Open Lectures

What connects Toblerone to Bill Gates, waterbeds, orange juice, Coca-Cola, the Virgin Mary, and Immanuel Kant? Olof Olsson takes you on a mind-bending trip of comic infotainment.

Driving the Blues Away is an info comedy racing through the histories of art, chocolate, cola-drinks, personal computers, philosophy, and theology. Along the way there’s a romantic melodrama – where Olof’s almost partner is seduced by an ultra famous software entrepreneur in the tax-free shop of Delhi’s Indira Gandhi Airport. The whole thing is steeped in Olof’s twisted love of language: “Our language and the world are not always hooked up one-to-one. It’s a mess, and that makes us nervous. But it’s a funny mess.”

Olof Olsson is a product of the charter tourism of the 1960s. His Dutch catholic mother and Swedish social democrat father met on Mallorca. In his youth Olof made attempts in journalism, documentary photography, and as a radio disc jockey. After having studied languages, philosophy and translation theory, Olof studied visual art at Konstfack in Stockholm and the Royal Academy in Copenhagen. Between 1992 and 2007, Olof mainly made conceptual art. Since 2007, Olof has been focusing on spoken performances – like lectures, speeches, and info comedy.

Olof Olsson’s Driving the Blues info comedy will be in English and is part of the EKA Contemporary Art MA (MACA) programme’s public lecture series ART TALKS.

Everybody is welcome to join!

In Praise of Bad Architects: Open Lecture by Pippo Ciorra

The next lecturer of the Open Lecture Series this spring will be Rome-based architect, critic and professor Pippo Ciorra. Ciorra’s lecture will focus on the contribution given to architecture and especially to modern architecture by designers whose skill was not mainly focused in the exclusive relation with the drawing process and the construction expertise but more to be found in their attitude to conceptualize, politicize, push architecture towards new dimensions and new relations with society. Ciorra will be stepping on the stage of the main auditorium of the EKA building on the 5th of March at 6 pm.

Pippo Ciorra is since 2009 the senior curator for architecture at the MAXXI museum in Rome and longtime editor in chief of “Casabella”. Architect, critic and professor, member of the editorial board of “Casabella” from 1996 to 2012, he collaborates with journals, reviews and national press and is author of many essays and publications. In 2011 he has published an overview of the conditions of architecture in Italy, Senza architettura, le ragioni per una crisi (Laterza). Author of a number of books and, he’s published monographic studies on Ludovico Quaroni (Electa, 1989), Peter Eisenman (Electa, 1993), and then on museums, city, photography and contemporary Italian architecture. He teaches design and theory at SAAD (University of Camerino) and is the director of the international PhD program “Villard d’Honnecourt” (IUAV). He’s a member of CICA (International Committee of Architectural Critics), advisor for the award “Gold Medal of the Italian architecture”. He’s been chairing or participating to national and international design competitions. He has curated and designed exhibitions in Italy and abroad.

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

Open lecture is cancelled!

On March 16th at 17:00 a public lecture will be held in Estonian Academy of Arts on Late Soviet Modernism in Georgia by Nini Palavandishvili and Estonia by Laura Ingerpuu. The lecture is part of a study course “Understanding Late Soviet Modernism”. Both countries are rich of intriguing architectural masterpieces worth to be evaluated and protected.

NINI PALAVANDISHVILI is a passionate and erudite researcher of Georgian architecture and heritage, especially late soviet modernism. The focus of her research and curatorial projects lies in social and political contexts and their interpretation in the framework of cultural production and contemporary art. She cooperates with Blue Shield Georgia in the protection of heritage in Georgia.

LAURA INGERPUU is a PhD student of Estonian Academy of Arts. Her research field is the soviet modernist architecture in Estonia with an emphasis on the architecture of the collective farms.

Rumour and Justice: A Troubled Relationship

Rumours are “unconfirmed information” (Weingart 2006). Like images, they share a troubled relationship with law (see Vismann 2008) and justice. Since Virgil’s ancient epic Aeneid, “Fama” has been regarded as the allegory of both fame and rumour. Depicted as a trumpeting angel-monster with countless tongues and mouths, the figure is in urgent need of a gender critique. Unsurprisingly, Fama is an unwanted actor before court, for embodying hearsay and mediality.

