Category: Departments

Exhibition “The Divergence From a Predefined Outline”
17.03–20.03.2022
Opening at March 16, 6 pm
ARS Art Factory, Studio 112

The art exhibition “The Divergence From a Predefined Outline” by Estonian Academy of Arts Graphic Design and Product Design 2nd year students will be opened on Wednesday, March 16 at 6 pm.

The joint exhibition of the two departments presents a series of works that were initially intended to be exhibited without any common theme or curation in mind. However, accompanied by the abrupt diversion from the European political timeline during the semester, a theme of mapping current temporal and spacial conditions became a perceivable focus point. Keywords such as information warfare, misinterpretation, indeterminacy and artificiality came to the fore. The planned cacophony leans toward a sense of wholeness or a palpable new understanding of the present time, which is represented by 11 artworks.

Participating artists: Ane Laande, Anita Elina Mürisep, Anna Kisseljova, Brigite Helena Sarapuu, Elisabeth Järve, Emma Reim, Gerli Tamm, Hanna Samantha Raidma, Helen Bender, Henry Markus Gregory, Ingrid Tärk, Katariina Kesküla, Katrin Kannu, Kaur Joonas Karu, Kelly Heleen Kaldra, Kertu Liisa Lepik, Laura Tursk, Lauren Teimann, Linda-Maria Varris, Magnus Harjak, Martin McLean, Nicole Winona Mikli, Rasmus Jurkatam, Steven Pikas

Graphic design by Emma Reim, Laura Tursk
Supervised by Sten Saarits

The exhibition is open on four days only (17.03–20.03)

Opening times 1pm – 6pm

Location: ARS Art Factory, Pärnu mnt 154, Tallinn

Special thanks: EKKM, Siim Sander Saar
Supported by Estonian Artists’ Association, Estonian Academy of Arts Faculty of Design

More info about events at ARS Art Factory: www.arsfactory.ee

Online discussion “Political emancipation of artistic practices in Ukraine” 

On 16 March at 18:00—20:00 EEST

The discussion will be live streamed on Facebook.

Join us for an online discussion, where artists, curators and researchers from Ukraine will talk about their works dealing with the entanglements of past and present, memory and cultural decolonization.

Participants: Svitlana Biedarieva, Lia Dostlieva and Andrii Dostliev, Nikolay Karabinovich, Olia Mykhailiuk, Lada Nakonechna, Kateryna Botanova.

Moderators: Ieva Astahovska and Linda Kaljundi

Since 24 February, the world has desparately followed the war started by Russian president Putin in Ukraine justifying his aggressive invasion of the neighboring country with the need to “defend itself”, “denazify” Ukraine and “protect people who have been subject to abuse and genocide by the regime in Kyiv”. In his hour-long televised speech announcing the attack, Putin manipulated notions of 20th century and especially WWII history, denied that Ukraine has ever had “real statehood,” and stated that the country was an integral part of Russia’s “own history, culture, and spiritual space.” The falsification of history used to invade an independent state, assert power, and justify his imperial megalomania, has suddenly transformed war in Europe from a thing of the past into an urgent catastrophe of unprecedented scale for millions of people in the 21st century.

The war in Ukraine began in 2014 with Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea, and subsequent invasion of eastern Ukraine. Already at that time, cultural resistance played an essential role alongside political protests. “What the artists did next to the barricades, sandwiches, hospitals, and Molotov cocktails was also a form of survival art, careful and scrupulous, often anonymous documentation of day-to-day activities. It was the art of action, of intervention in the physical and political reality to affect the symbolic one,” writes Ukrainian cultural critic, curator, and writer Kateryna Botanova. “Artistic practices engaged and laid the ground for a different kind of society based on a common fight and, at the same time, care and solidarity.”

