Ceramics’ Open Lecture: Yukinori Yamamura

On October 25, as part of the EKA Ceramics 100, the lecture From Hand to Hand by professor Yukinori Yamamura, a multidisciplinary artist with Japanese ceramics education, will be held for a wider audience in room A-501.

The lecture is held in English.

Yukinori Yamamura is an artist born in Kobe, Japan in 1972 and a professor at the Osaka University of Art, who has gained fame and recognition both in Japan and on the international art scene with his prolific exhibition activities.

Yukinori Yamamura: “Up until now, I have visited and created works in various countries and regions, Norway, Finland, Estonia, America, Thailand, Iran, Kenya, Germany, South Korea, China. I have searched for matreials and expression methods based on the history and culture of the land, and through encounters and exhanges with people and with the help of many people, he have realized my works. I value the process and the diverse relationships and connections that are created through my works.”

On October 23, as part of EKA Ceramics 100, it will be possible to watch the 2020 documentary film 972 Breakdowns by Daniel von Rüdiger, which shows the 2.5-year trip on motorcycles through Siberia by five young artists (among whom Kaupo Holmberg, an alumnus of the ceramics department).

On the colorful journey, which starts in Germany and is planned to go through Georgia, Mongolia, Siberia and New York, Canada, the group also experiences many setbacks, which are overcome with the help of friendship, creativity and youthful enthusiasm.

The film is in English, German and Russian, with English subtitles. It lasted 110 minutes

Place: A-501, start at 17.00

On Thursday, October 19 at 18.00 Eva Weinmayr will talk about her practice and the social and political agency of artists’ publishing. Speaking from an intersectional feminist perspective the talk’s focus is not on the commodity genre “art publication”, but on the collective processes, exchanges, and relationships such critical publishing practices can enable.

The lecture will take place at the Contemporary Art Museum of Estonia (EKKM).

Eva Weinmayr conducts practice based research at the intersection of art, critical pedagogy and institutional analysis. In 2020 she published her doctoral thesis, titled Noun to Verb, on a MediaWiki. This research is concerned with the micro-politics of publishing and entangled notions of authorship from an intersectional, feminist perspective. (HDK-Valand, University of Gothenburg, SE)

As interims chair of faculty Art and Education at Munich Art Academy (2022-23) she co-initiated together with students kritilab, an open source platform for discrimination-critical teaching in the arts. From 2019 to 22 she co-led the EU-funded collective research and study programme “Teaching to Transgress Toolbox” inspired by US activist, teacher and theorist bell hooks (with erg, Brussels, BE). She is currently Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Postdigital Cultures, Coventry University (UK) with Ecologies of Dissemination​​​​​​, a collaboration with artist Femke Snelting seeking strategies for dissemination and a politics of re-use that acknowledge the tensions between feminist methodologies, decolonial knowledge practices and principles of Open Access (HDK-Valand, 2023-24).

Eva Weinmayr lectures widely and works with art and activist spaces (SALT Research Istanbul, MayDay Rooms London, Showroom London, Kunstverein München, Steirischer Herbst Graz) as well as established art institutions (National Art Gallery Warsaw, Contemporary Art Museum Saint Louis, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia Madrid, Biennale di Venezia).

Recent artistic research-based projects include “Teaching the Radical Catalog – a Syllabus” (2021-22, with Lucie Kolb), “Library of Inclusions and Omissions” (2016-20), “The Piracy Project” (2010-15, with Andrea Francke), AND Publishing (2010-ongoing, with Rosalie Schweiker).

Eva Weinmayr’s lecture is co-organized by MA Graphic Design and MA Contemporary Art programs.

In autumn 2023, the open architectural lectures will take place under the title Mobile Masters. The theme brings architects and theorists to Tallinn, who analyse architecture’s flexibility and the mobile practices of architects, spatial designers and artists.

On October 26, at 6 pm Berlin-based architect, designer and carpenter Alexander Römer will be on the EKA main hall stage in Tallinn with the lecture Convivial Ground.

