Open Lectures

On Tuesday, March 14 at 17.30, Amsterdam-based artist Riet Wijnen will speak about her current research into the life and practice of painter and sculptor Saloua Raouda Choucair (1916–2017), one of the first abstract artists in Lebanon.

Choucair’s interests included genetic science, the infinite, the Arabic poetry form Qasida and Sufi philosophy. According to her, the Islamic rejection of the pictorial image led to the essential search for what one wanted to express, and was for her a fundamental way to understand Arabic intellectual thinking which she translated a.o. into abstract sculptures and paintings.

Wijnen visited the estate in Choucair’s last apartment in the Qatari neighbourhood in Beirut. There she was confronted by a large amount of works, photos and documents in French and Arabic, languages she does not speak, write nor read. This visit led to her development of non-linguistic research methods, an inquiry into how one might “speak nearby”* and position themselves in the work. Wijnen will share works and tools currently in development: a publication, sculptural dinnerware and a series of fermentation pots. These works will also feed into a fictional conversation with Choucair, which is part of a long term cycle, since 2015, titled Sixteen Conversations on Abstraction.
*Trinh T. Minh–ha

Riet Wijnen (b. 1988, Venray, NL, lives in Amsterdam) is an artist whose practice involves sculpture, photograms, text, woodcuts and more recently type design. She is interested in incomplete histories of abstraction, what and who are already registered in history, along with the known and unknown ways of making history. To do this, she looks to elders, and in her work hosts practitioners from the past and present who have been active in the field of art during early modernism, or in science, philosophy, education and activism. She brings the practitioners together in fictional conversations and sculptures to reconsider histories and better understand what comes next. Wijnen uses perception, language and organisational structures.

This research comes together in the cycle Sixteen Conversations on Abstraction (2015) and publications related to language and biographies of female identifying modernists that provide sources for Wijnen’s practice while functioning independently. Publications include: Saloua Raouda Choucair (2023), Homophone Dictionary (2019), Grace Crowley (2019), Abstraction Création: Art non-figuratif (reprint and translation) (2014) and Marlow Moss (2013).

Wijnen has had solo exhibitions at venues including Kunstverein Milano (2022), Manifold Books, Amsterdam (2019); Lumen Travo, Amsterdam (2018); P/////AKT, Amsterdam (2016) and Dolores, Ellen de Bruijne Projects, Amsterdam (2015). She was a resident at the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten (2017–18), the Van Doesburg Huis in Paris (2022), EKWC in Oisterwijk, NL (2023) and has participated in groups shows at, among others, SculptureCenter, New York; 21st Biennale of Sydney; John Hansard Gallery, Southampton; The Center for Contemporary Art & Culture at PNCA, Portland; Casco Art Institute: Working for the Commons, Utrecht; and Index – The Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation, Stockholm. Wijnen teaches in the Graphic Design and TXT department of the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, Amsterdam.
rietwijnen.nl

The lecture is in English. Riet Wijnen is in EKA to have tutorials with students from Contemporary Art MA and Graphic Design MA programs.

On March 22, at 18:00, Helmut Völter’s open lecture “Cloud Studies”  in auditorium A-501.

In this illustrated talk, Berlin-based artist and graphic designer, Helmut Völter, will speak in depth about two projects, Cloud Studies and The Movement of Clouds Around Mount Fuji.

As a research project, Cloud Studies has taken both book and exhibition form as it probes the field of scientific cloud photography. The book follows the history of cloud imagery from the Swiss Alps in the 19th century to the first weather satellite in 1960. The Movement of Clouds Around Mount Fuji traces the work of the Japanese physicist Masanao Abe, who set up an observatory near Mount Fuji in 1927 in order to observe and document the shapes and movements of the mountain’s clouds using film and photography.

Helmut Völter is visiting EKA as a guest lecturer with “Among Clouds”, a MACA workshop week course.

On March 9 at 6 pm, Marcel Smets will give the first lecture of the lecture series – The modern landscape of infrastructure.