After the Maidan Uprising (2013), many contemporary Ukrainian artists continued to work with difficult, debated and traumatic issues, among them searches for identity, memory wars, changing geopolitical affiliations, “documenting and empowering the voices of the other, telling the stories of those unseen and disempowered, articulating history not as a politically curated linear narrative serving the purpose of nation-building but as a layered and conflicting array of forgotten stories.” Collecting, accumulating, and articulating these issues of society’s blind spots, these artists have been building a critical mass of knowledge that are essential in building “a political nation capable of embracing multiple identities, on the foundations of traumatic experiences of the Soviet collectivity and post-Soviet aggressive individuality, colonial recasting of identities and post-colonial national take-over, Soviet totalitarianism and post-Soviet authoritarianism,” as Kateryna Botanova sums up.

The discussion is part of the project “Reflecting Post-Socialism through Postcolonialism in the Baltics”, which analyses the imprints of post-socialism and post-colonialism in the region. The programme is organized by the Latvian Center for Contemporary Art in Riga in collaboration with Kumu Art Museum, and it is curated by Ieva Astahovska and Linda Kaljundi.

The event is supported by the Nep4Dissent Research Network, an EU COST Action Association.

 ABSTRACTS AND PRESENTER BIOS

Olia Mykhailiuk, “rememberMINT”

“rememberMINT” is a subjective multidimensional collage of poetic lines, documentary interviews, and photo/video essays from Donechchyna and Luhanshchyna, and performance. It is an attempt to explore the mechanisms of memory. When there are no more words, movements remain. When movements stop — smell remains. When people die — grass sprouts.

Many people find it difficult to forget times of hardship. But my memory, with no effort made, does not return me to where it was scary. In August 2014, I happened to be in the occupied Alchevsk for a while. There grew a lot of mint in the yard. When the world narrowed down to one backyard… we brewed mint tea. Sometimes a sunbeam fell through the window in the ceiling into the glass cup. Mint helps some to calm down and reconcile with their own memories, while it helps others, those who tend to forget, to recall. But I do not aim to cure everyone. Everyone has his own grass.

Olia Mykhailiuk lives and works in Kyiv. In 2007, teamed up with other like-minded people and founded ArtPole Agency in order to unite artists working in various areas—painters, musicians, performers, writers. Developed the concepts and initiated several notable multidisciplinary projects, both Ukrainian and international. She continues to work on the development of interaction between various art disciplines, particularly performance, music, literature and video art. In performance, she often tries to study the primal senses of words by referring to her own system of emotional signs and symbols.

Lia Dostlieva and Andrii Dostliev

Cultural decolonisation in our practice

In our practice, we have been consistently working on establishing a discursive space that would enable the recontextualisation of cultural and historical processes in the context of the decolonisation of Ukrainian culture from the dominant external imperial narrative. We will show several examples of our works that use these optics while looking at the Ukrainian past and present.

Lia Dostlieva and Andrii Dostliev are artists from Ukraine, currently based in Poznań, Poland.

Lia is also cultural anthropologist and essayist. The primary areas of her research are trauma, post-memory and agency of vulnerable groups. She works in a wide range of media, including photography, installations and textile sculptures, and has exhibited her works in Germany, Italy, Ukraine, Poland, Austria and elsewhere.

Andrii is also photography researcher and curator. He has degrees in IT and Graphic Design. His primary areas of interest are memory, trauma and identity—both personal and collective. He works in various media and has exhibited his works in Ukraine, Poland, Austria, the Czech Republic and elsewhere.

Lada Nakonechna,
“Disciplined Vision”

“Disciplined Vision” is the title of an exhibition of Lada Nakonechna in the National Art Museum of Ukraine (NAMU). Looking at artifacts of the Socialist Realist tradition from the NAMU’s archives, library, and collection as testimony, it proposes examining the role of art in shaping judgments about history. For they are the shared aspect of culture that determines the present.
The paradox of the visual culture of the Soviet Union lies in the implicit violence in the affirmative, positive images that spring from general humanist values (emancipation, mutual respect, love for one’s native land, etc.). Expositions of Ukrainian Museums mainly continue chronological unfolding of the history of art that played a role in constructing unyielding logic of history. Disciplined Vision examines how the representation of Ukraine in Socialist Realist tradition still forms the consciousness of people.

