Open Lectures

Open Lecture about closed systems by Lydia Kallipoliti

The next lecturer of the Open Lecture Series this autumn will be New York based Greek architect Lydia Kallipoliti – she investigates the architecture of closed worlds and asks, what is the power of shit. Kallipoliti will be stepping on the stage of the main auditorium of the new EKA building on the 19th of december at 6 pm.

Lydia Kallipoliti is an architect, engineer and scholar whose research focuses on the intersections of architecture, technology and environmental politics. She is an Assistant Professor at the Cooper Union in New York. She has also taught at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, where she directed the Master of Science Program, at Syracuse University, Columbia University [GSAPP] and Pratt Institute.

Her work has been published and exhibited widely including the Venice Biennial, the Istanbul Design Biennial, the Shenzhen Biennial, the Onassis Cultural Center, the Royal Academy of British Architects and the Storefront for Art and Architecture. She is the author of the awarded book The Architecture of Closed Worlds, Or, What is the Power of Shit (Lars Muller Publishers, 2018), the History of Ecological Design for Oxford English Encyclopedia of Environmental Science and the editor of EcoRedux, a special issue of Architectural Design magazine (AD, 2010). Kallipoliti holds a Diploma in Architecture and Engineering from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece, a Master of Science [SMArchS] in design and building technology from MIT and a PhD in history and theory of architecture from Princeton University. She is the principal of ANAcycle thinktank, which has been named leading innovator in sustainable design in Build’s 2019 awards.

In her lecture, Kallipoliti will explore a genealogy of contained microcosms with the ambition to replicate the earth in its totality; a series of living experiments that forge a synthetic naturalism, where the laws of nature and metabolism are displaced from the domain of wilderness to the domain of cities and buildings. Beyond technical concerns, closed worlds distill architectural concerns related to habitation: first an integrated structure where humans, their physiology of ingestion and excretion, become combustion devices, tied to the system with umbilical cords; second, closed worlds are giant stomachs; they are inhabitable machines that digest resources and are sometimes disobedient; at times they digest, while at other times they vomit.

The Faculty of Architecture of the Estonian Academy of Arts has curated the Open Lectures on Architecture series since 2012 – each year, a dozen architects, urbanists, both practicing as well as academics, introduce their work and field of research to the audience in Tallinn. All lectures are in English, free and open to everyone.

The series is funded by the Estonian Cultural Endowment.

Curators: Sille Pihlak, Johan Tali

www.avatudloengud.ee
www.facebook.com/EKAarhitektuur/

More info:
E-mail: arhitektuur@artun.ee
Tel. +372 642 0071

The Faculty of Architecture of EKA is glad to ask you to join an open lecture by Malene Freudendal-Pedersen – a professor in urban planning at Aalborg University. In her lecture “Cities, Mobilities, Futures” she talks about planning the city keeping cycling in mind. Freudendal-Pedersen will be stepping on the stage of the main auditorium of the new EKA building on the 20th of November at 10 am. Lecture is free of charge and open to everyone.

Malene Freudendal-Pedersen is Professor in Urban Planning at Aalborg University and has a interdisciplinary background linking sociology, geography, urban planning and the sociology of technology.

Focus for her research is how mobilities frame and enable modern everyday life. How individuals experience, evaluate or describe their mobilities and what propels their actions is important to understand if we aim at more sustainable mobilities in the future. Specific transport modes have different values and importance in planning cities. Values or taken for granted knowledge about transport and mobilities produce path dependencies in everyday life mobilities that are also diffused into policy and planning systems. Her research addresses interrelations between social practice and transport modes and the role the for urban spaces and city life.

More info:
E-post: arhitektuur@artun.ee
Tel. +372 642 0071

The Inevitability of Urbanization: Open Lecture by Ross Exo Adams

The next lecturer of the Open Lecture Series this autumn will be London based architect, urbanist and historian Ross Exo Adams, who will talk about the inevitability of urbanization. Adams will be stepping on the stage of the main auditorium of the new EKA building on the 28th of November at 6 pm.