In her public lecture, Lisa Stuckey philosophically addresses jurisdiction and “rumourological” (Ronell 1986) phenomena in contemporary art and culture. The legal-artistic engagements of Forensic Architecture will inform an exploration into how the political metaphor of the “leak” functions: where do forensic and poetic investigations into voids connect, where diverge? In this context, Stuckey also reflects the artistic-research methodology of her project Fama facing Trial: Words as Currency.

Lisa Stuckey is a media artist and cultural theorist. She is about to complete her doctoral thesis on contemporary art and jurisdiction at the Institute for Art Theory and Cultural Studies, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. She holds a MA in Art and Communication with emphasis on the History and Theory of Art and a MFA in Media Art. 2018/2019 she was Junior Fellow / Abroad of IFK International Research Center for Cultural Studies, through which she undertook research stays at the Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths College in London and at Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin. 2019/2020 she is associate member of the Graduiertenkolleg Configurations of Film at Goethe University Frankfurt.

More info: lisastuckey.net

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!

On February 21–22, 2020, the Estonian Academy of Arts will host an international symposium titled “Prisms of Silence”. The symposium seeks to analyse and understand the prisms through which we could meaningfully reconsider significant silences. A particular interest lies in rethinking the silences about WWII, its aftermath and the Soviet era in order to explore how they could offer productive ways of understanding present social change. The main organizers of the symposium are Dr Margaret Tali at the Institute of Art History and Visual Culture at the Estonian Academy of Arts, and Ieva Astahovska at the Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art. The symposium is a part of the collaborative project “Communicating Difficult Pasts” between the Institute of Art History and Visual Culture at EAA and the LCCA. The participants include humanities scholars, curators and artists: see the CFP.

“PRISMS OF SILENCE” SYMPOSIUM PROGRAM

Venue: Room A501, Estonian Academy of Arts,

Põhja puiestee 7, Tallinn

DAY 1: FRIDAY, 21 FEBRUARY 2020

9:00 – 9:10 Welcome by Mart Kalm, Rector of the Estonian Academy of Arts

9:10 – 9:30 Introduction to the Symposium by Margaret Tali and Ieva Astahovska 

9:30 – 11:00  Session 1: Absences, their Impacts and Memory Work, Moderated by Violeta Davoliūtė, Vilnius University

Asja Mandić, Suppression of Socialist Narratives of the Second World War and its Modes of Visual Representation

Annika Toots, Exhibition Displaced Time: 10 Photographs from Restricted Collections as a Model of Remembrance

Jan Miklas-Frankowski, A City of Amnesia: Marcin Kącki’s Białystok. White Power. Black Memory

11:00 – 11:30 Coffee break

11:30 – 13:00  Session 2: Difficult Knowledge and Artistic Interventions, Moderated by Ieva Astahovska

Margaret Tali, Thinking through Silence and Mental Health in Recent Documentary Film

Zuzanna Hertzberg, Nomadic Memory: Artivism as Everyday Feminist Antifascist Practice

Rasa Goštautaitė, Contested Soviet Legacy: The Case of the Petras Cvirka Monument in Vilnius, Lithuania

13:00 – 14:00  Lunch break

14:30 – 16:00  Guided tour in the Vabamu Museum, Toompea 8 (1,5 h)

16:30 – 18:30 Session 3: When Sources Fail: Visual Languages for Analysing Past Trauma, Moderated by Margaret Tali

Assel Kadyrkhanova, Image, Sound, Absence, Silence. Artmaking on Historical Trauma

Lia Dostlieva, “I still feel sorry when I throw away food – Grandma used to tell me stories about the Holodomor.”