Lada Nakonechna is an artist and researcher. In addition to her personal practice, she is involved in a number of group projects and collectives. She is a member of the R.E.P. group (since 2005), part of the curatorial and activist union Hudrada (since 2008), cofounder of Method Fund (2015) and co-curator of its educational and research programs. In 2016 she also joined the new editorial board of the Internet journal of art, literature and politics Prostory.net.ua. Nakonechna’s artworks, which often take the form of installations incorporating drawing, photographs and text, call attention to methods of recognition and reveal the internal aspects of visual and verbal structures. Her latest artistic investigations are based on artistic and archival materials related to the art of Socialist Realism—understood as a “method” and institutional and educational system. In 2014 she received the Kazimir Malevich Art Award.

Nikolay Karabinovych, “In the beginning there was the rhythm”

Brief history of Ukraine 1991–2021.

A few stories, few videos and 3 artworks.

Nikolay Karabinovych lives and works in Kyiv and Brussels. The artist works in a variety of media, including video, sound, text, and performance. In 2020 and 2018, he was awarded the first PinchukArtCentre Special Prize. From 2019 he is studying at the Higher Institute for Fine Arts (HISK) in Ghent. In 2017, Karabinovych was an assistant curator of the 5th Odessa Biennale. His work has been shown at M HKA, Antwerp, PinchukArtCentre Kyiv, Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center Moscow, Museum of Modern Art, Odessa.

Svitlana Biedarieva

Viewing postcolonial entanglements in Ukraine through Latin American lens: Beyond “At the Front Line”

My presentation will focus on linking points between Ukrainian and Mexican art scenes. It will explore the notions of ambiguity and hybridity in the two regional contexts and will take on two different models of colonial and decolonial processes. I will compare the questions of (post)memory, memory wars, violence, and historical trauma in the discussion of art projects.

Svitlana Biedarieva is an art historian, artist, and curator with an interest in Eastern European and Latin American art. Her edited books include “Contemporary Ukrainian and Baltic Art: Political and Social Perspectives, 1991–2021” (ibidem Press 2021), “At the Front Line. Ukrainian Art, 2013–2019 (Mexico City: Editorial 17, 2020, co-edited with Hanna Deikun). Biedarieva’s papers have been published by, among other outlets, Space and Culture (SAGE), Art Margins Online (MIT Press), and Revue Critique d’Art (University of Rennes 2). She obtained her PhD in History of Art from the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London, in 2020.

Kateryna Botanova is a Ukrainian cultural critic, curator, and writer based in Basel. She is a co-curator of CULTURESCAPES, Swiss multidisciplinary biennial, and is an editor of the critical anthologies that accompany each festival. She was a director of CSM/Foundation Center for Contemporary Art, in Kyiv, where, in 2010, she launched and edited Korydor, the online journal on contemporary culture. She has worked extensively with EU Eastern Partnership Culture Program and EUNIC Global as a consultant and expert. A member of PEN Ukraine, she publishes widely on art and culture.

Laura Kuusk on March 5 – 16 April in Kanal Gallery, Võru.

The first solo exhibition of Laura Kuusk in Võru consists of two of her recent works, with which the artist wishes to create a dialogue with people who are interested in food, clothes, technology and who ask questions about the origin and ways of being of the matter in our environment. She also puts the emphasis on the ways of composing by the nature and by the human. 

The installation “How to Move as a Slime Mold” (2021) is built up as a sound cocoon created by a female voice and an ambient sound, walking the visitor through his/her/ their bodies to suggest an experience of becoming an other-than-human organism. The participants are asked to find a comfortable way of interacting with the installation and build their personal experience through spatial and auditory elements. The installation emphasises the idea of reuse and growing through change, not accumulation.