Alexander Römer initiated the international design-build network ConstructLab in 2012 as a member of the former EXYZT collective (2005–2013). ConstructLab is a laboratory for action research, constructive experimentation and interdisciplinary creation.

ConstructLab takes a dynamic approach to uniting concepts, realisation and activation of project situations. Breaking with traditional divisions of labour, the organisation engages a team of multitalented artists and designers – as well as sociologists, urban planners, graphic designers, film makers, photographers, curators, educators, and web developers – who carry the creative process from the drafting table into the field, enabling concept and design to respond to the possibilities and constraints posed by an environment, it’s people and utilisation.

Alexander introduces his lecture in the following words:

Construction is fundamentally a collaborative activity. In this talk, the collaborative aspects of construction processes are examined from different perspectives. In the design and planning process a lot of different expertise comes together, in the construction itself different trades are involved and during the construction there are situations where in sometimes very short moments, e.g. when straightening a roof truss, a lot of hands are needed. A planning and construction process is complex and can only succeed in teamwork. In addition, a broad community is created through participation processes in the building process, and through this participation, a community that cares about the building itself.

I would like to convey the community aspect of design-build processes by looking at our ConstructLab projects. In doing so, I draw on the content structure of the latest ConstructLab book Convivial Ground. Stories from a Spatial Practice (Jovis 2023, Editors: Joanne Pouzenc, Peter Zuiderwijk and Alexander Römer).

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The open lectures are intended for students and professionals of all disciplines, not just the field of architecture. All lectures take place in the large auditorium of EKA, are in English, free of charge and open to all interested parties. Be there!

Within the framework of a series of open lectures, the Department of Architecture and Urban Design of EKA brings to the audience in Tallinn every academic year about a dozen unique practitioners and valued theoreticians of the field. You can watch previous lectures  www.avatudloengud.ee

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

Curator: Gregor Taul

October 22th, 12–16 in Paljassaare.

More info in Urban Studies, Estonian Academy of Arts facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/urbantallinn

First year students of Urban Studies have spent half a semester exploring Paljassaare, the strip of land that takes one to the end of Tallinn, to the place where all the waste of the capital city ends up… and where all the high-flying visions of eco-city by the sea are waiting to be fulfilled.

On coming Sunday students will make an interim summary of their studio journey so far and are expecting everyone interested to join them on a four-hour walking trip through the peninsula’s pasts, present and futures, to discover and make sense of today’s Tallinn’s Wild West .

Exhibition How to be Here by the 3rd year students of the department of painting at the Estonian Academy of Arts will be opened in the hall of exhibitions in the library of the University of Tartu at 18:00 on Monday, October 16th, 2023.

Participating artists are: Karola Ainsar, Anaïs Dubois, Maria Hindreko, Liisa-Lota Jõeleht, Stanislav Alexander Mihheljus, Daria Morozova and Marc Léger Sauvageot 

All artworks exhibited at the current venue have been completed during this autumn, during the seven-week long studio practice. Therefore, this exhibition serves as a transient gesture of the present moment, reminding of a leaving a quick handwritten note to the audience while asking the question: how to be here. 

During the third year of their BA studies, students increasingly dedicate themselves to searching for their artist statement and unique style that often develops throughout years. These young artists are at the beginning of this journey. Even their paintings are simultaneously similar and different. While sharing the studio space, the artists share other things as well – they are influenced by common ideas, conversations and working hours. Even when seeking their individuality, the shared workspace connects them with each other. The inevitable solitude of a painter and the skill as well as the desire to cope with this solitude is something that they still have to experience in the future. 

The artist comment on their work as follows: 

Karola Ainsar: When I said that I desired to be away, I was already on the road. The field is endless, yet the rain has stopped and colours around me are entirely different than before. The gates take the shape of bridges and I want to know what’s there on the other side. I am already on my way. 

Anaïs Dubois: My purpose in painting is to create a world of my own where everything is possible. This world depicts different spaces like landscape and interior scenes that blend together to create an image. While working with the process of reappropriating my memories I create fragmented and colourful compositions in oil painting that question space and how we perceive it. 

