Liina Siib’s exhibition “Politics of Paradise” at Tallinn Art Hall

On Friday, February 15 at 6 pm, Liina Siib’s exhibition “Politics of Paradise” curated by Taru Elfving will be opened in Tallinn Art Hall.

Liina Siib excavates the multiple dreams and ideals that haunt the present. Her work pays acute attention to the minor narratives, which usually persist in the shadows of the attention economy or crevices of accelerated lived experience. Bringing together new productions and a selection of older works by Siib, the exhibition Politics of Paradise mediates intergenerational conversations between individual lives and complex gendered histories of privilege and power.

Recently Siib has looked at the ongoing regional economic migration through the eyes of Estonian women working in Finland. This contemporary polyphony of personal stories, desires and realities is reflected against new installations focused on the tragic yet deviant historical local female characters. They continue Siib’s long-term artistic investigations into the entangled political and habitual claims to space, voice and meaning.

Tallinn Art Hall (Vabaduse väljak 8, Tallinn) is open from Wednesday to Sunday, 12 noon to 7 pm, admission € 3 / € 6 / € 9.

The Art Hall Foundation 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. Tallinn Art Hall exhibitions are installed by Valge Kuup.

February 15 and 16, at 6–8PM in EKA Gallery

Kaspar Aus: “On two days I will pass on what I know about body, mind and movement. We listen, catch up and let life through ourselves. For example just like you could place one small seed cell into a human anus and from there grows the plant through and out of us. That the body becomes non-existent and the manifestation of everything that is.”

To get involved, you need comfortable clothes, shoes for running and dancing around, an effort to be opened and together. You do not need to have any specific skills in dance and body movement beforehand. There are a changing room and a shower. Everyone is welcome regardless of previous experience. Free of charge!

About the artist: kasparaus.wixsite.com/artist

Combining Design and Science for a positive impact on built environment: Open Lecture by Areti Markopoulou

The next lecturer of the Open Lecture Series this spring will be Greek architect, educator and urban technologist, Areti Markopoulou. Markopoulou will be stepping on the stage of the main auditorium of the new EKA building on the 14th of February at 6 pm to talk about advanced architecture research and how to combine design and science for a positive impact on our built environment.

Areti Markopoulou is a Greek architect, researcher and urban technologist working at the intersection between architecture and digital technologies. She is the Academic Director at IAAC in Barcelona, where she also leads the Advanced Architecture Group, a multidisciplinary research group exploring how design and science can positively impact and transform the present and future of our built spaces, the way we live and interact. Her research and practice seeks to redefine architecture as a performative “body” beyond traditional notions of static materiality, approximate data, or standardized manufacturing.

Areti is the founder and principal of the multidisciplinary practice Design Dynamics Studio, and co-editor of Urban Next, a global network focused on rethinking architecture through the contemporary urban milieu. She is the project coordinator of a number of European Research funded Projects on topics including: urban regeneration through technologies, dynamic design through novel materials and multidisciplinary educational models in the digital age. 
Areti has also served as a curator of international exhibitions such as On Site Robotics (Building Barcelona Construmat 2017), Print Matter (In3dustry 2016), HyperCity (Shenzhen Bi-city Biennale, 2015) and MyVeryOwnCity (World Bank, BR Barcelona, 2011).
She holds a Bachelor of Architecture & Engineering from DUTH – the Democritus University of Thrace, a MArch from IAAC, and a Fab Academy diploma on Digital Fabrication offered by the Fab Lab Network. Her work has been featured in numerous exhibitions worldwide, such as the Venice Biennale, Shenzhen Bi-City Biennale, Centre Pompidou, MAXXI and Beijing Design Week among others.

The architecture and urban design department of the Estonian Academy of Arts has been curating 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 all interested.

The series is funded by the Estonian Cultural Endowment.

Curators: Sille Pihlak, Johan Tali, for this lecture

www.avatudloengud.ee
https://www.facebook.com/EKAarhitektuur/

More info:
Pille Epner
E-post: arhitektuur@artun.ee
Tel. +372 642 0071

Carol Katkoff will open her solo exhibition “Using a Metamorphotic Photo Story as a Medium for the Analysis of the Viewer” at Vent Space project space on Wednesday,
February 6, 2019 at 6pm. 