Ross Exo Adams is Assistant Professor and Co-Director of Architecture at Bard College. He is the author of Circulation and Urbanization (Sage, 2019) and has written widely on the intersections of architecture and urbanism with geographies and histories of power. His research has been supported by fellowships and grants from the Royal Institute of British Architects, The London Consortium, Iowa State University and The MacDowell Colony.

To speak about an urbanized planet today is at once to utter an unthinkable reality and to name the inevitability of a process we take to be rooted in the human condition itself. As we confront this situation today, we are met with questions of how we urbanize—sustainable urbanism, resilient urbanism, adaptation regimes, development as improvement, etc.—almost never asking why we must urbanize in the first place. In his talk, Adams argues that the inevitability of urbanization is based in part on the way in which we have historically overlooked the emergence of the urban itself, treating it instead as a natural outcome of human co-existence. By suggesting a genealogical account of the formation of this space-process in parallel to the rise of the modern state, its colonial outposts and the capitalist order it gave rise to, he attempts to open a space in which we might challenge the inevitability of an urban future. Now more than ever, as we confront endgame thresholds and the countless injustices of limitless growth, we need to find ways to ask: if not the urban, then what?

The Faculty of Architecture of the Estonian Academy of Arts has curated the Open Lectures on Architecture series since 2012 – each year, a dozen architects, urbanists, both practicing as well as academics, introduce their work and field of research to the audience in Tallinn. All lectures are in English, free and open to everyone.

The series is funded by the Estonian Cultural Endowment.

Curators: Sille Pihlak, Johan Tali

www.avatudloengud.ee
www.facebook.com/EKAarhitektuur/

More info:
Kadi Karine
E-mail: arhitektuur@artun.ee
Tel. +372 642 0071

Flo Kasearu (b. 1985) :

I was born in Soviet Union but grew up in Estonia. I studied painting (2004-2008) and photography (2008-2013) at the Estonian Academy of Arts.
In 2006-2007 I was an exchange student at the Rebecca Horn studio at Berlin University of the Arts, where I started doing performance and video art. I work and live in Flo Kasearu House Museum in Tallinn, Estonia.

The nature of my works is seasonal and explorative, in that each project begins as an open-ended game. No favourite theme or a medium. I am interested in grassroots level, private and public space, vertical vs horizontal relationships, monumental vs unstable. I value irony more than aesthetics. So far I have played with private and public space, freedom, economic depression, patriotism and nationalism, domestic violence…

More info: www.flokasearu.eu

The talk is in English and is part of the EKA Contemporary Art MA (MACA) programme’s public lecture series ART TALKS.

Everybody is welcome to join!

Aesthetics, spatial practices and the 1980s neoliberalization: Open Lecture by Helena Mattsson

The first lecturer of the Open Lecture Series this autumn will be Helena Mattsson, Professor in History and Theory at KTH School of Architecture. In her lecture The Politics of the Archive: Aesthetics, spatial practices and the 1980s neoliberalization, she sets the historical foundation for our neoliberal and capitalist cityscape. Mattsson will be stepping on the stage of the main auditorium of the new EKA building on the 7th of November at 6 pm.

Helena Mattsson is Professor in History and Theory of Architecture at KTH School of Architecture. She is the co-editor of Swedish Modernism: Architecture, Consumption, and the Welfare State and the forthcoming Neoliberalism on the Ground: Architecture and transformation from the 1960s to the present. She is a member of the editorial board of Journal of Architecture. Her research deals with the 20th century theory on welfare state architecture and contemporary architectural history with a special focus on the interdependency between politics, economy and spatial organizations. Another focus for the research is methods of historiography, and investigations into participatory history writing.

Today’s social and political landscape of the welfare state is in a period of radical transformation, a process often labeled as neoliberalization. The role architecture and spatial practices play in this landscape have radically changed, with the separation between spatial dimensions and the administrative state apparatus. This shift calls for new conceptualizations of architecture as a discipline and how it operates. Her lecture discusses the contemporary architectural history of neoliberalization and revisits the archives of the emerging constellations of spatial practices and politics in the 1980s.

The Faculty of Architecture of the Estonian Academy of Arts has curated the Open Lectures on Architecture series since 2012 – each year, a dozen architects, urbanists, both practicing as well as academics, introduce their work and field of research to the audience in Tallinn. All lectures are in English, free and open to everyone.

