Application deadline to EKA Summer Academy 2019

The Open Academy of the Estonian Academy of Arts (EKA) is very excited to launch the 2019 EKA Summer Academy of Art, Design and Architecture – Possible Futures!

The courses will take place in August 2019 and focus on innovative, solution-seeking, salient topics: collaboration forms for humans and the natural environment, mapping roads and traffic to improve the efficacy of investments into public space, Estonian artistic life in the regional and international context, learning a disappearing specialized manual skill through couture millinery and egg tempera icon painting, designing the future of the public sector, linking art and technology in Clay 3D printing and take part in architecture planning workshop for the island of Naissaar.

The teaching staff of the Summer Academy includes leading educators, researchers and artists from the EKA and partner universities.

EKA Summer Academy courses include:

Clay 3D Printing

Introduction to Egg Tempera Painting

Numbers and Cognition in the Urban Environment

Planetary Countryside. Future Ecologies of the Island

Sculptural Headwear – Couture Millinery

Speculative and Critical Design – Special Programs Think Tank

Contemporary Art Field in Estonia

Wood and Design

“EKA Summer Academy of Art, Design and Architecture – Possible Futures” is funded by the European Regional Development Fund.

For more information about the courses and to apply, please visit http://www.artun.ee/summeracademy
or write summeracademy@artun.ee

On May 25 the fashion event with the longest history in Estonia will return home – to the ESTONIAN ACADEMY OF ARTS. In the new building fashion designers and audience, ambitious design and a critical jury, bubbling energy and playful fashion will reunite. You are welcome to take part in the powerful synergy of the reunited EKA and experience a show the like of which has never been seen before!

Tickets @ Ticketer.ee‘st
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ERKI website @ artun.ee/erki

Exhibition „iTouch Store” Darja Popolitova

Vault Room of A-Gallery, Hobusepea 2, Tallinn

The exhibition can be visited from 31 Mayto 1 July 2019.
The opening will take place on 7 June at 6 p.m.

Darja Popolitova’s exhibition examines touch as a part of digital culture: the tactility of digitally transmitted jewellery images, given the excessive focus on the phone and the screen.

The audience can also see the works in their representations —in the form of a video ad where the author attempts to find answers to the following questions: can the digital representation of the jewellery have tactile features?, how does the digital representation of jewellery affect real jewellery on a tactile level? and, how does the use of digital media change the relationship between jewellery and tactility?.

The jewellery and objects at the exhibition are meant to solve the potential problems of the digital age. The titles of the work speak for themselves: “Hot Not Only Online Phone Case”, “Silicon Nail for Touching Screen”, “Digital Detox Brush”, etc.

The exhibition is laid out as a shop and this is not accidental. Media critic Erkki Huhtamo brings a parallel between a museum and a shop, the tradition of which is related to “tactiloclasms” — tactile rules and prohibitions in public places. Similarly to the old days where you could have access to the product in a shop only with the help of a shop assistant, in the exhibition room touching the jewellery is not permitted due to security requirements. Namita Gupta Wiggers, the jewellery historian, spoke of the fact that jewellery perception in the museum is limited to the vision, while the potential destination of the jewellery is the body.

Replacing the sense of touch with the vision continues in the Internet age. Darja Popolitova notes that she has been inspired by AliExpress e-shop ads. “Reviewing products —even without buying them —offers me certain pleasure,” commented the artist. “As I read a book by the media theorist Laura U. Marks, I went deeper into the meaning of the term “tactile visuality offered by Laura U. Marks. At one moment everything came together in my head: I treat the images of the products with a certain plasticity — my eyes do not see, but “touch” these images.That is why I decided to explore the tactile properties of the images of jewellery with my exhibition.”

Darja Popolitova was born in 1989 in Sillamäe and lives and works in Tallinn. She is currently doing a PhD at Estonian Academy of Arts. Darja designs jewellery using innovative technologies and mixed media. Recently, Darja Popolitova has participated in exhibitions at the Art and Design Museum in New York (2019), the Kunstnerforbundet gallery in Oslo (2018) and the fourth biennial of contemporary jewellery, METALLOphone in Vilnius (2018). Darja Popolitova is represented by the following galleries: Marzee in Nijmegen, Beyond in Antwerp, and Door in Mariaheide. Her work is included in the collection of the Estonian Museum of Applied Art and Design and also in private collections. The work of Darja Popolitova was awarded the scholarships of the Ministry of Culture and Adamson-Eric in 2018. She also received the scholarship of Young Jewellery in 2015.

