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In the heat of the summer, everything is thirsty – it is the season of growth and, eventually, of ripening. Above all, thirst is a sensation of lack, a yearning for liquid, for water, and is deeply ingrained in all life, as living bodies consist of water, and life is bound in it. It also contains an element of intense desire for something or someone. So, as much as we are made of water, we are made of thirst, propelling us forward; this is blackout, heat, desire for flesh, sex, life, blood, anything.
"},{"name":"www-blocks/image-block","parentNodeDatabaseId":925,"attributes":{"caption":"Illustration: Martina Gofman and Johanna Ruukholm, Thirst, 2022","mediaData":"{\"url\":\"https:\\/\\/admin.ashadecolder.com\\/wp-content\\/uploads\\/2022\\/07\\/finale-scaled.jpg\",\"width\":1608,\"height\":2560,\"alt\":\"\",\"srcset\":\"https:\\/\\/admin.ashadecolder.com\\/wp-content\\/uploads\\/2022\\/07\\/finale-150x150.jpg 150w, https:\\/\\/admin.ashadecolder.com\\/wp-content\\/uploads\\/2022\\/07\\/finale-188x300.jpg 188w, https:\\/\\/admin.ashadecolder.com\\/wp-content\\/uploads\\/2022\\/07\\/finale-643x1024.jpg 643w, https:\\/\\/admin.ashadecolder.com\\/wp-content\\/uploads\\/2022\\/07\\/finale-495x788.jpg 495w, https:\\/\\/admin.ashadecolder.com\\/wp-content\\/uploads\\/2022\\/07\\/finale-636x1013.jpg 636w, https:\\/\\/admin.ashadecolder.com\\/wp-content\\/uploads\\/2022\\/07\\/finale-707x1125.jpg 707w, https:\\/\\/admin.ashadecolder.com\\/wp-content\\/uploads\\/2022\\/07\\/finale-848x1350.jpg 848w, https:\\/\\/admin.ashadecolder.com\\/wp-content\\/uploads\\/2022\\/07\\/finale-1131x1800.jpg 1131w, https:\\/\\/admin.ashadecolder.com\\/wp-content\\/uploads\\/2022\\/07\\/finale-1237x1969.jpg 1237w, https:\\/\\/admin.ashadecolder.com\\/wp-content\\/uploads\\/2022\\/07\\/finale-scaled.jpg 1608w\"}","mediaSrc":"https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/finale-scaled.jpg","mediaWidth":"50%","align":"left"},"saveContent":"The summer issue of A Shade Colder titled Thirst offers a glimpse into the spectre of thirst. Viewing thirst at the touching points with the natural world, we invite you to explore the floral fantasias of the painter Malle Leis, as seen through the eyes of Andrew Berardini. Leis’ lush world of plants evokes a sensuality guiding the reader towards an endless summer. This is often best spent in the farther reaches of the land, as Leis did in Võrumaa in southern Estonia. In the current issue Kaarin Kivirähk also profiles the art scene in the city of Võru. On another kind of journey, artist Rebecca Jagoe steps into the wet realms of the sea, pondering the eroticism of liquid states in their Ofthyrst.
"},{"name":"core/paragraph","parentNodeDatabaseId":925,"saveContent":"Thirst as yearning is also the starting point for an interview by the curator and writer Max Hannus with artists Sarah Nõmm and Maria Izabella Lehtsaar. How much of yourself or your desires and struggles is it acceptable to put into artistic work in a visible way without hurting yourself or appearing too thirsty? Among other things, the conversation discusses gentleness, queerness and intimacy. To accompany the piece, artist Elo Vahtrik has created collages based on the works of the two artists.
"},{"name":"core/paragraph","parentNodeDatabaseId":925,"saveContent":"But alongside the thirst for life and everything it entails, there are also darker shades to thirst. Thirst always seems to balance between existence and non-existence – bringing things into this world and making them disappear, while thriving on lack.
"},{"name":"core/paragraph","parentNodeDatabaseId":925,"saveContent":"As the events of Russia’s ongoing war in Ukraine in the past months have once again made clear, the thirst for life can easily be devastated by the thirst for blood. Although, considering the unnecessary destruction it causes and its senselessness, perhaps, the English expression lust for blood is more apt here. And while the echoes of the war in the artworld pale in comparison to the real-life destruction it sows, nothing is left untouched. Do images still have power and how can we re-evaluate that power and the context in which they came into existence and inhabit the world in the present? To tackle some of these questions, curator Liisa Kaljula writes about the curatorial and administrative choices made when recontextualising the exhibition Thinking Pictures at Kumu Art Museum.
"},{"name":"core/paragraph","parentNodeDatabaseId":925,"saveContent":"In whichever way we experience thirst, most likely its intensity will change us to some degree, so let us be aware not to get lost in it and have kindness towards others who have yet to emerge from the experience.
"}],"articleAuthors":{"articleAuthors":{"nodes":[{"id":"cG9zdDoxMzg=","content":"\nKeiu Krikmann is the editor of A Shade Colder.
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Anna-Stina Treumund was a bold artist, recognised as the first lesbian artist in Estonia. She was also a good friend of the author and a posthumous solo exhibition at Kumu, […]
\n","content":"\n“Anna-Stina Treumund, what would you do today?” asks Rebeka Põldsam in an article that opens the 10th issue of A Shade Colder, Practices in Dialogue.