The series is funded by the Estonian Cultural Endowment.

Curators: Sille Pihlak, Johan Tali

www.avatudloengud.ee 
www.facebook.com/EKAarhitektuur/ 

The new honorary doctor of Estonian Academy of Arts, prof Reinhold Martin (Columbia University) will give an open lecture “Order and Disorder: On Knowledge, Society, and Architecture.”

Reinhold Martin about the lecture:
This talk will consider the interplay of order and disorder, mediated by architecture. Order, in the sense we will explore, makes the world knowable and governable, through the suppression, management, or containment of disorder, which includes entropy or breakdown as well as willful disruption. Architecture, as one of many media, rather than simply a representation or an instrument, operates topologically and epistemologically, arranging and rearranging insides and outsides, drawing and redrawing lines. The lines we will consider distribute forms of knowledge, and the things they seek to know and govern, simultaneously joining what they distinguish. To trace this, the talk will sketch one particular genealogical sequence through the design of campuses, both corporate and academic, beginning on the US side of the Cold War. The larger aim will be to rethink the problem of order and disorder at the intersection of knowledge, society, and architecture, with specific reference to the political economy of design as a will-to-order of its own.

The honorary doctor Griselda Pollock will give an open lecture “From Alain Resnais’s Van Gogh (1948) to Julian Schnabel’s At Eternity’s Gate (2018): Why are we still Loving Vincent (2017)?”

Griselda Pollock about the lecture:
“The first exhibition I ever saw, I think, was of the work of Vincent van Gogh in 1961. I forgot about that first encounter until 1990, when, at a conference on the centenary of his death, I delivered a deconstructionist paper tracing the construction of ‘Van Gogh’ over the twentieth century. My research into his exhibition history revealed that the show in Toronto in 1961 was part of a specific post-war series of exhibitions when VG’swork was sent around the world, ensuring this artist’s spectacular place in the twentieth century’s cultural imagination as ‘the modern artist’. I also realized that this buried memory of an exhibition visited in 1961 with my art-loving mother, who died three years later, may have been the unconscious prompt for my choice, in 1972, of Van Gogh as my PhD dissertation topic.

Over my fifty-years, I have struggled against ‘the myth of Van Gogh’ in many publications and exhibition projects. In this lecture, I will return to one of the earliest films made about the artist by French documentarist Alain Resnais in black and white in 1948 and to the animated film Loving Vincent and the American painter Julian Schnabel’s personal homage, At Eternity’s Gate. What are the different concepts of art and artist this mythic ‘Vincent’/’Van Gogh’ has mirrored? What are the art histories I have tried to create to challenge their potency, affect, and dangers? Why does this myth and image persist and entrance?”

Tuesday, 22nd of October at 17.00 the artist Anne Pöhlmann will hold a public presentation of her artistic practice in room A501 at the Estonian Academy of Arts.

Anne Pöhlmann (b.1978) is a Düsselforf based contemporary artist, who’s work reflects the ever-changing conditions of the medium of digital photography.

She researches, among other things, the influence of software formulating photographic images, as well as the way we see photographs on monitors. The material translation of digital images into photo prints is a conceptual matter in Anne Pöhlmann’s practice. Her photographs range from urban architecture and natural landscapes to portraits and abstract compositions. They manifest as architecture-related installations of posters or banners that she prints on textiles. In these installations, the architectural space functions both as a spatial screen and layout location.

More recently, Pöhlmann prints her photos on various materials, like silk or cotton. The prints are subsequently sewn together with other prints into photo-fabrics and often combined with vintage textiles from the artist collection.

In works such as Japan Room (2019), Anne Pöhlmann presents folded photographs and photo-fabrics as fluid architectural formations, where the printed image merges with its carrier. Parallel Anne Pöhlmann has developed photographic works that represent an artistically subjective approach to the documentation of works of art and exhibition architecture. The artist published the resulting photographic series or sequences in the form of photo essays. In 2012 together with Diango Hernández, she founded the artist platform Lonelyfingers. Her work has received several awards and has been shown internationally in solo and group exhibitions. From 2018 to 2019, she has held a position as a visiting professor for photography at Art Academy (HBK) Braunschweig, Germany. Before that, she worked as a visiting lecturer at Folkwang University of the Arts in Essen, Germany. She regularly participates in workshops, lectures, and conferences at various international institutions.