Kai Ziegner, A History of Violence 

Aslan Goisum, Realms of Memory and Sources of Resistance

18:30 – 19:30 Dinner

SATURDAY, 22 FEBRUARY 2020 

9:30 – 10:15 Short keynote by Giedrė Jankevičiūtė, Reconstruction of Contested History: Vilnius, 1939-1949, Introduced by Margaret Tali

10:15 – 11:45 Session 4: The Unspeakable and Agency, Moderated by Eneken Laanes, Tallinn University

Katrina Black, Absence as Form: Spaces of Articulation in the Work of Chantal Akerman

Kati Roover, Project Red

Jaana Kokko, Oral History and Moving Image

11:45 – 12:15 Coffee break

12.15 – 13.45 Session 5: Patterns of Muting and Silencing, Moderated by Siobhan Kattago, University of Tartu

Franziska Link, Brawling Silences. Rereading Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s Écrits Maudits 

Mischa Twitchin, Refracting Implication: The Uses of Silence

Jan Matonoha, Dispositives of Silence: Injurious Attachments and Discursive Emergence of Silencing; “Missing” Gender in Czech Dissent Samizdat and Exile Literature

13:45 – 14:45 Lunch break

14:45 – 16:15 Session 6: Breaking Silences and Challenges to Changing Discourses, Moderated by Ilya Lensky, Director of the Museum “Jews in Latvia”

Shelley Hornstein, Architecture’s Dirty Little Secrets

Ieva Astahovska, On Collaborations, Silences and Lustration

Maayan Raveh, The Implication of Silence – The Promised Land in Palestinian Christian Theology

16:15 – 16:45 Coffee break

16:45 – 18:15 Session 7: There and Not There – Ways of Giving Voice to the Past, Moderated by Pille Runnel, Head of Research at Estonian National Museum

Elina Niiranen, Finnish Linguist Pertti Virtaranta and Silenced Identity of Karelians in the 1960’s Soviet Karelia

Paulina Pukytė, Repetition of Silence

Elisabeth Kovtiak, (Non-)sites of Memory of the Holocaust in Belarus: Cases of Minsk and Brest

18:15 – 18:45 Final discussion and conclusions

19:00 – 20:00 Dinner

Supporters of the symposium:

EKA LOOVKÄRG – Eesti visuaal- ja ruumikultuuri õppe- ja
teaduskeskus (Sisutegevuste projekt)
2014-2020.4.01.16-0045

Nordic Culture Point

Cultural Endowment of Estonia

EKA research fund

NEP4DISSENT: COST Action 16213

The War of the Ants: Architectures of the MTV Generation

The EKA Faculty of Architecture Open Lecture Series spring semester will kick off on Thursday 13 February with Stockholm-based architecture practice Secretary which consists of architects Karin Matz and Rutger Sjögrim and theorist/urban planner Helen Runting. In a present where architecture will have to do without stable categories, clear periodizations, and an indisputable sense of purpose, architects have to multi-task, operating across a range of different registers simultaneously. In their lecture in Tallinn, Secretary will use their own work with interior design, video and spatial installation, research and urban design in order to self-critically reflect on the obsessions, compulsions, ambitions, and failures of a generation of architects that came of age in a world on the cusp of digitalization. How could architectural design and theory help us to understand and visualize our data-drenched present? How could we cut through all the white noise?

Architecture practice Secretary is built on a shared interest in the capacity of architecture to facilitate a dignified life at the scale of the population. Secretary aims to produce buildings, exhibitions, research studies, and megastructures that give form to the late welfare state in the 21st century.

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

Benjamin Moua is a NYC-based designer, maker, and creative who strives to strike a balance between form, function, and the engineering of ideas into products and experiences that people will trust and love.​​ He has worked for major brands such as Reebok, Target, Adidas, Dick’s Sporting Goods, UNIQLO, Terramar Sports, New Balance and collaborated as a designer at the Boston Marathon, and the New York City Marathon.

His commitment to learning as both a professional and as a student, has allowed him the unique opportunity to stretch his interdisciplinary design experiences from Hardlines-to-Softlines goods, Color-to-Construction, Trend-to-Merchandising, and Print&Pattern-to-Production.

His uniquely expansive career, which started in fashion, has taken turns into consumable goods, high-performance protective gear, brand management, color theory/forecasting, and everything in between.