\n\n\n\nAnna-Stina Treumund was a bold artist, recognised as the first lesbian artist in Estonia. She was also a good friend of the author and a posthumous solo exhibition at Kumu, the largest art museum in Estonia, explores her contribution. Like friendly ghosts, the friends or people you admire and who are no longer here can often still inspire us to be better versions of ourselves. The dialogue continues.
\n\n\n\nIn this issue, A Shade Colder focuses on these and other kinds of dialogues between artists, performers and curators whose practices are shaping the art scene in Estonia and elsewhere.
\n\n\n\nIn the interview by Kathrin Heinrich, performance artist Netti Nüganen opens up about how she builds worlds on stage: often starting from learning a new technique, such as playing the banjo or black metal singing and then embarks on creating the performance based on these skills.
\n\n\n\nAbsurd moments and humour are something that might form a thread that connects Nüganen and the worlds created by artist Kaarel Kurismaa. Interviewed by artist and close collaborator Kiwa, Kurismaa openly reflects on his long practice that began by organising happenings while in art school in the 1950s. In early 2026, Kurismaa will open a solo show at Kunsthalle Zürich.
\n\n\n\nVanina Saracino writes about the works of artist Kristina Õllek, one of the most internationally active artists in Estonia at the moment. Saracino has been in dialogue with Õllek for many years. “How can image-making reveal what remains unseen, the invisible infrastructures and living processes that sustain the planet?” she asks.
\n\n\n\nLast but not least, I interview Paul O’Neill, a curator based in Helsinki, whose project, started many years ago, aims to bring curators of the region together and create a non-hierarchical platform to discuss the roles and activities that shape our everyday – a call for dialogue with the potential to find completely new forms of practice.
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\n","title":"Kaarin Kivirähk"}]},"contributors":null}},{"id":"cG9zdDo0MTg2","title":"Anna-Stina Treumund, what would you do today?","slug":"anna-stina-treumund-what-would-you-do-today","uri":"/anna-stina-treumund-what-would-you-do-today/","date":"2025-10-29T10:54:18","excerpt":"Whenever I go to a protest, a feminist or queer gathering or event, I find myself wondering if Anna-Stina Treumund would have liked it. Or sometimes, whether she would have been bored and interfered somehow. Once, she slid over the audience down the auditorium at a Chicks on Speed performance in Tallinn, where the band […]
\n","content":"\nWhenever I go to a protest, a feminist or queer gathering or event, I find myself wondering if Anna-Stina Treumund would have liked it. Or sometimes, whether she would have been bored and interfered somehow. Once, she slid over the audience down the auditorium at a Chicks on Speed performance in Tallinn, where the band gave her a golden cape as a welcome to the stage. Chicks on Speed had been a cult queer feminist band, but at the Tallinn concert one member played from a video call, which felt like Tallinn fans were not relevant for the band. This show was certainly saved by Treumund. But who was Anna-Stina Treumund, the self-proclaimed first lesbian artist of Estonia?
\n\n\n\nFirst, Anna-Stina Treumund studied photography in Tartu, where she found close friends and models. Her early work is largely influenced by fashion photography, gay and women photographers who often portrayed themselves. Treumund’s staged photographs of her younger sister and herself come across as tools of introspection. Yet, for the viewer, these photographs say little about the artist’s inner world; instead, they offer a display for reflecting upon oneself. Next to depictions of mental states, often sad and oppressed, the two other significant motifs in her early work are intimacy and family (e.g., the series Studies of Sexuality 2005–2017). It seems that she always contemplated becoming a mother (e.g., Princess Diaries (2008); Mothers (2011)). In two or three of her series, she depicted her longing for connection with her family members (Family (2006)). In other works, she sought ways to depict functional relationships based on mutual trust and open dialogue, or what a lack of it looks like, or told stories about things swept under the covers (e.g., Silent Dialogues (2007)). Without meaningful social connections, a person feels lonely, and thus, many of Treumund’s photographs describe loneliness as a feeling of being cut off.
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nIn 2010, Treumund presented her MA graduation exhibition, You, Me and Everyone We Don’t Know, exhibiting portraits of herself and her sister, her friends and members of the lesbian community around her, including the video We’re Going to Have a Baby, showing a lesbian couple dancing. At this exhibition, the self-portrait Queer, where she is carried by another woman, was surrounded by lists of publicly bisexual, lesbian and queer women artists, writers and theorists handwritten on the wall. The events programme for the exhibition included a seminar, where Estonian feminist scholars, critics and other artists were introduced to queer theory as something that we could employ in our thinking. It was a time when feminist research was much more marginal in Estonian academic circles and queer theory was still less widespread globally compared to the 2020s.
\n\n\n\nTreumund knew she was not the first lesbian artist in Estonia, but in 2010, others simply would not define their artistic position as such. It must be emphasised that publicly claiming a lesbian position was a wildly bold statement – along with the introduction to queer theory – however, it was enthusiastically welcomed in the art field and by the audience. Previously, there had been some discussion about gay sensibility and a public lecture referring to Lee Edelman at a 2009 conference Men, Women and Others organised by the Gender Studies Research Group (RASI) at Tallinn University. Hence, Treumund’s demand (or command) to think queerly landed on receptive ground. Since then, queer theory has been employed in the analysis of existing works by gay and lesbian artists in Estonia as well as works depicting gays, lesbians, drag queens, and Pride marches with greater nuance and clarity. Perhaps this disclosure of sexual identities – as an alternative to the ambivalence which is often justified with apolitical or conservative statements – came across as threatening to the patriarchal culture and audiences, since despite the positive critical reception and relatively active participation in art through regular solo shows and group shows, Treumund never received any awards. However, in 2016 she had a solo show at Tartu Art Museum curated by Rael Artel and accompanied by a mid-career catalogue. In addition to that, the gender studies scholar Redi Koobak dedicated her entire PhD thesis to analysing Treumund’s early work.