As primary public investments in our societies are devoted to infrastructure, we need to consider roads, canals, railways, trams, cycle paths, etc., not merely as means of transport but rather as prime urban/ public spaces. For this reason, the lecture intends to sketch out how infrastructure design initially transformed from an architectural to an engineering project, and to clarify why this evolution is reversed today. Reviewing significant projects worldwide of recently implemented projects in transport infrastructure, it advances four important paradigms that dominate the landscape of infrastructure design today: 1. hiding its presence; 2. beautifying its form; 3. appreciating it as vehicle for urban improvement; 4. deploying it as the driving force for urbanization.

On Friday, March 10, at 11:30 am, will be Marcel Smets’ book “Foundations of Urban Design” (2022) launch and an open seminar with 4th-year architecture and urban planning students on the 4th floor of the atrium (A400) in EKA.

Everyone is welcome!

Marcel Smets is an architect and urbanist and emeritus professor of urban design at the University of Leuven. As academic, he taught urban design at the University of Leuven (B) and Harvard GSD. As urbanist, he was the head designer for certain important conversions: the Leuven Railway Station area, the Isle of Nantes, three complex nodes of the Antwerp Ring coverage project – and he directed fundamental projects for Brussels, Rouen, Genoa, Oporto, Conegliano. As scholar he published many articles (Archis, Casabella, Lotus, Planning Perspectives, Storia Urbana, Topos, Urbanisme and Urbanistica Etc.) and books: most recently The Landscape of Contemporary Infrastructure (2010–2016, with K. Shannon) and Foundations of Urban Design (2022). As public servant, he acted as spatial Advisor for the City of Leuven (1995–2001) and as Flemish State Architect (2005–2010).

Within the framework of a series of open lectures, the Department of Architecture and Urban Planning of EKA presents a dozen unique practitioners and valued theorists in the field in Tallinn every academic year.

The lectures are intended for all disciplines, not only for students and professionals in the field of architecture. All lectures take place in the large auditorium of EKA, are in English, free of charge.

The lecture series is supported by the Estonian Cultural Endowment.

Curated by Andres Ojari

www.avatudloengud.ee

https://www.facebook.com/EKAarhitektuur/

Thomas Eschenbach, development director of Priedemann Facade-Lab GmbH, will hold an open architecture lecture on energy-efficient facades in the EKA hall on March 9 at 4:00 pm.

The presentation of an engineer with 25 years of experience in the facade industry “Active Cavity Transition (ACT) Facade – transparency made energy-efficient” deals with effective solutions for modern building facades in all aspects. The architectural features of the facades, space efficiency, energy load, construction efficiency, lighting and temperature effects, as well as renovation solutions that a modern architect faces when designing, are under consideration.

ACT technology combines the advantages of traditional heat-retaining facades made of aluminum profiles with modern lighting, air exchange and temperature solutions in a new system that reduces investments and costs.

Priedemann Fasade-LAB is a competence center that participates in the development of non-traditional technologies and, together with research institutions and professional associations, guides the future of facade construction in practice.

The lecture is intended for architecture students and professionals. The lecture takes place in the large auditorium of EKA, is in English, free of charge and open to all interested parties.

This event will bring together current research on writing Ukrainian art history of the 20th century from scratch, since an art historical canon has not yet been produced for this period. Focusing on the Soviet and post-soviet eras, art historians Lizaveta German, Olga Balashova and Svitlana Biedarieva will present their ongoing research and reflect on how museums, exhibitions and artists have conceptualized these periods in art history writing until now. How has the National Art Museum of Ukraine—which is currently closed due to war—written and presented 20th-century Ukrainian art history? What can we learn from histories of exhibitions? What could parallels with other former post-Soviet countries, such as the Baltic States, contribute to revisiting this period? How is Ukraine to rewrite its art history after the war? Artist and researcher Andrij Bojarov will act as a respondent and Margaret Tali will moderate.This hybrid event will be hosted by the Institute of Art History in the Estonian Academy of Arts.