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Video: Ando Naulainen

Sound Design: Andres Nõlvak

Graphic Design: Johanna Ruukholm

Artist’s gratitude goes to 3DKoda OÜ, A-Gallery, Adamson-Eric Museum,
Anastassia Dratšova, Benjamin Lignel, Daniil Popov, Doctoral School of Estonian Academy of Arts, Estonian Ministry of Culture, Kadri Mälk, Keiu Krikmann,
MakerLab Tallinn, Martina Gofman, Olesja Kulikova, Orbital Vox Stuudiod, Pire Sova,
Raivo Kelomees, Sarah Elizabeth Johnston, Shapeways Inc., Varvara Guljajeva, Vladimir Ljadov

The exhibition is supported by the Cultural Endowment of Estonia.

ANNA KAARMA will open her personal exhibition ON THE THRESHOLD in Hobusepea gallery at 6pm on Thursday, May 23^rd, 2019.  

With the current exhibition, the artist is observing the borders of the personal and the public, dreams and waking, the permanent and the changing. Anna Kaarma focuses on the living environment of the district of Lasnamäe in Tallinn – the architectural and social superstructure is being unravelled to fragments charged with personal meanings and experiences.

Lasnamäe has the characteristic features of a metropolis. It is easy to remain anonymous for individuals between and inside the housing blocks that have been mathematically positioned – the intimate views into the neighbours’ lives that one gets through the windows and walls has rather the effect of a background noise than a human contact. The exhibition emphasizes the microcosm of an individual resident belonging to the so-called anonymous crowd. Everyday objects are interwoven with a personal perception of space, playful childhood memories, stories and a dreamlike logic of space.

Anna Kaarma: „In the mid-1990s, a bullet was shot into the kitchen window of my 8^th floor apartment in the Lasnamäe district. The bullet probably bounced off of the wall in ricochet, only penetrating the outer glass of the window. The pane was therefore left as it was for several years. In the context of the criminal events of the last decade of 20^th century, the bullet hole has no special value; it is more meaningful for me as a strange image from the past. It is intriguing how an element from the outer environment had intruded into the personal space, got stuck between the two spaces while creating a new field – a certain wormhole that makes it possible to go back to the space in the past. The window as the connecting link between the private and public sphere became an entry point to the third sphere, the one of memories.”

This spring, Anna Kaarma will defend an MA degree in Contemporary Arts in the Faculty of Fine Arts at the Estonian Academy of Arts. She has obtained a BA degree in Graphic Design at the same academy. She has also studied at Hochschule Düsseldorf and in Baltic Film, Media, Arts and Communication School. Anna Kaarma is the laureate of Adamson-Eric Scholarship in 2017. Kaarma’s diverse artist’s practice involves publication design, artists’ books, video works as well as expansive installations. In her work, Kaarma skilfully combines the elements of graphic design, this often resulting from a 2D image to a monumental spatial installation. Anna Kaarma’s first personal exhibition „Type 121” was held in EKA Gallery in 2017 that can be considered as an ideological predecessor to her current exposition.

The artist would like to thank: Cultural Endowment of Estonia, Marge Monko, Jan Kaus, Sebastian Saaremäe, Anu Vahtra, Angela Ramires, Lee Kelomees, department of installation and sculpture of Estonian Academy of Arts, Jaana Jüris, Neeme Külm, Ingvar Heamägi, department of glass art of Estonian Academy of Arts and Eve Koha, Virko Kuusk, Kaisa Maasik, Kulla Laas, Gregor Taul, Saara Bergström.

Installation of the panel block: Valge Kuup LLC.

Exhibition will be open until June 10^th, 2019.

Supported by the Cultural Endowment of Estonia and the Department of Photography of the Estonian Academy of Arts.

Exhibitions in Hobusepea gallery are supported by the Cultural Endowment of Estonia and Estonian Ministry of Culture.

Current exhibition belongs to the programme of TASE – the annual spring graduation show festival of graduation works of Estonian Academy of Arts. The main TASE exhibition includes all MA graduation projects and selected BA projects in the new academy building on Põhja pst. 7 from May 31^st to June 16^th, 2019. The Young Artist Award and the Young Applied Artist Award will be announced at the opening of TASE’19 in collaboration with the Estonian Artists’ Association. The extensive satellite programme of the festival presents students films in TASE FILM, offers presentations of selected graduation works in TASE Elevator Talks, provides feedback to your artwork from international experts in Portfolio Cafe and opens several diverse personal and group exhibitions by students. Additional info: artun.ee/tase

May 20th at 16:00 at EKA room A501 Hélène Day Fraser will give an open lecture “Decoloniality? Locating Inadvertent Parallels”.

