Seminar “The Last Half-Century in Estonian Art History. Jaak Kangilaski 80”

On December 13th, the Institute of Art History and Visual Culture at the Estonian Academy of Arts is hosting a seminar in honour of professor emeritus Jaak Kangilaski. The seminar will focus on the history of Estonian art history, with four presentations by Jaak Kangilaski’s former students (prof Krista Kodres, prof Virve Sarapik, dr Epi Tohvri and Eero Epner), followed by speeches and a reception.

On Tuesday November 12 Ulvi Haagensen will open her solo exhibition “Distracting the workers” in the EKA Trepigalerii (Showcase gallery at Linnahall’s side of Estonian Academy of Arts’s building) at 5pm. The exhibition will be open until 27 November and being a window exhibition it is viewable 24/7. 

“I am working on the line between art and everyday life. With a particular emphasis on the practices of art-making and domestic cleaning, I focus on the places where art and life meet to try to find out what the dividing lines, overlaps and resulting ambiguities look and feel like. Helping me with my work I have three imaginary assistants – an artist-cleaner, an artist-researcher and an artist-bricoleuse. Together we make, clean, think and write. This installation is a view into our working and thinking space,” says the artist Ulvi Haagensen. 

The title of the show is in part a response to the German art critic Julius Meier-Graefe’s concern about art that is decorative, accusing it of being like a “gentle little housewife” merely amusing “tired people after a hard day’s work”. 

Ulvi Haagensen, originally from Australia, has been living and working in Estonia for many years and is currently a doctoral candidate at the Estonian Academy of Arts Faculty of Design.

Thanks to Kaido Kruusamets, Mart Vainre, Aksel Haagensen, Michael Haagensen, Risto Tali, Fiona Davies

Flo Kasearu (b. 1985) :

I was born in Soviet Union but grew up in Estonia. I studied painting (2004-2008) and photography (2008-2013) at the Estonian Academy of Arts.
In 2006-2007 I was an exchange student at the Rebecca Horn studio at Berlin University of the Arts, where I started doing performance and video art. I work and live in Flo Kasearu House Museum in Tallinn, Estonia.

The nature of my works is seasonal and explorative, in that each project begins as an open-ended game. No favourite theme or a medium. I am interested in grassroots level, private and public space, vertical vs horizontal relationships, monumental vs unstable. I value irony more than aesthetics. So far I have played with private and public space, freedom, economic depression, patriotism and nationalism, domestic violence…

More info: www.flokasearu.eu

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!

Join us for the opening of the solo exhibition and performance on Thursday, November 5 at 8 PM. The exhibition will remain open until November 30.

Vaarik’s sixth solo exhibition is a continuation of her solo exhibition “Possessed” (2017). The expressive, provocative, daring and heartfelt show is about being a woman, a mother, about saving the world, raising children and cuddling. The artist is observing her close relationships and is seeking for conclusions to save the world.

“Skin is our contact with the world. Scroll up to your sleeves and stroke your arm with your hand. This is a feeling. We feel and learn to feel our bodies through strokes, pamper and cuddles. Sometimes there’s no need to overthink! Weird feelings create weird thoughts. But if you know it’s only that–a feeling–and you stop forcing yourself to collaborate with your brain, you can only feel without attributing linguistic meaning. Things are simply as they are. If we start to over-explain something we can mess it up.
We can try to save the world, but if we grow our children to be empathetic, they are doing it naturally. All humans grow inside their moms! I am lucky I was held tight.” – Marta Vaarik

Marta Vaarik (b. 1986) is an artist, photographer and self-proclaimed blond trickster based in Tallinn, Estonia. She holds a BFA degree in painting from the Estonian Academy of Arts and is currently studying Contemporary Art in the same university. She did an exchange program in UDK studying under professor Josephine Pryde. The current solo show at EKA Gallery is her sixth and she has participated in group shows in Berlin and Estonia. She works in the mediums of painting, photography, performance, and video.

Thanks: Sandra Mäesepp, Rebecca Künnis, Ülle Vaarik, Aadam Taaksalu, Andrus Vaarik, Kelly Turk, Margit Lõhmus, Sveta Grigorjeva, Piret Karro, Rasmus Neljand, Krislin Ots, Big Boy, Gunnar Laal, Taavi Lepp, Pire Sova, Johannes Luik, Kersti Heile

Exhibition title: Sveta Grigorjeva

Graphic design: Kersti Heile

The exhibition is supported by A. Le Coq.

Aesthetics, spatial practices and the 1980s neoliberalization: Open Lecture by Helena Mattsson

The first lecturer of the Open Lecture Series this autumn will be Helena Mattsson, Professor in History and Theory at KTH School of Architecture. In her lecture The Politics of the Archive: Aesthetics, spatial practices and the 1980s neoliberalization, she sets the historical foundation for our neoliberal and capitalist cityscape. Mattsson will be stepping on the stage of the main auditorium of the new EKA building on the 7th of November at 6 pm.