Anne Pöhlmann was invited to Tallinn on behalf of the Department of Photography of Estonian Academy of Arts. During 21.–25th of October, she is giving a workshop in the Photography Department.

The lecture is in English.

Facebook event: https://www.facebook.com/events/681705208987400/
For more info about Anne Pöhlmann: http://www.annepoehlmann.net/

Tomorrow, October 22nd at 6PM artists and graphic designers Josse Pyl, Eloise Harris and Jungmyung Lee will hold public presentations at the Department of Graphic Design room C305.

All presentations will be about their practice and projects.

Jungmyung Lee practices intimate relations between type design, typography, visual art, and writings through Jung-Lee Type Foundry (Amsterdam, NL) by exploring the life of typefaces and their emotions. She also publishes Real-Time Realist, which is a unique type specimen that experiments the aforementioned relations based on Wheel of Emotions.
http://jung-lee.nl

Eloise Harris is an independent graphic designer based in Berlin, collaborating with artists and institutions on a range of projects creating visual identities, art directing, designing for print, image making, and she quest teaches graphic design play at UE in Berlin. Before that, Eloise graduated from Werkplaats Typografie in Arnhem and LCC in London.
http://www.eloiseharris.com/

Josse Pyl lives and works in Amsterdam. He was an artist in residence (2017–2018) at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten (Amsterdam) and has completed a Master of Visual Arts (2014–2016) at Werkplaats Typografie (Arnhem) and a Master (2013-2014) and Bachelor (2010-2013) of Visual Arts at KASK School of Arts (Ghent). He recently had solo presentations at 019 (Ghent), Annet Gelink Gallery (Amsterdam) and the Brakkegrond (Amsterdam) and participated in group shows at Nest (The Hague), Dash Gallery (Kortrijk), The Belgium Biennial (Ghent) and Ljubljana Biennial of Graphic Arts (Ljubljana).
http://www.jossepyl.com/

Josse Pyl, Eloise Harris and Jungmyung Lee are invited to Tallinn on behalf of the Department of Graphic Design of Estonian Academy of Arts to give workshops at the department October 21 through 25.

Presentations will be in English.

Open Lecture by:
Rolf Hughes, Professor of Artistic Research, Estonian Academy of the Arts/Experimental Architecture Group, Newcastle University

&

Rachel Armstrong, Professor of Experimental Architecture, Experimental Architecture Group, Newcastle University

This lecture describes the framework and strategies for engaging an age of uncertainty through artistic and design-led research. The presentation will ask how we will be inhabiting and making spaces at times of radical change. Hughes and Armstrong will provide examples from architectural research, address the value of creating transdisciplinary networks, the role of the architectural thinker within such networks, and the need to protect the artistic integrity of goal-based research projects.

Rolf Hughes has been at the forefront of developments in artistic research in Scandinavia and Northern Europe from its inception. He is currently Director of Artistic Research for the Experimental Architecture Group at Newcastle University (UK), Visiting Professor for the Estonian Academy of the Arts and the Norwegian Artistic Research Programme. He has supervised and examined PhD dissertations across architecture, art, craft, design, photography and the performing arts since 2000, including for the Bartlett, University of Westminster, Middlesex University, KU Leuven, Royal Institute of Technology, Oslo School of Architecture, Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Stockholm University of the Arts, and elsewhere. He has published widely, and is in demand internationally as an expert on artistic research.

Rachel Armstrong is Professor of Experimental Architecture at the School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape, Newcastle University (UK). Her work explores how our buildings can incorporate some of the properties of living systems to become ‘living architectures’. She was coordinator for the FET Open Living Architecture project (April 2016-June 2019) and coordinates the EU Innovation Fund ALICE project. She is a Rising Waters II Fellow with the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation (April-May 2016) and a 2010 Senior TED Fellow. She is also a Member of the Hub for Biotechnology in the Built Environment at Newcastle University and Director and founder of the Experimental Architecture Group (EAG) whose work has been published and exhibited internationally.