\n\n\n\nAnna-Stina Treumund’s artistic explorations seeking a feminist and lesbian community continued with systematic work seeking traces of queerness from the national and generational past. In the series Woman in the Corner of Mutsu’s Drawings (2010), Treumund visualised a lesbian yearning for her other half (how normative is that?!) by restaging the series Together by Marju Mutsu, a beloved Estonian printmaker of the 1970s. In Mutsu’s prints, two orientalised women are moving to embrace each other on a bed, yet in Treumund’s work, the woman remains alone, until over a year later Treumund made a double portrait Together II with her partner at the time. Later, Treumund made Loser (2011) as another witty homage to Kai Kaljo’s legendary video work Loser (1997), where Kaljo explains how her ridiculously small income crushes her high artistic morale. Treumund’s Loser (2011) envisions heterosexist macho men who claim that their stereotypically homophobic attitudes are an essential part of their high moral standard – that is as absurd a contradiction as Kaljo’s depiction of the relationship between artistic determination and income.
\n\n\n\nTreumund’s historical explorations culminated with a series of photographs and an artist book, both titled Lilli, Reed, Frieda, Sabine, Eha, Malle, Alfred, Rein and Mari (Lugemik, 2012). This is so far the most exhibited series by Treumund – it depicts her friends, as in You, Me and Everyone We Don’t Know, but more significantly, it visualises the knowledge gap of the history of women-loving-women in Estonia. The photographs were inspired by archival and print media sources from the 16th to the 20th century, provided to Treumund by the literary scholar Vahur Aabrams. Since 2020, there is much more information available about Treumund’s Alfred or A. Oinatski. In 1929, Oinatski became the first Estonian trans person to be interviewed and portrayed in the Estonian media and who was instrumentalised by the 1920s–1930s eugenicist movement to advocate forced sterilisation of poor, uneducated and otherwise socially marginalised groups of people1Põldsam, R. 2020. Otsides kvääre lugusid sõdadevahelise Eesti ajakirjandusest. Mäetagused, 76, 95−124. DOI: 10.7592/MT2020.76.poldsam. In 2012, Treumund knew much less about this person, so her alter ego called Alfred was masculine. Another figure from Treumund’s series, Lilli Suburg, a writer and leader of women’s education and emancipation since the late 19th century, has gained significantly more interest among researchers. 2Over decades, Lilli Suburg is thoroughly studied by Eve Annuk. However, Piret Karro’s 2023 exhibition on women’s history Escape the kitchen! at Vabamu museum brought Suburg into public limelight as a significant person in the national history. Furthermore, unlike the Baltic German queer men, who belonged to a higher class of landowners, keeping local peoples as serfs since the 12th century crusades, the women remain unknown.3Ken Ird’s and Andreas Kalkun’s chapters in Kalevi alt välja. LGBT+ inimeste lugusid 19. ja 20. sajandi Eestist [Bring back to light. Stories of LGBT+ people from 19th and 20th century Estonia] edited by R. Põldsam, A. Kalkun, V. Aabrams. Tallinn: Eesti LGBT Ühing, 2022. And research on the history of other transgender and intersex people is also still modest.4See, Põldsam, R. 2020. Otsides kvääre lugusid sõdadevahelise Eesti ajakirjandusest. Mäetagused, 76, 95–124. Treumund therefore started working on the Estonian queer past in parallel with her good friend and fellow artist Jaanus Samma, who gained international recognition with his fictive opera NSFW: A Chairman’s Tale (2013/2015) based on ethnographic interviews with gay men and one of the most well-known court cases on the Pederasty Article in Soviet Estonia.5Samma, J., Viola, E., Rünk, M., Põldsam, R. (eds.). 2022. Not suitable for work. A Chairman’stale. Berlin: Sternberg Press & Tallinn: Center for Contemporary Arts. Cf Rünk, M. 2022. Kõigest hoolimata. Esimehe lugu [Despite Everything. The Chairman’s Tale]. Kalevi alt välja. LGBT+ inimeste lugusid 19. ja 20. sajandi Eestist. Tallinn: Eesti LGBT Ühing, 109–121. Põldsam, R. 2024 Homophobic Discourses and their Soviet History in Estonia. Folklore: Electronic Journal of Folklore, 92, 49−72. DOI: 10.7592/FEJF2024.92.poldsam.