The Associate Dean at Emily Carr University of Art and Design will share work done with many others on a project called clothing(s) as Conversation. She will speak to material practice in relation to the social and questions she is currently posing of her own work in relation to decoloniality.

She asks how do we locate ourselves? What does it mean to find new routes forward? What are the tropes that trap us? Is it possible to identify, reroute, delink, move away from mainstream assumptions of design/in design?

Hélène Day Fraser is a first generation Canadian, of Welsh and English descent, born in North-Eastern Quebec. She has been formed by life in a small town on the Canadian Prairies, an island in the Philippines, downtown Toronto, Strasbourg, the outskirts of Paris, France and most recently Vancouver and the North Shore. She is the Associate Dean, Master of Design, Jake Kerr Faculty of Graduate Studies, Emily Carr University of Art + Design.

Hélène was the Principle Investigator of a SSHRC Insight funded research initiative: cloTHING(s) as Conversation. ( 2013 – 2018). Recently, she received CFI funding to help support and develop a Textile Adaptation Research Program (TARP) based out of Emily Carr University. She is also a founding member and Co-Director of the ECU Material Matters research center, and an active member of Emily Carr’s DESIS lab (DESIS is an international design research network for sustainability and social innovation). In her role as Emily Carr University’s Academic Co-ordinator for Sustainability (2012 – 2015) she established Creatives with Intent, a group that promoted agency and communication pertaining to sustainability.

Hélène’s textile and garment-based research addresses concerns and developments in the areas of: sustainability, new digital technologies, craft and legacy practices of making and generative systems. Her work explores modes of social engagement, identity construction and clothing consumption habits.

It is informed by a design education, and a past professional career in fashion, design, and manufacturing. Day Fraser holds a Masters of Applied Arts in Design and a Bachelor of Applied Arts in Fashion.

Apply until 27.05.

In the framework of TASE ’19, graduate students from the Faculty of Design and Fine Arts once again have the opportunity to get feedback from an international group of experts. At the Portfolio Café, based on a series of one-on-one meetings, students can receive comments and advice on their already finished works and also projects still in progress. Those meetings are a great chance to improve one’s presentation skills, and can also a lead to new contacts and possible future collaborations.

The experts attending this year’s event are:

KATI ILVES (EST),

MISCHA KUBALL (DEU),

LIEVEN LAHAYE (NLD),

CHARLES MICHALSEN (DNK),

ALEX REYNOLDS (BEL),

SERGEJ TIMOFEJEV (LVA),

ANN MIRJAM VAIKLA (EST),

DANIELLE WILDE (NOR).

Applying and more information HERE:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScVXDPniT8_tshs1vwExKBEVC1Kx4gaGx34mtuXhSEnOperew/viewform

NB!

The seats are limited! In case of a large number of applicants, a selection will be made by a committee faculty of members.

The MA graduates of the Faculty of Design and Fine Arts have a priority in applying.

In addition to the portfolio, it is also possible to present works exhibited at the graduation show.

The Portfolio Café meetings are mainly in English.

Portfolio Café is supported by the European Union European Regional Development Fund, the Cultural Endowment of Estonia, Goethe-Institut Estland and Erasmus +.

Lisainfo:

Kulla Laas ja Cloe Jancis
EKA fotograafia osakond

Tel. 616 4200, 5805 0009
portfolio.cafe@artun.ee

The Estonian Academy of Arts (EKA) is welcoming applications for the international summer school — 2019 EKA Summer Academy of Art, Design and Architecture – Possible Futures!

Application deadline: 26 May.

We invite you to take part in a rare opportunity to serve in the Special Programs Think Tank to envision and create hypothetical “special programs” that Estonia’s government might instate, either in the future or in parallel realities.
This five-day event will provide you with the chance to design preferable paths for government, guided by future-visioning strategists from the Extrapolation Factory. Over the course of the workshop, participants will be introduced to the essential principles of futures studies and will learn to identify signals, extrapolate implications and create future artefacts.
Each program will be announced through physical, print or digital artefacts to be shared with local citizens.

LEARNING OUTCOMES. The student is able to:

• understand the basics of speculative critical design;
• use design methodologies for a positive impact within one’s own community.

ASSESSMENT

The course ends with an evaluative assessment (pass-fail) and is based on:
• participation;
• Think Tank deliverables;
• individual reflections;
• final (semi-)public presentation of service/product prototypes.

TUTORS

Chris Woebken, MA Design Interactions (Anthony Dunne & Fiona Raby), 2008, Royal College of Art, London, UK.