Maria Hindreko: In my painting series I work with the means of collage. The starting point is the repetition of patterns and shapes as well as various contrasts: pink and green; geometric and ambiguous forms; spatiality and flatness; opacity and transparency. I depict these contrasting world with specific transitions characteristic of collages. 

Liisa-Lota Jõeleht: My works are inspired by risograph printing: in order to print photos, colour layers (blue, red, yellow and black) are separated and printed out in layers on top of each other. Small dots of colour blend thus creating new hues. When working on these paintings, I have been contemplating on how much so-called raw information could be included in an image that without any context won’t convey anything and leaving an abstract impression. I compare visuals with fossils where there is a trace of something specific, yet the image/object itself is absent. All we have is the knowledge about its existence. 

Alexander Stanislav Mihheljus: Sometimes you have to face the truth and accept that you don’t always have great ideas swimming around in your head. So, embrace what is given. The hay! 

Daria Morozova: My artwork “Language barrier” addresses the difficulties in expressing one’s emotions and thoughts, as well as the strong desire to communicate with the world either through one’s mother tongue or a foreign language. I often find it difficult to find the right words. I feel that every act of communication is inevietably distorted, words get stuck in your throat, get lost or misinterpreted so that you end up alone with these and your emotions. 

Marc Léger Sauvageot: In the painting series “Wrestle I” and “Wrestle II”, the underlying themes are the power of bodies, their mutual collisions and vulnerability. The artist uses bodies as a starting point to explore sexual identity and psychology while revealing the nuances of sensitivity and subconsious emotions. Various materials such as chalk primer, egg tempera and oil paint. 

Supervisor: Sirja-Liisa Eelma 

Technical support of the exhibition: Mihkel Ilus

Exhibition will be open until December 17, 2023.  

The hall of exhibitions in the library of the University of Tartu (Struve Street 1, Tartu) is open Mon-Fri 9–21, Sat-Sun 12–18. 

On Tuesday October 17th at 18:00, Noah Emanuel Morrison opens his first solo exhibition NNNNNNNNNNNN at Vent Space, Vabaduse väljak 6/8.

The exhibition is a part of Tallinn Photomonth’s satellite program.

Within this ongoing, site-specific body of work, he considers how and where racist language becomes camouflaged within the city. The exhibition draws attention to the contemporary phenomenon of the NGR/S/Z series of graffiti, present throughout Tallinn. Walking around as a Black, queer-identified individual, he has been deeply disturbed by these. Reactive and self-reflective, the exhibition veers from research-informed to quotidian in its interventions into Tallinn’s racialized public space.

The show’s central sculpture, Substrate, is a chimera of a fence in Tallinn, on which an early 1990’s graffiti, Neegrid Eestist Välja, was written. Amid the global fascist turn, the piece reflects on the stakes of reaction within the graffiti’s wake.

He will show documentation of his 2022 public performance, Harm’s Way, in which he recites an autobiographical narrative from his time in Tallinn at three sites of the NGR graffiti around his home. At the third of these sites, he attempts to interpret the graffiti’s meaning.

These pieces are accompanied by diaristic and self-reflective analogue image series and video works.

It will be open 12-19 every day through October 24th.

Noah Emanuel Morrison (b. 1995) is a lens-based artist from New York City, currently enrolled in the Masters of Contemporary Art program at the Estonian Academy of Arts and the Masters of Photography program at Aalto University. His practice centers on identity, belonging, and the construction of desire.

Graphic Design: Shubham Aggarwal
Project Assistant: Elias Kuulmann
Supported by: The Cultural Endowment of Estonia

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English landscape design, landscape art and the Anthropo(s)cenic (1750–1850)

On October 26th, the Institute of Art History and Visual Culture is hosting an open lecture by Frédéric Ogée.

The growing importance of ecological concerns and its transcription into the new discipline of eco-criticism have identified the first half of the 19th century as a possible starting point for the Anthropocene, a period when the profound effects of the two Industrial Revolutions could be felt and seen, when man’s imprint upon Nature became primordial, essential and irreversible.