The photo series “Some Notes on Things Around and In” (2019) is taking everyday things and situations as the departure point for the series of still-lives. The main question the artist is asking herself is how to relate to the things and the environment around us at the current situation. How to relate our bodies to the materials that travel with, within or through our bodies? The artist wishes to comment and organise these thoughts visually through an essay in the still life genre. She would like to make the objects speak about the moment in time in which we live now. The idea that everything seems to be reachable within a few clicks is creating an alienation from real objects and the physical environment.

Laura Kuusk (b. 1982) lives and works in Tallinn. She studied semiotics and culture theory at the Tartu University in Estonia (BA in 2005), photography at the Estonian Academy of Arts (MA in 2008) and fine arts at the Annecy Higher School of Art, France (postgraduate diploma in 2014). Kuusk works as the Associate Professor at the Estonian Academy of Arts, in the Department of Photography. Kuusk’s fields of interest are the visual and cinematic grammar and the potentials of narrative, she often recycles anthropological visual (found) materials. Kuusk is interested in the decision-making mechanisms within the collective consciousness. Over the last years, she has worked with the experience of the human body in the surrounding environment – in homes, in clothes, in relation to technology. Kuusk mainly uses photography, video and installation mediums in her work. 

Graphic designer Henri Kutsar.

Thanks: Estonian Cultural Endowment, Säsi Pruulikoda, Anderson’s Craft Beer, Camille Laurelli, Renzo van Steenbergen, Madis Kurss, Sigrid Liira, Agur Seim, Indrek Kits, Eleriin Seim, Kristel Onno, Janika Solmann, Edina Csüllög, Ago Paabusk, Tiina Mõttus, Robert Kähr, Contemporary Art Museum of Estonia, Estonian Academy of Arts Photography Department.

KANAL GALLERY
Liiva 11a, Võru city, Estonia
Thu–Sat 12–18
www.liivaate.ee
Facebook, Instagram @kanalgalerii

The upcoming Friday at 18hs, in an  online event, Yulia Zhiglova and Claudia Diaz Reyes will present “Vibmory: Touching Memories” 

Time travel is possible! We do it every day by recollecting past experiences in our minds. Can we also relive those moments and create new forms in the now to represent the past?

It is the outcome of the start.ee arts & science residency, organized by the HCI group at Tallinn University in collaboration with starts.eu.

On Facebook

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The weekly EKA International Workshop for Art Students in Narva ends with a flash exhibition “On the Other Side” by young artists from France, Lithuania, Finland and Estonia.
The exhibition can be viewed at the Narva Incubator at Linda 2 on Friday, March 4 from 6 pm to 11 pm. The master class was conducted by professors Ene-Liis Semper and Patrick Laffont de Lojo.

The city of Narva, located on the Russian-EU border, suffered greatly in the hostilities of the Second World War, and from there Narva’s identity is based on the knowledge that there is an invisible, lost city behind, under and inside the visible city. The border identity of the city has been associated for centuries with a meeting of different cultures and stories from the past, which can be read from the urban space. Some stories are hidden inside the buildings, some echo us on the other side of the river, from Ivangorod.

Narva is a friendly and open city – come and see what it looks like over here!

The master class in Narva took place within the framework of the international project ERASMUS (BIP). The master class was organized by the Visual Thought Laboratory of EKA in cooperation with the EnsAD (École nationale supérieure des Arts Décoratifs) in Paris, the University of Helsinki Uniarts and the Dailes Academy in Vilnius.

The last train back to Tallinn will leave on March 4 at 8.27 pm.

Many thanks for the help: Narva Vaba Lava, OÜ Linda Kaks, OÜ Narva Gate, Innovation and Creative Center Objekt, Allan Kaldoya and Jaanus Mick.