\n\n\n\nDuring Treumund’s lifetime no one studied lesbian past in Estonia, so in 2013, she continued creating a series on fairy tales and a lesbian childhood. It seems that the photograph Reading Jane Eyre, where Treumund’s partner is spanking her with a barely noticeable smirk, offers an introduction to the later BDSM series. For Treumund, BDSM was a new exciting community activity. BDSM is based on the ethics of consent: it opened her to new avenues of sexuality and learning something new was wholly invigorating. Treumund started to photograph queer feminist pornography, showing playful scenes of sex and moments before sex, finding inspiration from the erotics of genderbending and showing skin. As she says in the video Princess Diaries II (2014), she had a submissive man from Vienna (where she was studying at the time) and she enjoyed being a dom. This short chapter of Treumund’s life as a dom is still a curious story that her friends sometimes discuss. Although in Princess Diaries II (2014), Treumund argues that she is considering giving up art to have a child and a different life, BDSM inspired her to expand her practice so that she moved on from photography and video to installations and sculpture using bondage and latex materials, joking about sex and pleasure, and making some watercolour paintings of her egg cells.
\n\n\n\nTreumund made bold artistic statements on female sexuality with complete seriousness, but when I think of her, I remember her warm crackling laughter. She was so proud of her work and she knew perfectly well her formative role in the queer lesbian movement in Estonia. It was Treumund who introduced queer theory, initiated queer reading groups and Ladyfest Tallinn (2011–2018), which grew into further artistic activities and fostered friendships, romantic relationships and much more. While in retrospect it is easy to idealise Anna-Stina Treumund for her courageous and sometimes contradictory statements, her bravery to come out as lesbian in a very straight art field – that continues to view itself as queer-friendly and anti-racist but rarely succeeds in the exclusion of predators – was unprecedented. I often wonder what Treumund would do about the wars and increasing inequality around us. Would the artist community’s contribution to social activism be any different with her part of it? Would there be a stronger alliance between queer-feminist and lesbian artists of different generations if she were around? When I think that she never saw equal marriage in Estonia, it suddenly seems that she lived in a particularly raw time. Treumund was really a queer person – as in a fuck shit up person – who would not leave you feeling more at ease with yourself. She struggled with clinical depression for half of her life and had no issue expressing her discomfort, upset or opposition to you directly, which sometimes was honest and sometimes impolite. Most importantly, she always expected people to be kinder, smarter and articulate about their points of view. Anna-Stina Treumund would dream people around her to be better and not just give up on making the world a liveable place for all. So, don’t become a cynic, don’t give up!
\n\n\n\nRebeka Põldsam is Research Fellow in Ethnology at University of Tartu. She is currently working on the project Imagining Queer Aging Futures – A Study of LGBTQ Aging in Estonia, Poland and Sweden. In 2023, she defended her doctoral dissertation Why are we still abnormal?! History of Discourses on Non-Normative Sex-Gender Subjects in Estonia at the University of Tartu. Põldsam is also a freelance feminist art curator and a visiting lecturer at the Estonian Academy of Arts.
\n","title":"Rebeka Põldsam"}]},"contributors":null}},{"id":"cG9zdDo0Mjc4","title":"With humour, the absurd and seriousness I emerged. Bop and bop! – Interview with Kaarel Kurismaa","slug":"with-humour-the-absurd-and-seriousness-i-emerged-bop-and-bop-interview-with-kaarel-kurismaa","uri":"/with-humour-the-absurd-and-seriousness-i-emerged-bop-and-bop-interview-with-kaarel-kurismaa/","date":"2025-10-29T10:53:46","excerpt":"I encountered Kaarel Kurismaa’s work for the first time as a child when the Estonian National Television showed his animated films. I was also impressed by the gigantic blinking light object that made an appearance at the finale of Šlaager (1982), a film about the pop music industry of the Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic. Also […]
\n","content":"\nI encountered Kaarel Kurismaa’s work for the first time as a child when the Estonian National Television showed his animated films. I was also impressed by the gigantic blinking light object that made an appearance at the finale of Šlaager (1982), a film about the pop music industry of the Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic. Also in the 1980s, Kurismaa’s psychedelic objects could be seen as part of studio design for Sven Grünberg’s musical performances in television shows. In the mid-1990s, Kurismaa taught us colour theory and a special course in kinetic art at the Estonian Academy of Arts. While the founding of the Soros Center for Contemporary Art created a radical divide in the Estonian art field – the old and the new generation – Kurismaa with his kinetic art exhibitions seemed to adapt to the paradigm shift painlessly. In the early 2000s, myself and many other artists wanted to make music instead of art and the only artist from the older generation we found who could offer us guidance was Kaarel Kurismaa. At the time, however, we didn’t know sound art was a legitimate artform and not just a no-man’s-land inhabited by a few freaks. In 2001, we established the first sound art platform Metabor and asked Kurismaa to join us. We organised experimental noise and sound art nights, using his sound machines – in a former hospital, abandoned factory, a Soviet monumental park, inside an old ice breaker etc. It is admirable how Kurismaa, who was 60 at the time, still had the energy to participate in experimental techno events in post-industrial dens in the middle of the night with young exploring artists! We were young and anxious and he balanced it out with his unique calmness. We considered him our guru, because this is exactly what his sound and noise machines are – pure magic and vibration that unfolds in the space.
\n\n\n\nKiwa (Kiwanoid as sound artist) is an Estonian multichannel meta-artist, publisher, writer and neoist.
