Olof Olsson’s info comedy “Driving the Blues Away”

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

My limbs are gods,

I am entirely a god,

no part of me is without

a god.

My limbs guide me,

My flesh forges the paths for me,

The gods have been transformed into my body

Lill Volmer’s exhibition “My Limbs” will open on the 1st of March at 7pm in Vent Space. The exhibition will stay open until the 9th of March.
Volmer’s “My limbs” is part of a continuing making that was initiated in the autumn of 2019 in Lista, Southern Norway. Installations exhibited are a result of the obsessive act of twisting and binding. They emit a compulsiveness that creates tension in the material while relieving tension in the body. The book that comes with the exhibition serves as both an epilogue to the works, but perhaps also as a synopsis of the exhibition.

Opening times:

01.03 – 19:00 opening
02.03 – 14.00 – 20.00
03.03 – 13.00 – 19.00
04.03 – 14.00 – 19.00
05.03 – 14.00 – 19.00
06.03 – 14.00 – 19.00
07.03 – 12.00 – 19.00
08.03 – 14.00 – 19.00
09.03 – 14.00 – 19.00

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

As our lives are more and more digitally controlled, our bodies’ relationship to the environment has also changed in profound ways. Laura Kuusk’s solo exhibition “Dear Algorithm,” curated by Niekolaas Johannes Lekkerkerk, explores the productive tension between our desire to adapt and survive on the one hand, and our resistance to the logic of codes, on the other. 

The exhibition will be open from February 20 at the Tallinn Art Hall Gallery. 

The exhibition Dear Algorithm, will be staged as a choreography of everyday movements: the window display becomes a shop front for hybrid-organic clothing sculptures, the gallery attendant simultaneously serves as perception manager, a library section will give further instructions on subverting social expectations, conditioning principles and behavioral patterns, a video installation presents three nonhuman actors that aim to grapple with and relate to human working environments, and lastly one may encounter some other-than-human entities that are in no one’s pockets.

The exhibition opening will take place on Wednesday, February 19th, at 18:00 and the show will remain open until March 29th.

On 27. February we invite you to experience the performance Catch Error Throw Exception by Laura Cemin that reflects upon the role of computational thinking and algorithms in our daily life. As a supplement to the exhibition, the artist invites viewers to visit reading sessions and kombucha tastings that will take place in the library section.

Laura Kuusk lives and works in Tallinn. Kuusk mainly uses photography, video and installation in her artistic practice. Most of her works have to do with recycling 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. In her work, Kuusk experiments with the visual traces of bodily experiences and their connection to larger socio-political processes. She studied at the Annecy Higher Art School (DSRA, 2014), the Estonian Academy of Arts (MA in Photography, 2008), and Tartu University (BA in Semiotics and Cultural Theory, 2005). Kuusk is a member of the ARS art factory in Tallinn (since 2015) and was a member of the art center OUI in Grenoble (2009-2015).

Niekolaas Johannes Lekkerkerk works as a curator and writer for The Office for Curating and is director of A Tale of a Tub, a not-for-profit art space in Rotterdam. Central to Lekkerkerk’s work are social and political discourses revolving around daily living and working practices, cultural norms, and ideologies. He particularly focuses on debates concerning the Anthropocene, ecology and climate, post-humanism, and the increasing entanglement between nature and culture. Lekkerkerk recently published The Standard Book of Noun-Verb Exhibition Grammar (Onomatopee, 2018) that analyses exhibition as an ecological assemblage. In 2012, he received the inaugural Demergon Curatorial Award, and in 2014 he was the beneficiary winner of the Akbank Sanat International Curator Competition.

Art Hall Gallery (Vabaduse väljak 6) is open Wednesday till Sunday 12–7pm. Entrance is free.

The Art Hall Foundation fund is a contemporary art establishment that presents exhibitions in three galleries on the central square of Tallinn – at Tallinn Art Hall and nearby at Tallinn City Gallery and the Art Hall Gallery. 

The centenary of Elbert Tuganov marks the beginning of a year of celebration for Estonian animation, with a series of screenings in Tallinn and Tartu, and a symposium on the value of our animation heritage today.

Mait Laas recalls his behind the scenes personal and lively contact with the maestro in his presentation “Picturesque Sound Bites of Tuganov as a Creator”. The presentation is illustrated with specially digitized thematic historical footage. The discussion will be led by Jaak Lõhmus. Together with animation filmmakers, he will go over Tuganov’s role as a pioneer in Estonian animation. They will also give context to Tuganov’s work and creative heritage in the world today.

Elbert Tuganov was Estonia’s first professional animator, screenwriter, and director. He introduced a new method to Estonian culture – professional animation. Sounds, visual arts, and technology are blended together into a coherent whole by movement that creates a poetic world. The resulting magic touches the human soul and is sometimes childishly joyous (Krõll, 1972), but if necessary observes the world with an adult-like seriousness (Park, 1966). The main theme of most of Elbert Tuganov’s films is the relationship between man and machine or staying human in our society.

Straightforward and determined Elbert Tuganov’s heartfelt and experimental acumen has evolved into a 60-year tradition of animation. This has been appreciated in high culture and received praise and awards at international film festivals, but is equally welcome among children watching at home.

Due to the art of cinema, Elbert Tuganov’s spirit comes to life again and again – even a hundred years later. Let’s share this miracle!

Elbert Tuganov’s Centenary Week is the first event in a longer animation heritage program. On October 13, 2020, we will celebrate the 95th anniversary of Heino Pars, next year on March 20, 2021, Rein Raamat will celebrate his 90th birthday and on June 14, 2021, Eesti Joonisfilm will celebrate its 50th anniversary.

With the events of the jubilee year, we focus on individual authors and artists, as well as the wider field of animation; which provides an opportunity for debates and showcases the diverse historical aspects of animation.

Call for applications: Showcase Gallery of the Department of Photography at the Estonian Academy of Arts is looking for projects to showcase from April 2020 until October 2020. Current students of the Estonian Academy of Arts are welcome to apply. The application deadline is March 10th, 2020. The Projects will be chosen by jury and the results will be announced on 13th of March.

The application must contain:

• A description of the project. Visual materials if possible.
• The artist’s portfolio or examples of previous works.

The outer dimensions of the Showcase Gallery: W 580 x H 755 x S 160 mm.

The internal dimensions are (approximately): W 560 x H 740 x S 140 mm.

We are accepting projects according to the dimensions of the showcase.

Please send the application to cloe.jancis@artun.ee