Carol Katkoff is interested in the psychological process of perceiving
the world and how it makes everyone experience the surroundings through
their own unique distorting mirrors. The world we are experiencing is only the imagination of reality. The image
dictates the ways we perceive.

The key of the exhibition is a meta-morphotic photo story bound into an accordion book, which is accompanied by videos of the interviews with the viewers. The author created the book with an idea, that it’s story is formed depending on the viewer and one’s individual experiences and imagination. In a chaotic, but narrative photo story, the aimlessly drifting camera creates a metamorphotic plot, where the characters might or might not be linked together through only a chance. The actions of the characters might seem to have a purpose, but before we reach it, the camera might have already found a new subject of interest or brought us into an absurd situation.

The photo story is like a little replicate of the chaos we experience in real life, in which we try to find a meaning already because we have an instinctive need for it. The instinctive need is the reason why also the viewer is trying to reach an order in the chaos and find meanings in the story. The viewer is an active participant in the creative process, so that the story behind is formed by the individual experience and imagination. The complete form comes into being in a moment the viewer meets the story. The process the viewer goes through is a reflection of how the analyze should take place with the perceived information in general. The meanings the author might have actually had creating the story don’t own an importance.

The exhibition will be open daily from 12pm to 6pm until February 9, 2019.

Carol Katkoff is studying in MA Programme of Contemporary Art at Estonian Academy of Arts. The current exhibition was created as a thesis work
in Photography at Pallas University of Applied Sciences in 2018.

The next exhibition at EKA Gallery is The world’s biggest EKA Gallery-exhibited work by PRIIT, a group of artists from EKA. The exhibition is open only for a week, on February 12–17 and is accessible 24/7.

PRIIT has said about the exhibition: “Space becomes installation and installation becomes space again. A trans-medium and multidimensional work fills the entire space and is in terms of its parameters the biggest work that will ever be shown in that gallery. What do we have to sacrifice to completely subordinate space to ourselves at the exhibition? We experience defiance at the white cube, experience a loss and rediscovery of self in the abstract information field of non-objects.”

PRIIT is a group of artist including Riin Maide, Sidney Lepp, Johannes Luik, Cristo Madissoo, Nele Tiidelepp. Earlier, PRIIT has produced two slightly place-specific and quite experimental exhibitions – Placeless in a Kadriorg rental flat and The Fifth Ice Age before the Third World War in the Tartu culture club Üheteistkümnes.

For the first time, the Product Design Department of Estonian Academy of Arts will join the lineup of Stockholm Furniture & Light from 5 to 9 February, 2019. Alongside 29 design schools and 37 young, upcoming designers and design studios from altogether 21 countries, Estonian Academy of Arts will be exhibiting at the Greenhouse section of the fair, booth C18:37.

On view in Stockholm, Sweden, are 1:1 furniture prototypes designed during two studio classes of the Autumn 2018 Semester.

The Department of Product Design has been generously supported by the European Regional Development Fund, and the Architecture Endowment of the Cultural Endowment of Estonia.

For more information and images please contact: anna-liisa.laarits@artun.ee

From 29th of January, Misa Asanuma’s new exhibition “enkei” will be visible in photography department vitrine gallery. Misa Asanuma’s new exhibition “enkei ” throw doubt on our desire to take photography in this image-saturated era; Why we want to archive some scenery as images, and how we treat captured images after that? Why, time to time, we automatically do so, even we might not cherish them that much afterward?

The unique mismatch of materials framed in the showcase is her imagined landscape, which emerged from her personal experience.

Misa Asanuma (b.1994) is an artist from Japan. She studied literature at Meiji University, Tokyo. She is currently in the middle of her MA studies in the department of Contemporary Art of the Estonian Academy of Arts and mainly working on photography.

The exhibition will stay open until 24th of March at the address Põhja pst 35, in front of the Contemporary Art Museum of Estonia. The exhibition is open 24h/7 days.

