Adrianus Kundert open lectur: New Crafts

Adrianus Kundert is a Dutch designer working on products and spatial design and is an enthusiastic basketry maker. Playfulness, experimentation and a delicate application of both colors and materials characterize his design language. His hands-on working method vouches for groundbreaking projects – materialized ideas twisting techniques into new crafts.

Adrianus: ”The projects I especially enjoy working on tend to push boundaries. Currently I am exploring the world of basketry and organizing my initiative Basketclub. Besides I work on product and spatial design for clients such as: Jongeriuslab, Susan Bijl, Crafts Council and Envisions.”

In this lecture Adrianus Kundert will take you on a journey through his working method, highlighting some projects that he worked on so far. With his playful and experimental approach Adrianus works on a very diverse range of projects within the scope of product design; all coming forth out of an hands-on making attitude while designing. The outcome of this process is often craft oriented, and tries to push the boundaries in an attempt to bring something new to these techniques. Recently he has been focussing on basketry, and in the lecture he will also explain more about his initiative Basketclub, that brings designers from around the world together on the theme of basketmaking. Finally, he will end the lecture by sharing his vision and what questions drive him while working on new designs.

The lecture is in English.

www.adrianuskundert.com

www.instagram.com/opblaashelicopter

https://www.instagram.com/_basketclub_/

The lecture is brought to you by EKA Accessories and Bookbinding Department

PhD VITAMIN 2023 – OPEN LECTURES AND CONSULTATIONS FOR DOCTORAL ASPIRANTS

On March 10,  PhD Vitamin will take place at the Estonian Academy of Arts, room A501.

PhD Vitamin aims to support and pave the way – and inspire artists with a research approach on their way to doctoral studies. The goal is to introduce artistic research and advise potential candidates for postgraduate studies in planning a doctoral thesis project. In a program consisting of public lectures and one-on-one consultations, artists and experts discuss their approach to artistic research and share individual advice.

Artists, designers, alumni of EKA and other creative universities, and graduate students interested in artistic research methods are invited to participate.

The event will be held in English.

To participate in a one-on-one consultation, please fill out the FORM.

A detailed consultation schedule will be sent to your email after registration. Be quick – the number of participants in consultations is limited!

In case of additional questions, please write to kati.saarits@artun.ee

PROGRAMME

10.03, Friday, room A501

11:30-12:00 Coffee and welcome

12:00-12:45 Jaana Kokko “Ideals and Practices”

12:45-13:30 Daniel Peltz “Rural Contextual Practice: Long-term, place-based research in a centre for Peripheral Study”

13:30-14.00 Taavet Jansen “Directing a hybrid event as practice-based research”

14:00-15:00 Moderated discussion: Daniel Peltz, Jaana Kokko, Taavet Jansen, Maarin Ektermann

15:00-15:30 break

15:30-18.15 Consultations with Daniel Peltz and Jaana Kokko

SPEAKERS:

Daniel Peltz is an artist and Professor of Time and Space Arts at the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts, Uniarts Helsinki. Prior to his professorship in Helsinki, Peltz served as Professor of Film/Animation/Video at the Rhode Island School of Design and co-founded the long-term, place-based, artistic-research project Rejmyre Art Lab’s Centre for Peripheral Studies, in Rejmyre, Sweden.

In his presentation “Rural Contextual Practice: Long-term, place-based research in a centre for Peripheral Study”, Peltz will provide an introduction to some of the strategies he has developed over the past 20 years of making works that emanate from engagements with specific communities and socio-cultural situations. The works intertwine multiple planes of existence from the ecological, to the social, to the financial, to the spiritual. There will be a particular focus on his epic, long-term engagement (going on 15 years) with the rural, glass-factory town of Rejmyre, Sweden. 

Jaana Kokko is an artist, filmmaker, educator and occasional curator based in Helsinki. In her artistic practice she is now in the search of the common: the emergent need for the change that is starting from our practices of art making, learning and being together. Her practice-based Phd project for the Aalto University is thinking the political together with Hannah Arendt and others.

She is and has been teaching and lecturing f.ex. at the Academy of Fine Arts, Helsinki, Turku Art Academy, Estonian Academy of Arts in Tallinn, Latvian Academy of Arts, Riga and Akademie der Bildende Künste, Nürnberg. Her work has been exhibited f.ex. at the Lithuanian National Gallery in Vilnius, Latvian National Museum of Art in Riga, Tallinn Art Hall, Helsinki Art Hall, Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Joensuu Art Museum in Finland, Bucharest International Experimental Film Festival, Tampere Film Festival and Tokyo Media Art Festival. 

www.jaanakokko.com

Taavet Jansen is a multidisciplinary artist specializing in dance, choreography, sound, and video. His current research focuses on creating immersive experiences for online art events. He is pursuing his doctoral degree at EKA and working on enhancing the elektron.art platform for online art events. His project promises to bring fresh perspectives to the digital creative sphere and contribute to the performing arts community.