\n","title":"Kiwa"}]},"contributors":null}},{"id":"cG9zdDo0MTY0","title":"Between Fantasy and Hardcore Reality: The Performance Worlds of Netti Nüganen","slug":"between-fantasy-and-hardcore-reality-the-performance-worlds-of-netti-nuganen","uri":"/between-fantasy-and-hardcore-reality-the-performance-worlds-of-netti-nuganen/","date":"2025-10-29T10:53:24","excerpt":"In her stage and video works, Estonian performance artist and musician Netti Nüganen becomes, among others, a weightlifter, teenage vlogger, detective, historian and cowboy. Her characters allow her to build and deconstruct narratives crucial to her method of understanding the gaps between recognisable references and language, as she puts it. A graduate of the School for New […]
\n","content":"\nIn her stage and video works, Estonian performance artist and musician Netti Nüganen becomes, among others, a weightlifter, teenage vlogger, detective, historian and cowboy. Her characters allow her to build and deconstruct narratives crucial to her method of understanding the gaps between recognisable references and language, as she puts it. A graduate of the School for New Dance Development (SNDO) in Amsterdam, her works have been shown internationally, while also touring with Florentina Holzinger’s ensemble pieces since 2017. During a recent conversation in Vienna, where she has been living for the past three years, Netti discussed her evolving practice of world-building through performance with Kathrin Heinrich – from sound experiments and fragmented storytelling to the theatrical traps she seeks to escape.
\n\n\n\nKathrin Heinrich is an art historian, writer and critic based in Vienna, Austria. She currently works at mdw – University for Music and Performing Arts, organising the yearly interdisciplinary summer school isaResearch. Her writing has been published in magazines and newspapers such as frieze, springerin, Texte zur Kunst, Der Standard, and Süddeutsche Zeitung.
\n","title":"Kathrin Heinrich"}]},"contributors":null}},{"id":"cG9zdDo0MzI4","title":"Breath of the deep sea: Kristina Õllek","slug":"breath-of-the-deep-sea-kristina-ollek","uri":"/breath-of-the-deep-sea-kristina-ollek/","date":"2025-10-29T10:48:52","excerpt":"In her Tallinn studio, Kristina Õllek was finalising a new installation for the group exhibition For All at Last Return, curated by Emma Dean and opening on 8 November 2025 at the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art (UK). October sunlight filtered through the windows, landing on a crucial element of the installation: a series of […]
\n","content":"\nIn her Tallinn studio, Kristina Õllek was finalising a new installation for the group exhibition For All at Last Return, curated by Emma Dean and opening on 8 November 2025 at the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art (UK). October sunlight filtered through the windows, landing on a crucial element of the installation: a series of screen-like surfaces where sea salt, algae, bacteria, and other marine materials were growing, depositing, and transforming through natural processes. These hybrid interfaces, in which environmental matter produces its own forms of imaging, form the foundation of complex assemblages combining video, photography and sculptural elements.
\n\n\n\nOver the past five years since our last collaboration (Tiger in Space, EKKM, 2020, curated with Marten Esko and Lea Vene), Õllek’s artistic research on marine ecologies has evolved alongside the intensifying condition of climate breakdown, responding to human impact on the oceans with work that is both materially rigorous and conceptually expansive. This autumn, she is taking part in Down Deep. Living Seas, Living Bodies (State Art Gallery Sopot, Poland), curated by Joseph Constable, and just juuri nüüd nyt (Foku gallery, Tallinn), curated by Hertta Kiiski, among others, while she also prepares another newly commissioned work for Dulwich Picture Gallery next year (a duo show in London with Konrad Mägi in collaboration with Kumu Art Museum, curated by Kathleen Soriano), and a duo show with Tuomas A. Laitinen, curated by Anna Mustonen in 2027 in Finland.
\n\n\n\nAcross all these years, the sea has remained her constant and closest collaborator.
\n\n\n\nÕllek’s new work Breathing Deep Currency for the Baltic continues a trajectory that began with Nautilus New Era (2018), inspired by Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870). In Verne’s story, Captain Nemo speaks of rich metal deposits on the ocean floor, suggesting that their extraction might one day be within reach. This proto-science-fiction fantasy has now become a tangible reality and a political, economic, and ethical issue of our time: deep-sea mining is promoted as a necessary step in the transition to renewable sources of energy, with rare-earth and other minerals such as manganese (a critical industrial metal for steel and battery production) deemed essential for renewable technologies. This promise reflects a Promethean belief in salvation through technology, even as we persist in the paradox of extracting and accumulating ever more. It comes at a devastating cost: the minerals may fuel the illusion of a sustainable future, but fragile ecosystems, seafloor habitats, and countless species are destroyed in the process. It is difficult to believe that any new technology could improve environmental conditions within a system that imposes no limits on growth and extraction on a finite planet. For now, the only certainty remains what it has always been: the expanding profits of the corporations involved.
\n\n\n\nWhile preparing her recent work, Õllek was in dialogue with marine scientists at the University of Newcastle, who study deep-sea ecologies. The encounter between scientists and artists is, in many ways, an encounter between different worldviews and methodologies: distinct ways of knowing, perceiving, and, above all, doing research. “Each scientist has a very deep knowledge of a very specific focus”, Õllek told me, “but they often avoid discussing broader implications. They’re careful not to express personal views”. Unlike scientific research, artistic research inhabits a state of perpetual becoming, where unexpected knowledge emerges through exploration, transformation, and speculative practice – always open, never fully complete. Õllek noted how scientific freedom is increasingly constrained by funding and private interests: “A senior scientist told me my work was inspiring because artists still have the freedom to explore ideas scientists can’t always pursue. Science once allowed more experimentation, but now funding and expectations direct it.”