(Not) permanent exhibition at the National Art Museum of Ukraine

Olga Balashova

At the time of the gallery’s closure, the exhibition on the second floor of the National Art Museum in Kyiv was dedicated to 20th-century Ukrainian art. In the absence of a written history of art, we were always referring to this second floor for an up-to-date understanding of this history. Despite this influential role, however, the second-floor exhibition responded to the influence of external contexts, with the core museum team changing it three times during the past 20 years. The first non-Soviet exhibition had a strong national idea behind it, with a central narrative built around the Ukrainian Academy of Art, created in 1917 in the Ukrainian People’s Republic, and artists who were looking for peculiarities of the “Ukrainian style.” In the second exhibition, created after the Revolution of Dignity in 2014, the narration was more open for international interpretation, with a central focus on the avant-garde. The most recent change took place in 2020, just months before Covid-19 hit, with the narration dedicated to the idea of Modernism. The exhibition contained not only positive storytelling but also critical views of historical events and related art movements. After the war, the second-floor exhibition should change again. So far, it is difficult to say in which direction it will unfold, but it needs to include expertise from previous exhibitions and to consider the new post-war context.

We learn what we exhibit what we learn: Looking at art history from the perspective of exhibitions

Lizaveta German

Offering another perspective on how a particular art historical narrative can be (re)written, this presentation will focus on exhibition history as a method and elaborate on cases from two periods in Ukraine: the 1960s and the 1990s. Based on long-term research on both periods, Lizaveta will discuss how one can navigate through gaps in knowledge and lack of physical material, as well as how (and if) apocrypha can stimulate an alternative view of art history.

From this perspective, the former period—namely, the unofficial art of the so-called Ukrainian Sixtiers generation—can be roughly described as a period known through works which could never have been exhibited under the political circumstances of their time. Nor could they have been acquired for museum collections or entered the private art market, which generally didn’t exist in the USSR. As a result, monographic collections of the works of a number of the generation’s key artists have been well preserved in family estates and can be accessed for research. Yet, they have never been seen as subjects of a shared public discourse and have never been viewed as particles of the same space of artistic thought and vision by an external audience. While a good number of artworks from the 1990s—the period inaugurating the recent history of state independence—have long been scattered across anonymous public collections inside and outside Ukraine, others have physically disappeared due to their ephemeral nature or have remained beyond public and scholarly physical reach. Yet, there are somewhat chaotic but curious private documentary archives that cover the first curatorial endeavors to exhibit 1990s art in various non-institutional contexts. Today, this period can be interpreted through the way the art was presented rather than through the actual works.

Documenting Russia’s war on Ukraine in art, 2014–2022

Svitlana Biedarieva

The tensions related to the political changes and the war in Ukraine have provided an important background for a shift towards documentary practices in Ukrainian art after 2014, including film, video work, reportage, artist’s diaries and photography. The presentation will focus on the processes of documentation and creation of artistic archives following the beginning of the war through the full-scale invasion of Ukraine by Russia from 2014. The presentation explores the changes in documentation practices with the recent escalation of violence and the simultaneous transformation of artists’ perspectives on war atrocities, historical memory, trauma and decoloniality. The presentation draws on the interdisciplinary approaches of the film researcher Erika Balsom, the curator Okwui Enwezor and the artist Hito Steyerl to analyze the transformative role of documentary art as a form that emerges in a state of war-related violence and mirrors the effects of the political and economic crisis. It is based on research conducted for the book Contemporary Ukrainian and Baltic Art: Political and Social Perspectives, 1991–2021, edited by Biedarieva (ibidem Press, 2021). This recently published text is the first comparative volume to focus on the reflections of postcolonial transformation, contested history and resistance in Ukraine and the Baltic states (Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania), examining how these topics have been documented and interpreted in the art of these countries.

Olga Balashova is an art historian, curator and critic and the head of the Museum of Contemporary Art NGO in Kyiv.

Lizaveta German is a curator and art historian as well as a co-founder of The Naked Room, Kyiv, and co-curator of the Ukrainian Pavilion, 59th Venice Biennial.

