Craft Studies Live Reading

On Tuesday, March 18th, we’re reading a series of writings by the EKA Craft Studies MA programme students.
All texts were composed through research, writing and editing supervised by Lieven Lahaye and Else Lagerspetz. The event takes place at the Craft Studies Krulli studio (Kopli 70a, II floor), from 18:00-20:00

There are 8 texts as part of the components required for graduation, reflecting on a diverse range of topics and approaches relevant to the students’ individual practices and the expanded field of design and craft, with links to the making and footwork-handwork-headwork relations.

Belongings

Written by Kati Saarits
This text is exploring local material culture history through the lens of industrial ceramics heritage, touching on questions of how sentimentality settles into material and how surroundings shape our perception of home.

Creature. Maker. Mire. 
Written by Alyona Movko-Mägi
Through the entanglement of organic and digital materiality Creature. Maker. Mire explores the bog as an archive — where bodies, landscapes, and crafts are preserved, transformed, and reinterpreted across time.

Reblow toolset
Written by Rait Lõhmus 
Reblow toolset examines ways to upgrade premade glass objects and explores the causes of devaluation and potential for revaluations.

Through the hammer, through the body

Written by Elias Sormanen
A deep look into the importance of skill in making, as seen through the craft of a metal hammerer.

Hääbuda, et taas tärgata.
Written by Juulia Aleksandra Mikson
A poetical observation of decay as an integral part of the cyclical process of life, while approaching it with acceptance and a sense of hope.

On Extractivism and Care for Landscapes:
From Mines to Mountains in the East of Estonia
Written by Hannah Segerkrantz
This text explores the post-industrial mountains of mining waste in the east of Estonia through questions about how we relate to our surroundings and their materiality.

Movement Matter. Embodied knowledge in material practices
Written by Iohan Figueroa
Series of dialogues between materials and the way we embody our practice, the importance of contact during the making process.

A Book of Mashed Potatoes
Written by Sofiya Babiy
A contemplation on shades of vanishing through photography, trees, cinema, land, time, death and family.

Artist Karl Joonas Alamaa and curator Mikk Lahesalu will lead three guided tours at the exhibition “Daily Play and Bread” at EKA Gallery:
– on Thursday, March 13 at 4 pm, in Estonian
– on Wednesday, March 19 at 4 pm, in English
– on Wednesday, March 19 at 5 pm, in Estonian

Participation is free of charge.

More info:
https://www.artun.ee/en/calendar/karl-joonas-alamaa-daily-play-and-bread-at-eka-gallery/

The 2025 Spring semester session of the Open Lectures ”City as novel ecosystem” focuses on landscape architecture and, more specifically, urban nature.

The lecture series is being put together by landscape architects Karin Bachmann, Merle Karro-Kalberg and Anna-Liisa Unt, who have co-founded and edited the landscape architecture magazine ÕU for 7 years and are currently leading the project “Curated Biodiversity”, which experiments with ways to make urban landscaping more diverse as an environment. Therefore, the open lectures in the spring will also turn their attention to the quality of the space between buildings and, using the speakers’ words and creations, show how to make the city more biodiverse and enjoyable and how people and other species that call the city their home can live in symbiosis.

The first lecture of the spring semester lecture series will take place on March 27 at 6:00 pm in the EKA large auditorium. Architects Justyna Dziedziejko and Magdalena Wnęk from the Polish landscape architecture firm TopoScape will take the stage with a lecture „Park on the Warsaw Uprising Mound – design development method”.

„The topic of this lecture is to discuss the design process we used in the creation of the ‘Park on the Warsaw Uprising Mound’. During the lecture we will discuss strategies aimed at creating a place-related design that supports biodiversity and closed cycle economy, we will define principles for typifying components that constitute the value of a place. The example of the park realises our postulation of an interdisciplinary design process, combining ideas based on the history of a place and nature. We will talk about the practical principles of information selection, interdisciplinary cooperation and guidelines for the construction phase of the park. The example of the Warsaw park shows how a degraded, abandoned and forgotten area, which is a post-industrial type space (brownfield), becomes a vibrant place again.”

The lectures are intended for all disciplines, not only for students and professionals in the field of architecture.

All lectures are held on Thursdays at 6 pm in the EKA main auditorium. All lectures are in English and free of charge.

Schedule of the Spring 2025 lectures:

March 27. Toposcape

April 3. Ingo Kowarik

April 10. Jan van Schaik

April 24. Taktyk

For those registered for optional subjects, the essay submission date is 12.05.2025.

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

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

www.avatudloengud.ee

The head of EKA Sculpture and Installation Department, Taavi Talve will open the exhibition “The Man who Fell Down on the Ground in His Head” at the ARS Showroom on March 6th.

Taavi Talve lives in Tallinn. He graduated from the Estonian Academy of Arts with a degree in sculpture. Since 2005, he has been involved in various collaborative projects and has also been involved in solo work.

ARS Showroom Gallery

6–28.03.2025
Mon–Fri 12–18

FEAST. Shared moments. 

Piret Hirv, Eve Margus, Erle Nemvalts, Taavi Teevet

Between the done and the undone, between the cooling forge and the warming skin, we gather—not as revellers, not as mourners, but as those who wait, as those who celebrate the passing of time.

The feast is not yet consumed, yet neither is it untouched. Hands have shaped these fragments of time, folded process into form, cast intention into weight and curve. Nothing is whole, and yet everything is full.

Each piece contains its own becoming — the long roads walked, the hesitations, the moment a choice cleaved one path from another.

To wear is to bear witness, to become part of what came before and what is yet to follow. The place matters, the moment matters — the object is a whisper in the silence before speech, a moment before something is revealed.