Maarin Ektermann is an art worker, based in Tallinn, Estonia, who is working on intersections between contemporary art and more-or-less experimental education. Recent projects have included “Artists in Collections” (w M-A Talvistu, 2017 – ), re-imagining social rituals of the cultural field under RESKRIPT (w H. Hütt, 2019 – ), proposal for fair fee system for Estonian art scene (w A. Triisberg, 2019 – ) and since 2020 running a new educational platform proloogkool (“school of prologues”). On a daily basis she works  as a Head of Center for General Theory Subjects at Estonian Art Academy and teaches there courses on art history of 20th century, self-organized practices and on art criticism.

When you think about the phrase “beautiful legs’’, you may first associate it with the idea of something feminine and seductive, which reflections are secretly stored in our minds through advertising culture. What if the stereotypical and restrictive standards would turn into playful self-expression where feminine accessories could easily be worn by anyone, regardless of their gender identity? The photo is inspired by fashion photography and advertisements from the turn of the century and the last decades, using known symbols in a twisted manner.

The actors of Lunacharsky Drama Theatre have arrived in Tallinn! Let us introduce: The Christmas Boy, The Knight, Mr. Xavier and The Dog With a Man’s Body. The collage is composed of pictures taken in the 1970s which were found in a former military base.

Group exhibition “Ideations of the World”
Manufaktuuri 7, Uue Loomingu Maja (ULM)

Artists: Alyona Movko-Mägi, Ats Kruusing, Cloe Jancis, Kati Müüripeal, Lara Brener, Laura Liventaal, Maris Paal, Noah Emanuel Morrison, Samuel Lehikoinen, Zody Burke
Curator: Liisi Kõuhkna
Graphic design: Taylor Tex Tehan

Jaan Valsiner (2021) has written, that culture is a part of a person’s relationship with their self and the outside world. Due to psychological limitations, animals have to accept the fact of an experience as they are unable to enrich the experience with meaning. However, people cannot be satisfied with the fact that a bad experience has taken place. They feel the need to make sense of it – to give it meaning. If a car accident is explained as a coincidence, it does not sound too meaningful. By adding karma or sorcery as a justification for the event, one has enriched a personal experience with cultural significance. People are the creators of meanings, and the meanings they create frame their relationships with their surroundings. Art is a delusion, that speaks the truth (Picasso).

Open until 26.05
Sat-Thur 12 am–6 pm 

Installation and technical support: Estonian Fairs Centre, Valge Kuup Studio, Tallinn Art Hall

Artists: 

Laura Liventaal is an Estonian artist and filmmaker, who is interested in physicality, tactility, intimacy and uniqueness of an individual experience. Her work was last exhibited at the EKA Young Sculptor Award Exhibition at ARS Art Factory 17.02-05.03.2022.

Samuel Lehikoinen is on abstract and surreal painter from Finland. His last solo exhibition “Strange questions” took place in Helsinki, Malmitalo Center on 10.02-6.3.2022. His works are depicting dream states and obsessive thought patterns with repetition and sense of materiality.

Maris Paal is a painter, who has graduated from the Painting Department at Pallas University of Applied Sciences and received further education in Greece and Hungary. Her last exhibition with Brita Maripuu “Parallel Potentials” took place in Põhjala Tehas on 17.04-01.05.2022. 

Kati Müüripeal is an Estonian painter, who has participated in several group exhibitions since 2019. In her painting she depicts abstract magical realism. 

Cloe Jancis has studied photography at EKA. Her last exhibition took place at the Riga Photography Biennale on 21.05.2022 , where she represented Estonia with an artist Sigrid Viir.

Zody Burke is an American artist and musician. The last exhibition “Mousetrap. America eats it young ”took place at the DOM Gallery in Riga from 1.04-15.04.2022. In addition, on 17.02.2022 she participated in the EKA Young Sculptor Award Exhibition at the ARS Art Factory and won the silver medal.

Lara Brener is an artist and educator from São Paulo, Brazil. She is interested in building ambiguous narratives and spaces that could incite memories and projections. Her works are developed mostly by experimentations in text, photography, and graphic processes.

Noah Emanuel Morrison is an artist and a professional photographer from New York. The main art mediums used in his work are video, photography and text. He is interested in the topics of gender, nationality and origin, family and race.

Ats Kruusing is a master’s student at EKA, whose main art mediums are painting, photography and video. He participated in the EKA graduation festival TASE21. He is mostly interested in everyday rituals, relationships between space and the individual and modern masculinity and sexuality.

Alyona Movko-Mägi is an audiovisual and video artist studying at EKA. She creates installations and art with mixed media. The artist recreates her perception, revealing the inseparable connection between image and sound. She collaborates with directors, orchestras and theaters and works in the field of new media. 

