Calendar

Opening of the exhibition Self-Portrait as a Dancer and a Revolutionary by Brit Pavelson and Cloe Jancis at Võru Showcase

The opening of the duo show entitled Self-Portrait as a Dancer and a Revolutionary by Brit Pavelson and Cloe Jancis will take place on 11 June at 5 pm at Võru Showcase. The exhibition playfully addresses topics such as women’s everyday roles and the spaces in which these roles are expressed. What are the roles that permeate through the definition of a parent, a partner and an artist? How can we best cope with the emotional states that different roles make us feel? Which domestic practices are considered “feminine” and what is their social or artistic value?

The title of the exhibition refers to a false citation by the anarchist activist, feminist, writer and teacher Emma Goldman (1869–1940), which has achieved mythical status today: “If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution.” The sentence refers to Goldman’s reaction when she was criticised for dancing joyfully at parties, arguing that agitators should not engage in such frivolous activities. Goldman’s quote is eloquent because many phenomena or common practices are still today called “feminine,” which aims to deem them of lower value. Following Goldman’s example, contemporary women’s rights activists should not choose between dancing and revolution, everyday joys and political activism, but they should instead find individual ways to intertwine these worlds, empower themselves and others, and shift values.

Curators: Brigit Arop and Sigrid Liira
Graphic design: Elisabeth Juusu

A bus starting from Tallinn and stopping also in Tartu will come to Võru on 12th of June. More info here (only in Estonian unfortunately).

The exhibition takes place in three cities during 2022, starting at the Galerie Showcase (Place aux Herbes, 38000) in Grenoble, France. In summer, the exhibition will arrive in Tallinn and Võru, Estonia.

The exhibition is open 24/7 and will remain open until 7 July.v Event on Facebook

Sponsors: The Cultural Endowment of Estonia, Võru City, Võru rannabangalo
Special thanks: Camille Laurelli, Laura Kuusk, Koit Randmäe, Silver Marge

Contact for information:
Brigit Arop
curator
+372 5621 6259
brigit.arop@artun.ee

Heleliis Hõim’s personal exhibition “The Mars Chronicles” in ARS Project Space

Opening on June 18 at 7 p.m.

Performance at 7:30 p.m.

The performance will feature music and soundscapes created by a group of vocalists led by Lauri Lesta and Kaie Sauga, inspired by the works exhibited at the exhibition.

The artist invites the viewer to relate to the planet Mars as a borrowed environment in order to gather thoughts of beliefs, isolation, limited thinking, and silence, right after a person has left.

The Chronicles of Mars draws parallels with science fiction, citing Ray Bradbury’s book of the same name. In a collection of short stories, Bradbury describes how a person wants to inhabit Mars, despite its inhabitants and advanced civilization. Mankind wants and demands more than they have. Or there was, because a polluted and war-torn planet is left behind.

The artist focuses on a collage of a kind of planned and then abandoned environment, on the basis of which it is possible to feel the thoughts of the deceased, the creation of the environment, beliefs, dreams.

The exhibition is supported by EAA, the Estonian Artists’ Union, the Estonian Cultural Endowment

Facebook event

The exhibition is open from 20.06 to 12.07.2022

Mon-Wed 12 – 18 / Sat – Sun 12-16

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

VENT SPACE Art fair +  Summer Market 6-10 July, Tallinn. Register now!

The event is open for everyone, who wishes to participate. International applicants are also very welcome (works for the Art Fair can be received by post)!

Opportunity to participate in one or both events. Participation possible by registration and filling a form in Drive until June, 20, 2022.

Photos and works should be submitted by mail until July, 1st (details explained in the rules). No comission applied. All sales revert to the artists.

SCHEDULE

Art Fair 6-10 JULY – submit 2-10 works. All works with the price of 15 EUR per piece.

Summer market 9-10 JULY – Bring and sell your art/craft/design/creation.

Location: 
Vabaduse väljak 6-8, 10146 Tallinn.

Registration

More info

See you at the ART FAIR SUMMER MARKET!

Team Vent Space 

Taming a Wild Tongue

Laura Cemin (IT/FI) and Bianca Hisse (BR/NO)

curated by Monika Charkowska (PL/DE)

8.–30.7.2022, EKA Gallery, Kotzebue 1, Tallinn

Opening: 8.07.2022, 4 pm

Referring to Gloria Anzaldúa’s notion of ‘wild tongue’ (Borderlands, 1987), the exhibition departs

from the questions: How to tame a wild tongue? How to carry a language? The verbs ‘taming’ and

‘carrying’ imply certain dynamics of permission and restriction of movement, and suggest the

entanglement between language and the body.

Through sculptural and audio elements, the exhibition explores the power of language and its

poetics. It delves into the notion of ‘tongue’ as an archive: the tongue as a muscle shaped by the

physical practice of moving/ talking, the tongue as a personal collection of the words that each of

us speaks, the tongue as a ‘cultured’ part of the body. It explores the practices of accent reduction

and speech therapy, tools widely used when ‘working on language’. It addresses accent as part of

our linguistic identity, but also something that defines access or restriction. It examines the weight

of different accents, their stigma, and what the process of adaptation to a new language can

generate in a body.

Laura Cemin (b. 1992, Italy) is an artist based in Helsinki, Finland. Her work, often presented in galleries and non-traditional performance spaces, brings together elements of performance, writing and temporality with the intention of challenging the boundaries between choreography and visual art. She graduated from Umeå Art Academy (SE) in 2019 and holds a degree in Ballet and Contemporary dance.

Bianca Hisse (b. 1994, São Paulo, Brazil) lives and works in Norway. From a double movement between choreography and visual arts, her work investigates how today’s societies are choreographed by globaal demands. She graduated from Kunstakademiet i Tromsø in 2019 and has a BA in Performing Arts from Pontificia Universidade Catolica de São Paulo (2016).

Monika Charkowska is a Polish-born researcher and curator based in Berlin (DE). Her current interests focus upon language, time relations and non-human ontologies. She studied in Toruń (PL), Freiburg (DE), Paris (FR) and Prague (CZ), and holds a MA degree in Art History, Philosophy and German Philology (with a focus on Modern German Literary History). She also works as a DaF-teacher (Teacher of German as a Foreign Language).

Graphic design: Kersti Heile

Cirrus Intensive on the coastline of Saaremaa Island 16-20 August, 2022 

Start your Autumn semester with a 5-day intensive on how to incorporate the principles of ecology and living system thinking into bio-integrated and -informed design processes. 

Coinciding with the season of seaweed foraging in Estonia, the intensive is embedded within the biosphere of Saaremaa Island, where algae and algae-derived materials can be explored in the broadest sense – from open-ended design speculation to hands-on craftsmanship. 

Upon completion of the intensive, you will: 

– have an overview of the emerging technologies in algae biology, biomass production, cultivation, harvesting, and extraction (on the example of a local seaweed industry and farm; 

– understand the impacts of their (design) decisions into the environment and the society; 

– be able to derive material-specific concepts and applications for algal biomasses. 

Part of a semester-long course originally developed as a MA-level studio at the Faculty of Design at Academy of Arts, Bio-integrated Design is co-led by the designers’ collective Studio Aine (Kärt Ojavee, Annika Kaldoja, Marie Vihmar), and equals to 3 ECTS. 

Applications to the intensive will be accepted on a rolling basis until 27 June 2022 (23:59 GMT+3). The number of IC participants is limited. 

No previous field knowledge is required. 

Participants´ travel and accommodation costs will be covered by the Nordic-Baltic network of Art and Design – Cirrus.

To apply for the intensive, please follow the link here