EKA Accessories and Bookbinding Department 105 jubilee exhibition ‘’Perspectives’’ is open from March 6th till March 31st @ Põhjala tehas gallery (Marati 5, Tallinn).

Together with works by students and alumni of the EKA Accessories and Bookbinding Department, the exhibition will feature works by the students from three visiting universities: Detroit College for Creative Studies, Designskolen Kolding and London College of Fashion.

The exhibition space, an abstract composition and a three-dimensional landscape, is created by the curator Helen Sirp.

The exhibition will also introduce other opportunities for professional higher education in Estonia in addition to EKA – Pallas University of Applied Sciences and University of Tartu Viljandi Culture Academy.

For more information about rest of the upcoming jubilee month events will be announced on our web and social media, click here:

https://www.instagram.com/eka_aksessuaar/

EKA Accessory and Bookbinding Department is inviting all the footwear design lovers to an open lecture “The Aki Method: Surviving as a Designer in Today’s World” on Thursday, 3rd of March at 4-5 p.m. to EKA, room A-101.

The lecture is about how to live a successful design life in a world full of challenges through Aki Choklat’s prism. He will share his history, philosophy and experience in the design industries including education. 

Aki Choklat is a fashion and footwear design professional with experience in all levels of the industry, from design to production. He is a Royal College of Art graduate, and the Founding Chair of Fashion Design Department at the College for Creative Studies in Detroit. He has held numerous positions with top-tier, international fashion labels, such as designing a capsule footwear collection for London-based menswear Diverso and consulted with numerous brands, such as Finnish footwear heritage brand Lahtiset. In addition, he directs his own London-based label of shoes, handbags and accessories. He helped establish and lead the footwear and accessories master program at Polimoda, Italy’s leading fashion school with Ferruccio Ferragamo at the helm, and has taught at the London College of Fashion and De Montfort University. Choklat is also a celebrated author of many design books, one of which – “Footwear Design” – is considered the authority on shoe design.

Aki Choklat’ veeb

Aki Choklat Instagram

CCS Fashiondesign Instagram

College for Creative Studies

This lecture is part of the EKA Accessories and Bookbinding Department jubilee exhibition and other event series.

Exhibition “Perspectives” is open from 6- 31st of March at Põhjala tehas Sepikoja gallery (Marati 5, Tallinn). Information about rest of the events will be updated in web and social media continuously: 

EKA aksessuaar 105

EKA aksessuaaridisain Instagram

The lecture is supported by the Estonian Cultural Endowment and the Baltic-American Freedom Foundation (BAFF).

Open lecture will be held in English without translation. 

The lecture will be recorded and it will be rerun on EKA TV.

Matthias Sildnik „Development Fever”
04—26.03
Opening: 04.03 at 5 pm

 Join us for the opening of „Development Fever“ by Matthias Sildnik on March 4, at 5 pm at EKA Gallery! The exhibition is part of the Art and Design PhD curriculum studies and runs until March 26. 

Our research results indicate that human consciousness is dysfunctional. Memory, perception and attention are setting limitations not only to the volume but also to the functions that the information contains. In addition, an even more troubling problem has emerged. A spectre of nationalism is lurking in the subconscious sections of the human psyche. Human consciousness is critical and paranoid. It doesn’t draw conclusions only from the proven facts. Speculation and critical analysis have become dangerous in the era of post-truth. We can only draw one conclusion if we take these threats seriously.

The evolutionary conditioned human mind has become a limiting factor for economic and political developments. Only radical innovation and revolutionary technology can tame the dangers of the human mind. If we could only bypass the consciousness, and feed relevant information directly to the executive parts of the brain. Disconnecting the psyche from executive autonomy is the utmost challenge. The consciousness would be isolated and will remain in the state of a passive observer. From there, it’s just a matter of fine-tuning and tying together the occasional loose ends. Do we identify parts in the brain from which the consciousness emerges and remove them? Or we could feed the consciousness with randomized noise such as entertainment, local newsfeed or audiobooks by Michel Foucault. Then they have time to think about “How to explain human nature to Foucault?”.”