The curator Liisi Kõuhkna is an art therapist and artist, who has graduated her BA (2014) and MA (2016) in art therapy at Tallinn University. She is currently studying jewellery and blacksmithing, curating in EKA.

Info:
Liisi Kõuhkna
liisi.kouhkna@artun.ee
+56665255 

Exhibition “Notes on Fashion and Gender” on the 4th floor of Estonian Academy of Arts on 14–16 May 2022.

Participants: Karl Martin Kelder, Hedy Kohv, Karolin Kärm, Maria Kristiin Peterson, Jentl Rietdij, Mairo Seire, Sanna Särekanno, Kirke Talu, Liis Tisler, Anni Vallsalu, Dana Lorên Vares

This Saturday, the exhibition Notes on Fashion and Gender, which is outcome of the course Fashion and Gender opens at the 4th floor of Estonian Academy of Arts. 11 students present their works that could be considered floating between the areas of fashion, design and contemporary art. The focus of the course was on fashion as visual communication and as embodied practice: how different embodied practises contribute to the creation and communication of gender and other identity-related categories (age, sexuality, ethnicity, social class), and how the prevailing notions of identity can be challenged. Shoes, a mask, a hat, bags, pants and other objects will be exhibited at the show.

Tutors of the course are Sten Ojavee from Estonian Center for Contemporary Art and Annamari Vänskä from Aalto University. Ojavee and Vänskä first collaboration took place in 2016 in the event VI Artishok biennale which was produced by CCA.

Tutors: Sten Ojavee, Annamari Vänskä (Aalto University)

Exhibition is open until 16 May 2022.

Estonian Academy of Arts, 4^th floor, Sat–Mon 08–23.

Seminar Likeness in Difference. Perspectives on Baltic Regional Art History 

Location: Estonian Academy of Arts, Kumu Art Museum
The working language at the seminar is English.

The seminar jointly organised by Estonian Academy of Arts and the Art Museum of Estonia brings together art researchers and curators from the three Baltic countries. The art history of the Soviet period serves as the point of departure for the seminar.

The regional, comparative, and international focus on an analysis of cultural practices and the respective institutional conditions establishes a basis for presentations on both shared and individual experiences, facilitates studying their causes and backgrounds, and helps to challenge the established narratives that we construct and reproduce about our own art histories and those of others.

The meanings and self-understanding of the Baltics as a geopolitical and cultural region have changed several times throughout history. In the field of culture, the frequent interaction between the three Baltic republics in the Soviet time was replaced by narratives of national independence in the 1990s. Because of the polarised world perception of the Cold War era, the three countries sought to define themselves through these narratives as part of either Eastern Europe or the West. Therefore, their interest in one another and the sense of shared regional characteristics remained in the background for quite some time. Nevertheless, the last few years have witnessed changes in several spheres (of culture), which have served as a launch pad for a more active and productive dialogue.

The two-day seminar has been divided into six panels. Topics vary from photography and studies of the heritage of women artists to analyses of Soviet exhibition activities and experimental art practices. Presentations will also deal with real and imaginary art collectives and pose future-oriented questions about potential trans-Baltic research topics, exhibition projects and new theoretical approaches that provide the necessary framework. The aim is to explore intersections between the participants’ research interests and activities, and to prepare a foundation for future cooperation projects.

‘Likeness in Difference – Perspectives on Baltic Regional Art History’
Digital Thesis PDF

More info + the programme

Event on Facebook

Public play event “Don´t lose, but let loose” will take place on 10th May 18-19 at EKA caffeteria hole (A100). 

And playground is open for the whole day.

This is part of course “Design for play”, which is led by Eva Liisa Kubinyi.

Until we play!

Difficult Pasts. Connected Worlds

With the beginning of Russia’s war in Ukraine, the past has returned in Eastern Europe, changing from something distant into a present-day disaster for millions of people. The invasion that started in 2014 with Crimea, Luhansk and Donetsk was often dismissed by the international community, but it has now grown into a situation that is affecting the whole world. This war hits Eastern Europe most alarmingly, reviving many silences, unhealed wounds and unprocessed memories of the totalitarian past.

We are used to thinking about past times through the lens of national histories, with their selective, smoothed and linear narrations, instead of the plural, messy and nonlinear stories shared in daily life. The difficult sides of these histories have often been neglected; instead, comforting stories are told that stress positive narratives and ways of overcoming challenges. This exhibition brings together difficult and often-silenced aspects of pasts that include violent conflicts, traumatic losses and their long-term legacies. The difficult pasts addressed here involve nationalist and communist regimes, recent warfare and histories of colonialism, the uneasy balances between modes of survival and collaboration and the ongoing specificities of post-soviet societies coping with the shadows of the past.