Elliott P. Montgomery, MA Design Interactions (Anthony Dunne & Fiona Raby), 2011, Royal College of Art, London, UK.

The Extrapolation Factory is a design-based research studio for participatory futures studies, founded by Chris Woebken and Elliott P. Montgomery. The studio develops experimental methods for collaboratively prototyping as well as experiencing and impacting future scenarios. Central to these methods is the creation of hypothetical future props and their deployment in familiar contexts such as 99¢ stores, science museums, vending machines and city footpaths. With this work, the studio is exploring new territories for democratised futures by rapidly imagining, prototyping, deploying and evaluating visions of possible futures on an extended time scale.
www.extrapolationfactory.com

COST
Free

Apply now at www.artun.ee/summeracademy

“EKA Summer Academy of Art, Design and Architecture – Possible Futures” is supported by the European Regional Development Fund.

On Thursday, May 16 at 6 pm, the exhibition YOU MUST HAVE A BODY by the second-year students of the Jewellery and Blacksmithing Department will be opened at the Estonian Academy of Arts Trepigalerii.

The subject of the exhibition is the body and the experience of this self-existence and being a part of the world. Nine young artists interpret how bodies interact with each other, what are the characteristics of the body, and what, in which form, leaves marks in the body. The selection of the materials and techniques used can be somewhat surprising.

Participators: Georg Arnold, Kristina Kask, Endel Maas, Terje Meisterson, Tauris Reose, Kristin Sepp, Oleg Šubitšev, Mart Talvar, Taavi Teevet.

Supervisors: Eve Margus-Villems, Nils Hint, Urmas Lüüs, Jens A. Clausen.

Sponsors: Träx rehvikeskus, Tikkurila, ExtraWize, EKA, Martin Kipper, Carol Haamer.

The exhibition at the Estonian Academy of Arts Trepigalerii (entrance on the corner of Põhja pst 7 and Kotzebue street) remains open May 17 – 30, Monday – Sunday 12 PM – 7 PM.

Further information:
Taavi Teevet
taavi.teevet@artun.ee
+372 56 947 532

The exhibition “Reading the Street” will be opened at Vent Space project space on 11 May at 4pm. The exhibition will be open until 16 May, Sunday to Thursday 12-6pm.
On 16 May at 6pm there will be a presentation of the book “Reading the Street” by Urbiquity.

The exhibition showcases a selection of student work resulting from the “Art and the City” studio at the Estonian Academy of Arts as well as a presentation of the book “Reading the Street – Creative Methods in Doing Critical Urban Research on the Example of Two Streets in Milan and Tallinn” by the urbanism platform Urbiquity.

The aim of the “Art and the City” studio has been to merge artistic practices with researching urban space. The studio is interdisciplinary and its results have been publicly presented in the form of exhibitions and talks. The wider aim of the studio is to expand the concept of city-making – asking who and what has the power to shape urban space and what possibilities inhabitants of a city have for more agency over space. Therefore, the resulting material is not only targeted towards specialists, but a more general public.

The exhibition consists of a selection of student work resulting from the “Art and the City” studio, which showcases how creative methodologies can enable difficult and critical conversations. The book “Reading the Street” combines the results of the 2018 “Art and the City” studio with the results from a parallel workshop conducted in Milan and offers a critical analysis of using creative methods for urban research.

Urbiquity is an international platform for urbanism, founded by Mattias Malk, Stefano Carnelli and Pablo Conejo.

Performance by Heleliis Hõim and Irmeli Terras at Vent Space project space on 6 May, 6-9.30 pm.

A person never wants to feel that they are truly alone. You want to feel protected and guided by some higher power or feel that your choices are directed by someone else, because the most terrifying realisation is that you are alone and that you alone have the responsibility to choose. According to the theory of the origin of beliefs, worshipping objects bestowed with a greater power, i.e. fetishism is the oldest kind of religious belief. What do we do with these objects? What do we use them for? In the contemporary consumerist world, this is pure imagology and often carries a promise of a better life and a better me. We have returned to polytheism and reach out to our gods. “I believe in things, I want things, therefore I am.”

Irmeli Terras, person?, consumer, fetishist, pagan, artist. She studies human psychology and their actions when it comes to consumerism, religion, the occult, fetishism and imagology. She creates performances in which she incorporates various media: sound, vocals, video, dance, installation.

Heleliis Hõim, person, consumer, pagan-being, artist. Consumed media: painting, performance, sculpture, video, dance, sound. A childhood spent in the forests of Estonia convening with the trees and other beings. A consumer of art and culture. A fetish for new materials.