Svitlana Biedarieva is an art historian with a focus on contemporary Ukrainian art, decoloniality and Russia’s war on Ukraine, and is the editor of Contemporary Ukrainian and Baltic Art: Political and Social Perspectives, 1991–2021(2021) and At the Front Line: Ukrainian Art, 2013–2019 (2020).

Andrij Bojarov is a Ukrainian Estonian visual artist, independent curator and researcher who has, from the early 2000s, focused on exploring neglected histories of avant-garde art in the central European context, expanding and blending artistic and curatorial work with research practices.

Margaret Tali is an art historian and co-initiator of the project Communicating Difficult Pasts, which has brought together scholars and artists to revisit the 20th-century past in the broader Baltic region.

Lizaveta German and Olga Balashova are currently visiting researchers at EKA with support of the Estonian Research Council.

Time: Wednesday, Dec 7 at 18:00

Place: A306, EKA

Mini-conference “Defining Public in the Space” will take place at the Estonian Academy of Arts on December 8th, 11 a.m. till 4 p.m.

The discussions will focus on the art in public space as a consideration of aesthetic and political decision-making and will discuss topics such as the responsibility of public space in shaping ethical values in society, the reflection of history, and the rights and freedom of author. Several international practitioners and experts in the field will give short presentations under the thematic blocks “Public Space as an Archive” and “Public Space and its Authors”.

The conference will take place within the framework of international collaborative project PARTGO. PARTGO is a joint programme of theoretical research and practical workshops between the Estonian Academy of Arts (EKA), the Dublin College of Art and Design (NCAD), the Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design (MOME) and the Turku Academy of Arts (TUAS) focusing on the educational aspects of teaching public art. The project started in 2018 and named conference is one of its final events.

www.partgo.eu

Conference will be held in English and live streamed in EKA TV www.tv.artun.ee

Public Space as an Archive 

Mini-presentations(10-15 min) of each speaker, followed by moderated discussion (1h)

11:00 opening words, Kirke Kangro
11:05 Andres Kurg – Maarjamäe: Two Ideologies of One Aesthetic
11:20 Linda Kaljundi – Museum Ethics in the Age of Decolonisation – Estonian and Eastern European perspectives
11:35 Marek Tamm – Lives and Afterlives of a Public Building: The Baltic Exchange
11:50-12:50 panel discussion, moderator Kirke Kangro

13:00-13:30 coffee break (30min)

Public Space and it’s Authors

13:30 Taavi Talve – Paldiski Project: Case Study
13:45 Villu Jaanisoo – Everything is Possible: Destruction and Eternal Life
14:00 Eglė Grėbliauskaitė – Let’s Not Forget Not to Remember
14:15 Yoko Alender – Urban Space and its Wounds
14:30-15:30 panel discussion, moderator Rebecca Duclos

EKA Animation department invites you to join us on Wednesday (23 Nov.) from 10:30 – 12:00 in our auditorium (A101) for an insightful lecture from world-famous animated film director Theodore Ushev.

Theodore Ushev is a Bulgarian-born Canadian filmmaker who has created some of the most iconic animated films of recent decades. At the meeting Ushev introduces his animated world and talks about his working methods.

Ushev latest feature film “Phi1.618” is going to get the international premiere at PÖFF 26 | Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival!

“Phi1.618” screenings at PÖFF

For more information about Theodore Ushev

Artist’s talk: Film and the Practice of Social Dreaming by Andrea Luka Zimmerman 22 November at 3.45 pm / Room A 403 

How we might resist being framed exclusively through class, gender, ability or disability, and even through geography… I will outline my working process, spanning over a decade, which contributes attention to the under-expressed intersection of public and private memory and itinerant lives, human and otherwise, often in relation to structural and political violence. Processes where radical encounters call for uncommon commons and futures, using filmmaking practice as a form of social dreaming.
Curator and event / film producer Gareth Evans will conclude the presentation by examining the various possible distribution and exhibition platforms for such work.