There are no projects too small or too big, and no questions left unturned, as he shares his insights on the key role designers serve as problem-solvers to the world’s unique creative challenges, and outlines why they are essential in addressing concepts such as ‘end-user experience’, ‘sustainability’, and ‘functional design’.

His lecture on the 31st January 2020 he will talk about identifying keys to success and will be a valuable experience for the students giving them insights and new perspectives in the world of design. 

Lecture will be about an hour long with a Q&A session after giving the audience a chance to learn the secrets of global fashion and accessories industry.

The experimental stop frame animation filmmaker Paul Bush will give three open lectures and will show his works next week from Wednesday to Friday in EKA.

Falling in Love with the Frame
On Wednesday, January 15th at 19:00-21:00 in EKA auditorium A101

“This talk will look at my passage from artist to experimental filmmaker and finally to animation director, and the pains and special pleasures of working frame by frame.”

The Art of Stupidity
On Thursday, January 16th at 17:30-18:30 in EKA room A302

“Pushkin wrote that poetry has to be a little bit stupid. On the eve of the UK leaving Europe this is the perfect moment to examine the British nation’s love of stupidity – for good or ill.”

In the Hinterland of Narrative
On Friday, January 17th at at 17:30-18:30 in EKA room A302

“An attempt to undermine all the rules for storytelling you may ever have heard and an exhortation to move into the unexplored territory of narrative.”

Paul Bush
Paul Bush is a filmmaker most well-known for experimental stop frame animation. He has made numerous short and medium length films including The Cows Drama (1984), His Comedy (1994), Rumour of True Things (1996), Furniture Poetry (1999), Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (2001) and While Darwin Sleeps (2004). He has won many awards and his films have been shown in festivals, cinemas, galleries and on television all round the world. Last year he had retrospective programmes in Taiwan, Brussels, Madrid, Bucharest and Lisbon. He has directed commercials and his clients include Philips and National Panasonic. He has written four feature length screenplays one of which he directed and was released in UK cinemas to critical acclaim in 2013.

He began teaching film in 1981 and established a film workshop in South London. He taught on the visual arts course at Goldsmiths between 1995 and 2001 and at the National Film and Television School since 2003. Bush has lectured, run workshops and tutored at numerous art and film courses around the world including Harvard, Luzern University, Centro Sperimentali di Cinematografia in Italy and The Animation Workshop in Denmark.

“Bush is part scavenger, part inventor. Nothing is out of bounds and everything is worth trying. This is what makes Bush’s work so welcoming; you never know what you’re in for but you know it will be smart, funny, provocative and unique.” (Chris Robinson – Director, Ottawa International Animation Festival)

The lectures will be in English.

The series of open lectures titled “International Inspiration”, co-organized by the Center for Contemporary Arts Estonia and the Institute of Art History and Visual Culture at the Estonian Academy of Arts, is proud to host our next guest, dr Anna Novikov.  On January 15th, she will give a lecture titled “Nation is the New Black: Patriotic Fashion and Performance in the Post-Communist States” at EKA, starting at 18:00 in the room A501. The lecture will focus on  the transnational revival of patriotic attire linked to patriotic performance that became fashionable in the Post-Communist states of Eastern-Central Europe and Central Asia in the last decade. Dr Novikov will examine visual and ideological links between media, dress, performance and the current development of patriotic fashion and performance in these areas.

The open lecture is followed by a seminar “”My Body is My Runestick and My Tattoos Tell My Story”: Performing Self-Barbarization in the Digital Age” held on January 16 in room A301, starting at 18:00. The seminar will focus on the broader trend in current popular culture of celebrating what the “civilized” Western cultural narrative has previously regarded as “barbarian”, and seeking to return to authenticity, albeit in reconstructed or borrowed forms.

Dr Anna Novikov, originally from Israel, lives and works in Greifswald in Germany, studying the broader sociopolitical context of fashion, including the recent rise in nationalism in Central and Eastern Europe, and its impact on the issues of fashion and identity.

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