From 1 February the exhibition “Ocean Botlights” by Taavi Suisalu will be open at the Tallinn City Gallery. Suisalu, who tackles the relationship between people and technology, here explores light – simultaneously a giver of life and a conveyer of information, spreading out in a web of rays the breadth of a hair at the bottom of the oceans, where no other light can reach. The exhibition is curated by Siim Preiman.

The exhibition will open on Thursday, 31 January at 6pm and will remain open until 31 March.

Taavi Suisalu (b. 1982) is an artist, who seems to be constantly flickering between different times, simultaneously looking into the ancient past and the future just out of reach. It seems that this tension between eras is an activating force in his work. At the exhibition “Ocean Botlights”, light is what brings together the ancient and the modern, simultaneously one of the prerequisites for life on Earth as well as the conveyer of information along the super-fast fibre optic cables that cover the world like a spider’s web.

“Light is not just a condition necessary for life, but the infrastructure of our information society also relies on it – the internet relies in large part on the relay of information in the form of light along fibre optic cables. Along with productivity, cheapness and user-friendliness, the internet has helped the mass growth of information and communication technology (ICT) in society. As a result, almost all important products and services in first-world countries depend on ICTs,” Oliver Laas writes in the accompanying booklet.

The installations on show at the exhibition bring together the characteristics of light both ancient and new. Suisalu seems to be trying to capture continuity in his work and is searching for something with a longer perspective. “Although how people behave and think acclimatises to new technologies quickly, the changes in sensations, physiology and mentality are more long-term,” he writes in the accompanying text. It seems that Suisalu is striving towards such a level of standardisation that would allow us to overcome the seemingly accelerating and unstoppable fervour for technological development.

Taavi Suisalu activates peripheral areas using technology, sound and performance based art as tools for an intriguing coming together. His work is inspired by the way contemporary society relates to technology and its influence on how a social being behaves, senses and thinks. In his work, he also connects cultural phenomena with contemporary cultural practices and approaches that are more traditional. His recent solo-exhibitions include “Landscapes and Portraits” (Hobusepea Gallery, 2017) and “I Am NOT Sitting in a Room” (Draakoni Gallery, 2015).

We would like to thank: Estonian Cultural Endowment, Estonian Ministry of Culture, Estonian Artists’ Association, Veinisõber, AkzoNobel, WRO Art Center, EMAP / EMARE, Creative Europe, Tartu Valgus, KOOR Wood, Kadri Toom, Indrek Tali, Mihkel Säre, Tõnu Narro, John Grzinich

Tallinn City Gallery (Harju 13) is open Wednesday till Sunday 12–7pm. Entrance is free.

Public lecture by Raine Vasquez will be held today(17.01) at 5pm in room nr A301

In an informal conversation Raine Vasquez will discuss his complicated and frustrated relationship with art, his exodus into philosophy, and his continued work at the Museum of Impossible Forms and other art-centric organizations. He will discuss some points of his forthcoming “anti-art” manifesto, contemplate arts’ role as a technology of late-capitalism, and whether it really has the power to disrupt that it is so often claimed to possess. He will wonder about the ethics of continuing to make art, and speak about disappointment, hopelessness, and self-exile.

http://www.raine–vasquez.com

Janne Lias will open her first
solo exhibition titled “Dog Show”
on Wednesday, January 16 at 6–8pm
at Vent Space project space.

“To get over some fears, you need to actively deal with them. Some others you may simply grow out of and realise at some point that you just aren’t afraid anymore. That said, terrifying past events leave their mark and leave you with unpleasant memories.

One active method for overcoming phobias is to confront them i.e. through exposure, in which you get used to the frightening situation or object through careful yet consistent contact with them. Another method is to poke fun at the fear and convince yourself you aren’t afraid anymore. But does this work?”

The exhibition will be open from January 17 to 19 at 12–6pm and
on January 20 at 12–4pm.

Janne Lias (b. 1981, Tallinn) studies
at the painting department of the Estonian Academy of Arts. Having previously acquired a master’s in computer science from Tallinn University of Technology,
Lias often uses IT knowledge in her work. Working in the field of art, she likes to experiment with different materials and techniques. Emotions and a sense of humour are important tools for her in creating her work.