This is the nature of all things held and passed on, touched and released. We do not own, we do not keep. We pause here, at the edge of time’s turning, knowing the feast is both here and elsewhere, both now and then. The weight of all things rests lightly, just for this moment, before the silence breaks and we move on.

We come together. Everything might change. We come together. Everything might stay the same.

Opening days & hours:

Opening 12.03 (Wednesday) 19:00
13.03-14.03 (Thursday-Friday) 12:00 -18:00
15.03 (Saturday) 12:00 – 16:00

Exhibition supporters:

Estonian Cultural Endowment, Estonian National Culture Foundation

Bart Pushaw is Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of Tennessee in Chattanooga. His research, teaching, and curatorial work focus on Arctic and Baltic art histories.

Baltic actors played a critical role in the expansion of the Russian Empire across the Pacific. Starting in the eighteenth century, people from throughout the Russian Empire facilitated the invasion and occupation of Alaska Native homelands until the U.S. acquired “Russian America” in 1867. The imperial initimacies that entangled these edges of the Russian Empire — the Baltic Sea and the Bering Sea — also brought Alaska Native artworks and material culture to Estonia. Today, these objects remain in collections throughout the country. This talk explores the histories that made it possible for Alaska Native art to come to Estonia, and what futures might be possible as museums reconsider their role in rematriation.

Lecture is connected to the joint project of KUMU Art Museum and Estonian Academy of Arts Expedition: Estonian and Indigineity.

Lecture is held in cooperation with KUMU Art Museum and is funded by:

From 6 March, exhibition by artist and graphic designer Andrew Hill, titled “Scaled Views. Details from CCA Archive”, showcasing findings from the archive of Estonian Centre for Contemporary Art will be open at the library of Estonian Academy of Arts.

Influenced by his experience of working at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design library and archive, Andrew treated the CCA archive as material deposit and shaped his findings to be exhibited in various compositions of the A4 format. Therefore, the showcase focuses on rendering of scale and the indefinite potential of archival material and possible interpretation and not so much on reconstructing past events. In this exhibition, the focal point lies on the infrastructure of the exhibits, on the quotidien information carriers, which shape the material into a bureau aesthetic exposition.

Andrew Hill is an artist and graphic designer from Nova Scotia, Canada, currently based in Tallinn. He is a founder of the Halifax Art Book Fair and OTCHO, a periodical about fingerboarding. His work in public libraries and immigration archives informs his approach to publishing and organizing. He dreams of being illuminated by an Emeralite, next to a stack of yearbooks, sleeping in a banker’s box.

The exhibition is curated by Marika Agu from the Estonian Centre for Contemporary Art.

The exhibition will be open until 6 May 2025.

Karl Joonas Alamaa’s solo exhibition “Daily Play and Bread”
EKA Gallery 7.–30.03.2025
Open Tue–Sat 12–6pm Sun 12–4pm, free entry
Opening: 6.03.2025 at 6pm

Artist and designer Karl Joonas Alamaa is interested in personal and collective power — how the strength of individuals can oppose authority and politics. The exhibition is based on interviews with people from different parts of the world who have been forced to leave their home countries for various reasons. Working with archival materials and collecting personal stories, their works highlight the power of seemingly small actions to unite people and create social change.

“The basis of the research is the story of my great-aunt Leili, who was deported to Siberia during the Stalinist purges,” explains Alamaa. “In Siberia, Leili was sent to work in a birch forests. On another day of work, she carved her name and family details into the bark of a birch tree. Unexpectedly, that log reached the workshop where her father worked, and he happened to see it after a long time of separation.” This notion of hope amidst extreme repression raises critical questions about the nature of hope, resilience, and resistance in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds. How can individuals find hope in the most desperate situations? How do small, personal acts of resistance challenge the carefully designed power structures and contribute to broader social change?

The title of the exhibition is derived from the aphorism of the ancient Roman poet Juvenal “Give them bread and circuses and they will never revolt.” This refers to bread as a cross-cultural symbol, representing everyday well-being and basic needs as well as their use as a tool of oppression. The exhibition brings together textile sculptures and other interactive and playful works that explore memory and society, delving into the themes of finding hope and purpose in a world that often feels suffocating and restrictive.

Karl Joonas Alamaa (2000) has studied fashion at the Estonian Academy of Arts and costume design at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp. In their practice, they often engage with the notion of the mundane, exploring the potential of everyday phenomena and small actions to create change, working with historical archival materials, personal memories, and experiences. The exhibition has grown out of their master’s project, for which they have received the Mathilde Horlait-Dapsens Prize, the JAT Prize and the Future Proef Award.

Cheerful trio: Karl Joonas Alamaa, Linda Mai Kari, Mikk Lahesalu

Language editor: Olivia Soans

Lighting designer: Mikk-Mait Kivi

Technician: Erik Hõim

Graphic designer: Fatima-Ezzahra Khammas

Special thanks: Myriam Van Gucth, Esther Severi, Vaast Colson, Helena Kask, Martin Lahesalu, Visa Nurmi, Andres Alamaa, Siiri Alamaa, Peeter Kari, Asmus Soodla, Jim Wockenfuß, Lisette Sivard, Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp, Eesti Vabaõhumuuseum.

The exhibition is supported by Cultural Endowment of Estonia, Mathilde Horlait-Dapsens Foundation and Tallinn City.

Opening drinks from Põhjala Brewery.

See photos of the opening here.

Artist Karl Joonas Alamaa and curator Mikk Lahesalu will lead three guided tours at the exhibition “Daily Play and Bread” at EKA Gallery:
– on Thursday, March 13 at 4 pm, in Estonian
– on Wednesday, March 19 at 4 pm, in English
– on Wednesday, March 19 at 5 pm, in Estonian

Participation in the tours is free of charge.