\n\n\n\nAmong the discoveries that most struck Õllek was from a decade-long study by the Scottish Association for Marine Science, whose results were published in 2024, which revealed a second source of oxygen produced entirely without sunlight, on the deep ocean floors. ‘Dark Oxygen’ (a colloquial name) is generated by manganese nodules in complete darkness, and suggests that entire ecosystems may depend on non-photosynthetic oxygen production. This view radically challenges our assumptions about where and how life can exist, and thus potentially redefines the parameters for searching for it beyond our planet. Yet these findings often conflict with the interests of the mining companies funding such research. “When the scientists published their discovery” Õllek said, “the mining company tried to downplay the results as it could hinder extraction. The scientists had to stand against them, and also find another funding source to continue their research. It’s been concerning to learn that some researchers may even face pressure to remain silent or to expose only a partial result of their findings.”Õllek’s practice dwells in the tension between human extraction and the resilience of life, exploring the often-invisible processes that sustain oceanic ecosystems, and a deep awareness of how much remains unknown. Her works occupy these interstitial zones, where boundaries between organic and synthetic, human and non-human, scientific and fictional become porous. Nautilus New Era already reflected this tension, imagining the ocean as a techno-political landscape of both wonder and exhaustion. Her new body of work deepens that inquiry departing from the recent discovery of Dark Oxygen, asking how image-making can reveal what remains unseen, the invisible infrastructures and living processes that sustain the planet.
\n\n\n\nNautilus New Era was one of the pieces Daniela Arriado and I were happiest to include in the Screen City Biennial 2019, which we curated together in several venues in Stavanger. The city, both the heart of Norway’s oil industry and a magnet for cruise tourism, embodied the contradictions of extractive practices that Õllek’s work investigates. The work was installed in the cruise terminal, a glass building overlooking the North Sea, which seemed the perfect setting for a work in which the sea itself is both subject and context. We had planned carefully around ship arrivals and departures, but on the day of the opening, a massive cruise liner unexpectedly docked just outside, eclipsing the horizon and transforming the work’s relationship to the sea. Suddenly, the installation appeared dwarfed by the machinery of consumption it sought to question. We laughed at the irony because control in the public space is always provisional: the environment inevitably responds in unpredictable ways that we prefer to embrace than oppose.
\n\n\n\nWhen the ship finally departed, the horizon reopened and the work regained its line of sight to the water, as if breathing again. But that short moment revealed something essential about the conditions we inhabit, and that Õllek’s practice captures sharply: that we persist through cycles of pressure and release, through the pulse between obstruction and renewal, visibility and concealment, contraction and expansion. A continuous, inevitable rhythm, that is mirrored in the act of breathing itself.
\n\n\n\nVanina Saracino is an independent curator, film programmer, writer, and lecturer whose work explores the intersections of art and science, ecology, technology, experimental film and video, and art in the public space. Since 2021, she has taught at Berlin’s Universität der Künste and has spoken at numerous universities and cultural institutions. She has contributed to several books and catalogues, and holds degrees in Communication Sciences, Arts Management, and Art Theory.
\n","title":"Vanina Saracino"}]},"contributors":null}},{"id":"cG9zdDo0Mzcz","title":"Paul O’Neill: A rethinking of curatorial relations is necessary","slug":"paul-oneill-a-rethinking-of-curatorial-relations-is-necessary","uri":"/paul-oneill-a-rethinking-of-curatorial-relations-is-necessary/","date":"2025-10-29T10:47:43","excerpt":"During the first week of October this year, a four-day symposium on curating took place in Helsinki. Initiated by Paul O’Neill and PUBLICS, it was called Positioning. A Symposium on Curatorial Thinking in the Nordic-Baltic Region and Beyond. This year, the event was co-hosted with Amos Rex and Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma; in the […]
\n","content":"\nDuring the first week of October this year, a four-day symposium on curating took place in Helsinki. Initiated by Paul O’Neill and PUBLICS, it was called Positioning. A Symposium on Curatorial Thinking in the Nordic-Baltic Region and Beyond. This year, the event was co-hosted with Amos Rex and Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma; in the upcoming years it will be happening elsewhere in the Nordic and Baltic countries. Bringing together an impressive list of curators both from the region and elsewhere, the symposium aimed to grasp the idea of what a curator’s role is today and how this can vary across countries, institutions and initiatives. We asked Paul O’Neill, the organiser and a researcher on curatorial thinking about his motivation behind bringing together a network of international curators.
\n\n\n\nThe aim is to establish a new nomadic centre for curatorial thinking – without a single main centre, or fixed location. Instead, it would be a centre that accounts for a cooperative decentring or recentring – one that is networked, unfixed, flexible and of regional significance while connecting to the breadth of knowledge here and beyond. This new Centre for Curatorial Thinking would focus on the significance of past and present thinking, knowledge and critiques within the practices of the curatorial.
\n\n\n\nThis symposium aims to start with positioninga globally networked enquiry into current and future curatorial thinking in the Nordic-Baltic region during a time of urgencies, and of radical uncertainty for culture and human rights. We come together to consider how we can think and work together, how to position ourselves with others, and how to bridge the local-regional-global curatorial nexus within and beyond the region. We aim to provide a critical space for much-needed dialogue between diverse local and regional actors, agencies, and international contemporary art scenes, and all our extraordinary curatorial thinkers across generational and geographical boundaries.
\n\n\n\nI think the Nordic-Baltic region needs more curatorial thinking, productive dialogues and cooperation across institutions and between differently located practices. There are already many geopolitical concerns and commonalities across the region.