 Difficult Pasts. Connected Worlds includes works by artists from the three Baltic countries, Ukraine, Poland, Finland and the Netherlands. The experiences the works evoke are ones that are often forgotten or ignored, excluded from official histories. Artists included in the exhibition narrate those experiences through individual stories, while evoking broader layers of cultural memory. What is the place of these stories in the present? How could we integrate them in our understanding of history? What do they change in our perception of the world around us? Overcoming local and national borders, the exhibition calls for reflection on the relationships between difficult pasts and their impact today through the perspective of a shared history-opening dialogue, forging connections and foregrounding solidarities between the different difficult histories that are often perceived as incompatible or in competition with each other.

The exhibition was first shown in 2020 at the Latvian National Museum of Art in Riga, as part of Communicating Difficult Pasts, an international project which engages with the uncomfortable and often forgotten sides of history in order to understand their influences in the Baltic region and neighboring countries. The project has fostered collaboration and synergy between artists, curators and researchers who seek new approaches and means to study difficult legacies and to overcome their omission. The current exhibition is organized within the framework of the project From Complicated Past Towards Shared Futures, which is a collaboration between the Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art in Riga, the National Gallery of Art in Vilnius (Lithuanian National Museum of Art), OFF-Biennale in Budapest, Muzeum Sztuki in Lodz, and Malmö Art Museum. The project seeks to explore and communicate the entanglements of past and present, and is searching for new ways how art and culture can raise awareness of these issues for the wider public and influence current realities.

Curators: Ieva Astahovska, Margaret Tali, Eglė Mikalajūnė

Artists: Anastasia Sosunova, Eléonore de Montesquiou, Jaana Kokko, Laima Kreivytė, Lia Dostlieva & Andrii Dostliev, Matīss Gricmanis & Ona Juciūtė, Quinsy Gario & Mina Ouaouirst, Paulina Pukytė, Ülo Pikkov, Vika Eksta, Zuzanna Hertzberg

Exhibition design: Jonas Žukauskas

Graphic design: Alexey Murashko

Organized by: Latvian Center for Contemporary Art, National Gallery of Art (Lithuanian National Museum of Art)

The project is financed by Lithuanian Council for Culture

Supported by: European Union Programme “Creative Europe”, Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Latvia, Cultural Endowment of Estonia, Frame Contemporary Art Finland, Nordic Council of Ministers, Mondriaan Fund, Fundermax, Exterus

Media sponsor: lrytas.lt

“Soft Negotiations”
EKA (Estonian Academy Of Arts) Department of Textile Design
25/04/2022–15/05/2022

Vilnius Academy of Arts gallery “Artifex”,  Gaono g.1, Tue to Sun 12.00–18.00

The exhibition presents works by students and teaching staff of the Estonian Academy of Arts that investigate the all-encompassing role of textile design. Besides conventional roles, new hybrid forms emerge, presenting new knowledge in the context of artistic research. Emerging technological approaches are demonstrated, in which textile, interwoven with digital properties or technology at different levels, mediates collaborative processes in design of social interaction.

Just as the warp threads connect the weft, serving as a bridge for each other, this exhibition by the Department of Textile Design invites audiences to ponder the role of textile in today’s and future society. At the exhibition, the department presents contemporary trends that often straddle or meld with the boundaries of other disciplines. That in turn creates a new, multidisciplinary approach where textile can take very different forms: it can convey structure, idea, protest, message, self-expression, pattern or simply colour combination.

The exhibition has three conceptual threads, which intersect each other:
Textile as STATE(MENT)
#critical and conceptual practices
Textile as LAB
#experimental practice #flirting with science #biotextiles #new materials and structures
Textile as WELLBEING
#design that values the environment and well-being #sustainability #recycling #healthcare #social responsibility #therapy

Participants: Frank Abner, Arife Dila Demir, Katrin Kabun, Kadi Kibbermann, Mari-Triin Kirs, Kristi Kuusk + Ana Tajadura-Jiménez (Universidad Carlos III de Madrid) + Aleksander Väljamäe (University of Tartu), Krista Leesi, Kille- Ingeri Liivoja + Juulia Aleksandra Mikson, Greth-Ann Loog + Riina Samelselg + Anete Vihm, Nithikul Nimkulrat (OCAD UNIVERSITY), Marin Nooni, Maria Kristiin Peterson, Piret Roos + Liisa Torsus, Zane Shumeiko, Marie Vihmar + Sirje Sasi (TLU), Piret Valk, Varvara & Mar + Sebastian Mealla

Curators: Varvara Guljajeva (HKUST(GZ)), Kristel Laurits, EKA Department of Textile Design
Graphic design: Jesus Rodriguez Santos
Exhibition team: Kristi Kuusk, Varvara Guljajeva, Krista Leesi, Kadi Kibbermann, Piret Valk