Helena Mattsson is Professor in History and Theory of Architecture at KTH School of Architecture. She is the co-editor of Swedish Modernism: Architecture, Consumption, and the Welfare State and the forthcoming Neoliberalism on the Ground: Architecture and transformation from the 1960s to the present. She is a member of the editorial board of Journal of Architecture. Her research deals with the 20th century theory on welfare state architecture and contemporary architectural history with a special focus on the interdependency between politics, economy and spatial organizations. Another focus for the research is methods of historiography, and investigations into participatory history writing.

Today’s social and political landscape of the welfare state is in a period of radical transformation, a process often labeled as neoliberalization. The role architecture and spatial practices play in this landscape have radically changed, with the separation between spatial dimensions and the administrative state apparatus. This shift calls for new conceptualizations of architecture as a discipline and how it operates. Her lecture discusses the contemporary architectural history of neoliberalization and revisits the archives of the emerging constellations of spatial practices and politics in the 1980s.

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/ 

The new honorary doctor of Estonian Academy of Arts, prof Reinhold Martin (Columbia University) will give an open lecture “Order and Disorder: On Knowledge, Society, and Architecture.”

Reinhold Martin about the lecture:
This talk will consider the interplay of order and disorder, mediated by architecture. Order, in the sense we will explore, makes the world knowable and governable, through the suppression, management, or containment of disorder, which includes entropy or breakdown as well as willful disruption. Architecture, as one of many media, rather than simply a representation or an instrument, operates topologically and epistemologically, arranging and rearranging insides and outsides, drawing and redrawing lines. The lines we will consider distribute forms of knowledge, and the things they seek to know and govern, simultaneously joining what they distinguish. To trace this, the talk will sketch one particular genealogical sequence through the design of campuses, both corporate and academic, beginning on the US side of the Cold War. The larger aim will be to rethink the problem of order and disorder at the intersection of knowledge, society, and architecture, with specific reference to the political economy of design as a will-to-order of its own.

The honorary doctor Griselda Pollock will give an open lecture “From Alain Resnais’s Van Gogh (1948) to Julian Schnabel’s At Eternity’s Gate (2018): Why are we still Loving Vincent (2017)?”

Griselda Pollock about the lecture:
“The first exhibition I ever saw, I think, was of the work of Vincent van Gogh in 1961. I forgot about that first encounter until 1990, when, at a conference on the centenary of his death, I delivered a deconstructionist paper tracing the construction of ‘Van Gogh’ over the twentieth century. My research into his exhibition history revealed that the show in Toronto in 1961 was part of a specific post-war series of exhibitions when VG’swork was sent around the world, ensuring this artist’s spectacular place in the twentieth century’s cultural imagination as ‘the modern artist’. I also realized that this buried memory of an exhibition visited in 1961 with my art-loving mother, who died three years later, may have been the unconscious prompt for my choice, in 1972, of Van Gogh as my PhD dissertation topic.

Over my fifty-years, I have struggled against ‘the myth of Van Gogh’ in many publications and exhibition projects. In this lecture, I will return to one of the earliest films made about the artist by French documentarist Alain Resnais in black and white in 1948 and to the animated film Loving Vincent and the American painter Julian Schnabel’s personal homage, At Eternity’s Gate. What are the different concepts of art and artist this mythic ‘Vincent’/’Van Gogh’ has mirrored? What are the art histories I have tried to create to challenge their potency, affect, and dangers? Why does this myth and image persist and entrance?”

Claudia Pasquero, PhD student of the Estonian Academy of Arts, Curriculum of Architecture and Urban Planning will defend her thesis “Polycephalum: Aesthetic as a measure of ecological intelligence in Architecture and Urban Design” (“Polycephalum: esteetika ja ökoloogiline intelligentsus arhitektuuris ja linnakujunduses”) on the 22nd of November 2019 at 10.00 at Exhibition Space of BAU Design College of Barcelona (Carrer de Pujades, 118 Barcelona)

Supervisors: dr Veronika Valk (Estonian Academy of Arts) and prof Mario Carpo (The Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London)

Pre-reviewers: Prof Dr Christopher Pierce (Architectural Association, London) and Prof Dr Bart Lootsma (University of Innsbruck)

Opponent: prof dr Dr Christopher Pierce (Architectural Association, London)

This dissertation, titled ‘Polycephalum: the aesthetic as a measure of ecological intelligence in architecture and urban design’, unpacks and articulates the design methodology of the candidate’s practice-based research. It moves from an analysis of the relationship between ecoLogicStudio (co-founded by the candidate in 2005) and the academic work she conducts at the Bartlett School of Architecture (UCL) and at Innsbruck University (UIBK). The thesis then explores how, in this body of work, biology intersects computation as the basis for a new architectural and urban design method. Critical to the synergy among these disciplines is the role of aesthetics. The candidate refers to aesthetics as a language of non-verbal communication, a metalanguage, which, she argues, must now embody greater ecological agency in shaping future cities.