\n\n\n\nThere is also considerable disbalance between institutional scales where there are a lot of large-scale museums, institutions and academic structures (albeit constantly under threat) without offering sufficient support for independent, co-dependent and smaller scale curatorial, emergent and organisational practices.
\n\n\n\nThere is a huge gap between those two scales without middle ground and medium-scale support structures to provide links between more grassroots and the top level and more stable infrastructures for curators, artists and cultural workers alike. Work needs to be done but without competing for the same agency, access or resources.
\n\n\n\nAt the same time, we have seen the emergence of curatorially-led, but relatively new modestly scaled biennials, triennials and regionally specific larger-scale exhibitions with global perspectives. These are happening simultaneously with even newer curatorial studies and nascent exhibition histories and programmes focusing on the region and its surrounding relations. With the Centre for Curatorial Thinking we wish to decentre the activities of publics from Helsinki into the regions, whilst expanding our activities and collaborations with institutions, curators and artists alike, offering opportunities and support for one another.
\n\n\n\nAfter more than 30 years of increasingly intense curatorial production and debate – considering the foundation of the first curatorial courses in the late 1980s and early 1990s as a starting point – one aspect within curatorial discourse is the continued contestation of the existence and legitimacy of a specifically curatorial field of praxis. It seems that we are experiencing an ongoing discursive cycle of consolidation around curatorial practice at an increasingly global level.
\n\n\n\nDuring a similar timeframe, all across the globe, we have increasingly witnessed an ever-aggressive and accelerating reaction to globalism in the form of rejection, xenophobia (even in form of multiple genocides), and anti-internationalism in the form of the march and success of the populist Right, and its preference for autocratic men with names like Erdoğan, Modi, Netanyahu, Orbán, Putin, and Trump. What these leaders and their followers share, among other things, is a disdain for the liberal and humanist values of contemporary art and its permissiveness. It is the ideology of global curatorial and contemporary art practices, its proposed value, and its economic support structure – globalisation, and thus its creation of surplus value – that are under direct attack. It should also be noted that their policies are a response to the economic effects of neoliberal deregulation and global trade in favour of protectionism and neo-nationalism.
\n\n\n\nSo by focusing on the differences and commonalities of forms and modes of curatorial thinking we can bring into focus where we are positioned and how we might come to know more, and to share and to offer opposition or modest modes of resistance. I like to think of positioning as situated knowledge, or simply as the practice of locating where someone or something is located or sited; how we are arranging ourselves or something in a particular way, how someone or something is placed or arranged; putting or arranging (someone or something) in a particular location or specific way. Taking up a position, taking a stance, and of positioning oneself with others as a means of informing art, curatorial, educational and institutional practices as much as they shape the world around us.
\n\n\n\nAdditionally, we need to consider how we position and with whom are we positioning ourselves, and to build and expand more productive collaborative and sustainable networks, partnerships and relationships across the region and beyond for the present and the future.
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\n","title":"Kaarin Kivirähk"}]},"contributors":null}},{"id":"cG9zdDo0MjIw","title":"Your guide to exhibitions in Estonia and beyond for Autumn and Winter 2025/2026","slug":"your-guide-to-exhibitions-in-estonia-and-beyond-for-autumn-and-winter-2025-2026","uri":"/your-guide-to-exhibitions-in-estonia-and-beyond-for-autumn-and-winter-2025-2026/","date":"2025-10-29T10:47:13","excerpt":"TOP PICKS RECOMMENDED BEYOND
\n","content":"\nIn the heat of the summer, everything is thirsty – it is the season of growth and, eventually, of ripening. Above all, thirst is a sensation of lack, a yearning for liquid, for water, and is deeply ingrained in all life, as living bodies consist of water, and life is bound in it. It also […]
\n","content":"\nIn the heat of the summer, everything is thirsty – it is the season of growth and, eventually, of ripening. Above all, thirst is a sensation of lack, a yearning for liquid, for water, and is deeply ingrained in all life, as living bodies consist of water, and life is bound in it. It also contains an element of intense desire for something or someone. So, as much as we are made of water, we are made of thirst, propelling us forward; this is blackout, heat, desire for flesh, sex, life, blood, anything.
\n\n\n\nThe summer issue of A Shade Colder titled Thirst offers a glimpse into the spectre of thirst. Viewing thirst at the touching points with the natural world, we invite you to explore the floral fantasias of the painter Malle Leis, as seen through the eyes of Andrew Berardini. Leis’ lush world of plants evokes a sensuality guiding the reader towards an endless summer. This is often best spent in the farther reaches of the land, as Leis did in Võrumaa in southern Estonia. In the current issue Kaarin Kivirähk also profiles the art scene in the city of Võru. On another kind of journey, artist Rebecca Jagoe steps into the wet realms of the sea, pondering the eroticism of liquid states in their Ofthyrst.
\n\n\n\nThirst as yearning is also the starting point for an interview by the curator and writer Max Hannus with artists Sarah Nõmm and Maria Izabella Lehtsaar. How much of yourself or your desires and struggles is it acceptable to put into artistic work in a visible way without hurting yourself or appearing too thirsty? Among other things, the conversation discusses gentleness, queerness and intimacy. To accompany the piece, artist Elo Vahtrik has created collages based on the works of the two artists.