With their new ‘landscape garden’ and the subsequent rise of picturesque tourism and landscape painting, the British developed a new, empirical exploration of man’s frictional inscription within Nature. The natural world seemed no longer considered as man’s ‘environment’, something peripheral surrounding man’s central presence, in their works Nature IS the center, and is somehow restored as the source of knowledge and truth. Yet this revolution is ambivalent when we know that the main patrons of these English landscapists were also the main actors of the industrial revolution and colonial expansionism, which consisted primarily in commodifying and ‘exploiting’ both nature and man.

Frédéric Ogée is Professor of British Literature and Art History at Université Paris Cité. His main publications include two collections of essays on English artist William Hogarth, as well as ‘Better in France’? The circulation of ideas across the Channel in the 18th century (Lewisburg, 2005), Diderot and European Culture (Oxford, 2006), J.M.W. Turner, Les Paysages absolus (Paris, 2010) and Jardins et Civilisations (Valenciennes, 2019). In 2006-07, he curated the first-ever exhibition of Hogarth for the Louvre. He is currently working on a series of monographs on 18th and 19th-century British artists – Thomas Lawrence, J.M.W. Turner, Thomas Gainsborough and William Hogarth – to be published by Cohen & Cohen (Paris). The first one, Thomas Lawrence – Le génie du portrait anglais came out in December 2022. The next one, on Turner, will be published in the fall of 2024. From 2014 to 2017 he was a member of Tate Britain’s Advisory Council, and since 2014 of the City of Paris Scientific Council. In 2018-19 he was a Kress Fellow in the Literature of Art at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts, and also a Neilson Professor at Smith College, Massachusetts. Next summer he will be a visiting lecturer in Beijing, at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, and the University of International Business and Economics.

The 17th conference from the series Studies in Contemporary Culture, dedicated to one of the key Estonian literary works from the transition era, Emil Tode’s groundbreaking novel Border State, will take place on October 16th, 2023, at the Writers’ House in Tallinn (Harju 1).

The conference is organized by the Research Group of Contemporary Estonian Culture (EKA KVI, TLÜ TÜHI and TÜ) in collaboration with the Estonian Writers’ Union, and funded by Estonian Research Council (grant PRG636), Cultural Endowment of Estonia and EKA’s Research Foundation.

Transform4Europe Open Dual Lecture: “Dissonant Heritage: Re-evaluating the Soviet Legacies”. 

On October 17, the Estonian Academy of Arts will organize an open conversation/ lecture with two speakers, where academic knowledge and practitioner are discussing about the dissonant heritage from the Soviet Legacies

The dual lecture will explore both local and transnational aspects of dissonant heritage in relation to Soviet legacies. Since Russia’s full-scale invasion on Ukraine in February 2022, Russian political behaviour, both in present and past, has been discussed across Europe and beyond as never before, including scrutinising Soviet and Russian-related heritage as one of the reactions to the aggression. This has resulted in creating new and opening up old conflicts between different communities. On the other hand, the situation gives a much needed opportunity for countries and memory groups to acknowledge their collective suppressed conflicts, provoking discussions that had been put on hold for decades. In this delicate process, transregional exchange of comparative experiences is substantial, paving the way for balanced discussions and cross-disciplinary expertise on heritage protection. 

On behalf of EKA – Anu Soojärv

Her field of research is Estonian monumental art in the Soviet era, focusing on the role of public monuments in identity formation of local communities. In her everyday work she is mapping and documenting public monuments and works of art from the perspective of preservation and data gathering. She is a doctoral student and a junior researcher in EKA at the department of Cultural Heritage and Conservation. 

You are invited to the Summer Hall (Suvesaal) of Maarjamäe Castle, doors open at 4:30 p.m. 

The event will be broadcast live on YouTube, but you can definitely have a more exciting discussion experience when you join us in Tallinn, at Maarjamäe!

NB! The event will be in English.