Methodologically, the development of this thesis has followed the Creative Practice Research model developed by RMIT University (Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology), founded on the notion that any creative venturous practice intrinsically involves a form of research enquiry. In supporting the development of this original piece of work the Estonian Academy of Arts doctoral program in architecture and urban planning, in which the candidate enrolled as an ADAPT-r Research Fellow, has aligned its stream of creative practice research with RMIT’s long-established program.

A key outcome of this research is embodied in the concept of Polycephalum architecture. This notion mobilizes multiple forms of intelligence, both human and non-human, to redefine the urban realm in the post-Anthropocene age. What role will non-human intelligence, both artificial and biological, play in shaping future architecture? The Polycephalum dismisses the core notion of modern master-planning, to elevate humanity beyond its material substrate via its foundations in rationality. Its aesthetics apparatus becomes here a mean to establish cybernetic conversations, within which human and non-human ecologies constitute co-evolutionary systems, a form of extended mind.

The thesis was developed as part of the ADAPT-r (Architecture, Design and Art Practice Training-research) program within Architecture and Urban Planning program of EKA Doctoral School.

Please find the PhD thesis HERE

On Wednesday, 30 October at 3:30 pm, the exhibition From the Beginning to Today: 1+1 , which celebrates the academy’s 105th anniversary, will open on the 2nd floor of the EKA atrium. About 40 individual works, series or sets of student works by 52 authors are exhibited at the exhibition introducing the different departments of  EKA. All works displayed at the exhibition belong to the EAAM’s collection, whose rich treasures are still waiting to be explored. The exhibition is open on all workdays until 18 November.

The exhibition dedicated to the anniversary of EKA presents all disciplines currently taught at the academy, each with two works: one from the early days of the school and the other from the present time. Liberal arts, including painting, sculpture, drawing, print art, photography, scenography, animation and new media, as well as applied arts, design and architecture, are presented as thematic groups on the three levels of the atrium. Scientific research has not been left out either: a satellite exhibition at the library presents research papers selected based on the same principle.

Although the exhibition presents the entire kaleidoscope of disciplines, the principle of selection – only two works or series from each art field, with the old and the new items displayed side by side – the intent of the exhibition is not to provide a comprehensive overview. On this occasion, the focus is on individual works. Each selected piece creates a visual or substantive connection with its partner, as well as with adjacent works. In this way, works depicting the urban space, such as Ülo Sooster’s social realist graduation project and the PhD student Britta Benno’s hybrid drawing with an animation projection from her Dystopic Tallinn series are shown side by side, and a phone model and drawings from 40 years ago form a pair with the project for a digital ring that would allow lovers to keep in touch over a long distance, etc. The accompanying texts on the labels make it possible to put together a historical picture, piece by piece, which is presented in a more comprehensive form in the publications celebrating EKA’s anniversary.

The exhibition was created in close cooperation with the EKA departments and participating artists.

Curator: Reeli Kõiv

Participating artists, designers, architects and scholars:
Ülo Sooster, Jaan Vares, Bruno Tomberg, Aulin Rimm, Pilvi Ojamaa, Laur Tiidemann, Triin Marts, Edith Karlson, Britta Benno, Ene Pikk, Cloe Jancis, Julia-Maria Linna, Sander Joon, Anu Laura Tuttelberg, Arthur Arula, Varvara Guljajeva (Varvara@Mar), Katrin Kabun, Andra Jõgis, Nils Hint, Henri Papson, Raul Polding, Nesli Hazal Akbulut, Ellen Tamm, Herbert Preisman (Prees), Aino Toppi, Merilin Meremaa, Ruth Huimerind, Kelian Luisk, Merike Männi, Maria Port, Üllar Karro, Risto Bruus, Janika Vesperg, Peep Ainsoo, J. Kurvet, Vello Laanemaa, Irina Tširitš, Tõnu Kallas, Lembit Remmelgas, Leili Rummel, Anneliis Aunapuu, Ülo Kulgver, Raine Karp, Rein Kersten, Ell Väärtnõu, Veiko Vahtrik, Hain Toss, Evgeniya Dolgopolova, Hilkka Hiiop, Mart Kalm, Elnara Taidre, Olesja Katšanovskaja, Mati Kahu

Graphic design: Mikk Heinsoo (StuudioStuudio)
Designer: Maria Kristiina Ulas
Technical realisation: Heldur Lassi

See the entire programme of events to celebrate the 105th anniversary of EKA here: artun.ee/EKA105.