Andrea Luka Zimmerman is a filmmaker and artist whose engaged practice calls for a profound reimagining of the relationship between people, place and ecology. Focusing on marginalised individuals, communities and experience, her practice employs imaginative hybridity and narrative reframing, alongside reverie and a creative waywardness. Informed by suppressed histories, and alert to sources of radical hope, the work prioritises an enduring and equitable coexistence. Andrea’s feature length films have won numerous awards internationally. Andrea is Professor of Possible Film at Central Saint Martins.

www.fugitiveimages.org.uk 
https://linktr.ee/andrealukazimmerman

An open lecture and discussion on the possibilities of artistic research to approach socially complex and even conflicting questions through the practices of the curator and architectural researcher dr Ines Moreira and the media scholar dr Nico Carpentier.

Both of their artistic research travels to sites, which are related to non-beloved industrial heritage and memorialisation, feeding into the complex, sensitive and divisive debate with creative means.

The event is organised by the Design Faculty of the Estonian Academy of Arts and the museology working group of the Estonian National Museum. It is part of our collaboration over the sites in the European geographical fringes at COST Action EFAP working group 1 “Contexts”.

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Iconoclastic controversies: Arts-based research on the memorialization of the Cyprus Problem 

Nico Carpentier

The Cyprus Problem is a term that refers to a chain of armed conflicts, starting with the decolonial struggle of EOKA against the British, followed by the ethnonationalist violence after independence, then leading to the Turkish 1974 invasion and the division of the island. The cultural trauma that came out of these conflicts also had a very tangible translation through the production of a multitude of memorials and commemoration sites, on both sides of the divide. Using arts-based research, this nomadic research project offers a visual, theoretically-supported analysis of these memorials, how they often connect to (and strengthen) antagonistic nationalism, but also how—in rare cases—they offer counter-hegemonic possibilities by articulating a peace discourse. The analysis also juxtaposes the memorials from north and south, showing the uncanny similarities in how they both represent the Self and the Enemy-Other.

Nico Carpentier is Extraordinary Professor at Charles University (Prague, Czech Republic), Chief Research Fellow at Vilnius Gediminas Technical University (Lithuania) and President of the International Association for Media and Communication Research (2020-2024). His theoretical focus is on discourse theory, his research is situated in the relationship between communication, politics and culture, especially towards social domains as war & conflict, ideology, participation and democracy. His latest monographs are The Discursive-Material Knot: Cyprus in Conflict and Community Media Participation (2017, Peter Lang, New York) and Iconoclastic Controversies: A Photographic Inquiry into Antagonistic Nationalism (2021, Intellect, Bristol).

http://nicocarpentier.net/

Foto siin: http://www.nicocarpentier.net/temp/Nico.tif

Fieldwork in/on/through Non-beloved Heritage – curator’s notes from eastern and western European fringes

Inês Moreira (Lab2PT-UMinho, Portugal)

The year 2022 has been a period of rising tension and awareness on war, conflict and its consequences in Europe, and elsewhere. The sociopolitical and cultural situation has led us to look upon past events and to non-beloved legacies of conflict from the last century.

For some years I have been doing research and curatorial projects around postindustrial sites in Eastern and Western Europe, from Gdańsk to Ave Valley. Some sites embody the material and symbolic legacy of eastern political past, some encapsulate military and security secrecy – industry and the military systems have close articulation.

This talk shares field notes and some theoretical references collected in the last couple of years, which were devoted to fieldwork inquiry and to nomadic research around (what we perceive as) sites in the European geographical fringes. Focusing on ecologies, settlements, memorials and other symbolic and artistic legacies of military and post-socialist past, it is a modest visual and urban cultures contribution to address and relate to non-beloved heritage.

Bio:

Inês Moreira is a Principal Researcher in Visual Arts at Lab2PT-University of Minho, Portugal. She completed a Postdoctoral project at Universidade Nova de Lisboa (2016-2022) and created the research cluster Curating the Contemporary: on Architectures, Territories and Networks (2018-21). PhD in Curatorial/Knowledge (University of London), Master in Urban Culture (Universitat Politécnica de Catalunya/CCCB) and Architect (FAUP).

She is an active member of cultural and academic European projects, such as European Forum for Advanced Practices, and Press Here, a Living Archive of European Industry.

inesmoreira.org