understood as women’s history embedded and encrypted in gendered techniques, textures and patterns, through which this historical knowledge is being carried, lived and transformed through generations, continents and local contexts.

This public seminar will bring together the experiences and research strategies of two artists, Mare Tralla (London / Tallinn) and Katrin Mayer (Düsseldorf / Berlin), as well as one collaborative craftivist project, #FramedinBelarus (Rufina Bazlova and Sofia Tocar, Prague). They will articulate relationships between embodied herstories and their chosen material forms. Furthermore, they will consider handi/craft as a channel of alternative communication that has long been used for transmitting women’s struggles and hardships in patriarchally structured and capitalist societies. Central questions of the public seminar are: How can we explain this return of traditional and transgenerational body-related techniques in art in the age of surveillance capitalism and diaspora? What kinds of affects do these techniques and materials channel and carry? How do they allow us to document and connect different feminist struggles, and bring together contemporary and historical resistances? In the context of this public seminar, art historians Margaret Tali (Tallinn) and Ulrike Gerhardt (Potsdam) are specifically interested in handi/craft as a newly interpreted tradition and as material labor and a means to express and communicate the unspeakable, including its capacity to raise new questions about international solidarity, acts of resistance and mental health, and to offer alternative worldbuilding practices.

On November 26^th a workshop by #FramedinBelarus will take place in collaboration with the Vabamu Museum of Occupations and Freedom in the framework of the seminar.

Mare Tralla is an Estonian queer-feminist interdisciplinary artist and activist living in London.

Katrin Mayer is an artist based in Berlin. Her approach is a type of archeology of knowledge, she takes up gender political histories of a place and translates them into spatial-material formulations.

Rufina Bazlova is a Belarusian artist who works with the traditional folk embroidery as a medium to depict socio-political issues.

Sofia Tocar is a curator and cultural manager who works on artivist collaborative projects and documentary films in the region of Central and Eastern Europe.

#FramedinBelarus is a social art project by Stitchit dedicated to political prisoners and organized by Stitchit art group. Stitchit was created in 2021 in Prague by Rufina Bazlova and Sofia Tocar, who invite different communities and individuals to join their creative process.

Katrin Kivimaa is an art historian, whose main areas of research are feminist art history, Estonian modern and contemporary art, historiography of Estonian art history, representation of women in art and visual culture.

Ulrike Gerhardt is a visual studies scholar with a focus on cultural memory practices in post-socialist art and artistic co-directress of the feminist video art platform D’EST.

Margaret Tali is an art historian and cultural theorist whose work deals with memory politics, art museums and curation of difficult histories in the Baltic context. She co-curates the project “Communicating Difficult Pasts”.

The event is supported by European Regional Development Fund, Estonian Academy of Arts and University of Potsdam.

Kaisa Maasik’s new solo exhibition The Human Sponge in the Age of Screens is open from Thursday, November 3, 2022 at the ARS Showroom Gallery. The new project dealing with the susceptibility of children and the way kids mimic everything they see and hear, brings together video footage filmed by kids themselves. The exhibition will remain open until November 29.

Something that the gathered material has in common is its influences from mass media, the mainstream film and music industry. From the 2000’s onwards, filming equipment like video, web, digital and phone cameras became more affordable. Ever since then, kids have had a way to record different re-enactments of what they see on screens. The artist adds: “The endless creativity, sincerity and enthusiasm of children in the work is amazing, but it’s clouded by the violence in most of the scenes. When mirroring their surroundings, kids have a way of showing us what society is like in general.”

Graphic design by Nora Pelšs

The exhibition is supported by the Cultural Endowment of Estonia and the Estonian Artists’ Association.

3.–29.11.2022
Mon–Fri 12–18, free entry
NB! The exhibition is exceptionally open on two Saturdays: 19.11 & 26.11 at 13–16
ARS Showroom gallery
ARS Art Factory
Pärnu mnt 154
11317 Tallinn
www.arsfactory.ee

More info:
Kaisa Maasik
kaisamaasik@gmail.com
5396 2524
https://fb.me/e/9IVyk3ha4

“Broken Forests” tells a story about the before and after of a deadly wildfire in Pedrogão Grande. It analyses the relation to land which seems to have started acting dangerously and unpredictably. The work is an answer to a trauma that comes from living on the Anthropocene post-apocalyptic landscape. It expresses worry, love and fear for a place which has been changed by eucalyptus plantations.