But let us not get carried away by the future prospects. Neither technology nor political economy is advanced enough to achieve this during the next five years. At the time being our main strategy is to subvert and erode the evolutionary stratum of consciousness. We must use state of the art technologies, namely AI and social media to be successful at this. In addition, we need to mobilize the mass of young and underdeveloped individuals who possess incredible techno-revolutionary potential. This mass shall be empowered and organized by the neuro-pioneers movement. Neuropioneers are the developers of mind whose slogan shall be ”Deautonomize! Deorganize! Dementalize!”. Our main function during this period is the coordination and deployment of information and psychological operations. But we must not forget that only youth can accomplish the final denazification of the human mind.

PS

This cyber-bolshevist brainstorm belongs to the authors’ ongoing PhD artistic research project that probes similarities between technological capitalism and Leninism. Usually, digital developments are analyzed within the framework of criticism of capitalism. Nevertheless ideas such as digital Maoism (Jaron Lanier), Google Marxism (George Gilder), digital Gulag/Google archipelago, corporate socialism (Michael Rectenwald) and woke capitalism (Ross Douthat), describe tendencies within technological developments that are closer to socialist totalitarianism than to free-market economies. This exhibition consists of forms that emerge when these two opposing currents crossbreed and give life to an entirely new existence.

Matthias Sildnik (b. 1987) has graduated from the Installation and Sculpture department BA (2010) and MA (2014) at the Estonian Academy of Arts. His work has been exhibited in Estonia and abroad in solo and group shows. Sildnik studies the impact of high technology on daily life. He uses mediums such as digital graphics, statistical analysis and installation as dissociative synthesis environment. He is currently pursuing a PhD in Art and Design at the Estonian Academy of Arts.

Participate in the ongoing authors’ research and fill in the Working Environment Development form here:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSewxCqDpGXswDpm0CEPBpeywQiMlBceBKFq05Ry4MXXxwwFmg/viewform?vc=0&c=0&w=1&flr=0

Previous projects and methodological overview can be further explored here: https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/721404/800739

Between 28.02–6.3 an international master class “Expedition to Narva” will take place under the leadership of Ene-Liis Semper, Professor of Scenography at EKA, which will end with a pop-up exhibition on March 4.

The workshop will take place in cooperation with the good partners of EKA: Paris ENSAD, Helsinki Uniarts and Vilnius Academy of Arts. In addition to Ene-Liis Semper, the course will be supervised by Patrick Laffont de Lojo from ENSAD, in addition, the workshop will also be assisted by Maria Hansar, PhD students at EKA and Madlen Hirtentreu.

Ene-Liis Semper has commented the upcoming workshop as follows: “Narva is a town with a strange time shift. We are going to Narva, we are researching local conditions, we are working on site-specific installations or videos, we are making summaries and a pop-up exhibition at the Narva Estonian House.

The exhibition “Open Windows” will reopen on the windows of the Library of EKA on February 21, at 4 pm.

Through the exhibition of EKA windows, different specialities of EKA introduce their most outstanding projects and the latest creations of students. The exhibition can be viewed on the windows of the EKA Library on Põhja pst and Kotzebue streets and will remain open until March 14.

Specialities represented: Installation and Sculpture, Room Design, Product and Environmental design, Visual Communication, Photography, Jewellery and Blacksmithing, Scenography, Fashion Design, Textile Design, Accessory Design, Graphics, Graphic Design, Animation, Ceramics, Industrial and Digital Product Design, Glass, Architecture, Interior Design, Painting, Art and Visual Culture, Cultural Heritage and Conservation

The exhibition of open windows of EKA made its debut in 2021 and received a warm welcome from those interested in art and art education. The Estonian Academy of Arts, located on the edge of Kalamaja, will once again enliven the city’s cultural landscape at street level. Get with it!