The works are casted into the first harvest of cork from Quercus Suber aka cork oak. Quercus Suber, unlike the introduced eucalyptus is native to Portugal and is one of the most resilient trees to the fire thanks to its bark. The hot melted metal puts the cork to yet another test.

The works presented here are the continuation of a graduation project in the Estonian Academy of Arts.

More info on Reverso web

The seminar “Michel Sittow in the North and South” will be held on Wednesday, November 23 at 16:00 in EKA room A101.
The seminar is held in English.

SPEAKERS:

Oskar Rojewski, University of Silesia in Katowice, University Rey Juan Carlos in Madrid
Michel Sittow’s service to Isabel of Castille (1492-1502) and Habsburgs (1505-1515)

Greta Koppel, Art Museum of Estonia
Michel Sittow in the North? Is there any material evidence to testify his artistic activities?

Anu Mänd, Tallinn University
Michel Sittow in the archival documents of Tallinn

Discussion on Michel Sittow’s legacy will follow.

The focus of the seminar is on the internationally renowned artist Michel Sittow (c. 1469–1525), who was born in Tallinn. Sittow, who was trained in the school of Netherlandish art in Bruges and worked in various European courts, was active as an artist in Tallinn for almost fifteen years. His person and works and the wider cultural context of their creation continue to be of interest to both researchers and the general public. One of the sequels to the extremely popular exhibition at the Kumu Art Museum and National Gallery of Art in Washington (2018) is the research and exhibition project of the Art Museum of Estonia and the Hälsingland Museum in Sweden “Michel Sittow in the North? Altarpieces in dialogue“. Oskar Rojewski, who is visiting EKA within the Transform4Europe partnership, is one of the speakers at the seminar.

Bika Rebek (Some Place Studio): Between Worlds

We are focusing on Berlin. What is being done in this city, which architecture offices operate in Berlin, what is being built and what is being thought about: the series of open architecture lectures of the EKA Faculty of Architecture will travel to the capital of Germany and one of the most colourful metropolises in Europe this fall, with architects from Berlin as guests.

On November 3, architect, educator and curator Bika Rebek, head and co-founder of the architecture studio Some Place Studio, will be making sense of Berlin in the EKA hall. The studio is engaged in the creation of sustainable spaces for diverse communities. Rebek’s work is defined by an expansive interest in contemporary issues of equity, sustainability and technology through the lens of architectural discourse. Some Place Studio operates mainly in Berlin, but also brings globally together architects, designers and strategists from around the world.

Warum Berlin?

According to the curator of the lecture program, Johan Tali, Berlin is loaded. On the one hand, due to its tragic past, the wounds of which have to be dealt with in the urban space until now. On the other hand, hundreds of communities with different cultures gather in Berlin, and the result is one of the largest cultural compotes in Europe.

The open lectures are intended for students and professionals of all disciplines – not just the field of architecture. All lectures take place in the large auditorium of EKA, are in English, free of charge and open to all interested parties.

Every academic year, the Department of Architecture and Urban Planning of EKA brings to the audience in Tallinn about a dozen unique practitioners and valued theoreticians of the field. You can watch previous years’ lectures on YouTube and www.avatudloengud.ee

The lecture series is supported by the Cultural Endowment of Estonia.

Curator: Johan Tali

On Wednesday, 26 October at 17:30, designer Linda van Deursen holds an open lecture at the EKA auditorium (A101).

Linda van Deursen is a graphic designer who works and lives in The Netherlands. Together with Armand Mevis she founded Mevis & van Deursen in 1987. Since then they have worked for cultural institutions such as Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, documenta 14, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, and have collaborated with artists on publications and exhibitions, such as Armin Linke, Yael Davids, and Aglaia Konrad.

Since 1990 she has taught graphic design at various institutions such as the Gerrit Rietveld Academie Amsterdam (where she also served as head of the graphic design department), Yale School of Art in New Haven and currently NLN at the Royal Academy of Arts in The Hague.

The talk is held in English.