\n\n\n\nBut alongside the thirst for life and everything it entails, there are also darker shades to thirst. Thirst always seems to balance between existence and non-existence – bringing things into this world and making them disappear, while thriving on lack.
\n\n\n\nAs the events of Russia’s ongoing war in Ukraine in the past months have once again made clear, the thirst for life can easily be devastated by the thirst for blood. Although, considering the unnecessary destruction it causes and its senselessness, perhaps, the English expression lust for blood is more apt here. And while the echoes of the war in the artworld pale in comparison to the real-life destruction it sows, nothing is left untouched. Do images still have power and how can we re-evaluate that power and the context in which they came into existence and inhabit the world in the present? To tackle some of these questions, curator Liisa Kaljula writes about the curatorial and administrative choices made when recontextualising the exhibition Thinking Pictures at Kumu Art Museum.
\n\n\n\nIn whichever way we experience thirst, most likely its intensity will change us to some degree, so let us be aware not to get lost in it and have kindness towards others who have yet to emerge from the experience.
\n","featuredImageId":"cG9zdDo5Mjc=","featuredImage":{"node":{"id":"cG9zdDo5Mjc=","sourceUrl":"https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/finale-scaled.jpg","mediaItemUrl":"https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/finale-scaled.jpg","srcLQIP":"https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/finale-45x72.jpg","srcSet":"https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/finale-848x1350.jpg 848w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/finale-188x300.jpg 188w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/finale-643x1024.jpg 643w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/finale-768x1223.jpg 768w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/finale-45x72.jpg 45w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/finale-495x788.jpg 495w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/finale-636x1013.jpg 636w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/finale-707x1125.jpg 707w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/finale-1131x1800.jpg 1131w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/finale-1237x1969.jpg 1237w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/finale-965x1536.jpg 965w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/finale-1286x2048.jpg 1286w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/finale-scaled.jpg 1608w","altText":"","caption":null,"title":"finale","mediaDetails":{"width":1608,"height":2560}}},"categories":{"nodes":[{"slug":"editorial","name":"Editorial"}]},"terms":{"nodes":[{"name":"Thirst","slug":"thirst","description":"July 2022","id":"dGVybToxOA==","issueFields":{"issueColor":"#ddd7ee","accentColor":"#000000","productUrl":null}}]},"articleAuthors":{"articleAuthors":{"nodes":[{"id":"cG9zdDoxMzg=","content":"\nKeiu Krikmann is the editor of A Shade Colder.
\n","title":"Keiu Krikmann"}]},"contributors":null}},{"id":"cG9zdDo3Mzg=","title":"The Floral Fantasias and Pop Potentials: On the Work of Malle Leis","slug":"the-floral-fantasias-and-pop-potentials-on-the-work-of-malle-leis","uri":"/the-floral-fantasias-and-pop-potentials-on-the-work-of-malle-leis/","date":"2022-07-08T10:19:46","excerpt":"A sly, almost crypto-surrealism pervades the paintings and serigraphs of Estonian artist Malle Leis (1940–2017). Somehow simultaneously immediate, quotidian, and observed, but also fluid with rainbow waterfalls, unmoored botanicals, and landscapes emerging from people in other dimensional spaces. Her work flirts with pop, with everyday intimacy, and with the codedly erotic within floral fantasias and […]
\n","content":"\nA sly, almost crypto-surrealism pervades the paintings and serigraphs of Estonian artist Malle Leis (1940–2017). Somehow simultaneously immediate, quotidian, and observed, but also fluid with rainbow waterfalls, unmoored botanicals, and landscapes emerging from people in other dimensional spaces. Her work flirts with pop, with everyday intimacy, and with the codedly erotic within floral fantasias and stylized portraits of friends, family, allies, and vividly coloured horses in angled postures and often uncanny flatness (a bit Alex Katz, a bit Tamara de Lempicka, a smattering of Frans Snyders and Lisa Frank, but both sweeter and more sour than any of these), sometimes blending into landscapes and later those visions of nature without figures at all.
\n\n\n\nWhen asked to list her favourite artists for her retrospective catalogue in 2014, she cited Russian turn-of-the-century bête noire Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin (especially his star turn naked atop a horse in Bathing a Red Horse, 1912), the 19th century realist grandee Ilya Repin (lately famous for his Reply of the Zaporzhian Cossacks, 1880–1891, as an echo of the resistant fuck-you the Ukrainian people gave and are giving since Russia’s 2022 invasion of their homeland) along with lusciously floral Ukrainian folk artist Kateryna Bilokur and the flowery southwest folds of American painter Georgia O’Keefe. The artist curiously and explicitly states in the same interview that she’s not a feminist (though it’s unclear if it’s elder revanchism or a lifelong fundamental stance), there’s a distinctly bold femininity that connects to the latter two female artists. In the case of Bilokur, who, however exquisite her paintings are, was an untrained artist from a folk background, and proto-feminist O’Keefe, one feels a bold and brave femininity in both of these women’s work from the folkloric to the avant-garde that emanates from Malle Leis’ oeuvre but always with a blinding colour.
\n\n\n\nIt’s difficult to summarize any artist working for nearly five decades, but we can trace her polychrome vivacity to the graphic angled framings and all-over compositions bursting with plants from the 60s, her portraits from the earlier fundamentally representative to the latter much more specific figures, and those landscapes from the psychedelically unreal to the sweetly twee. Those otherworldly angles sometimes set aside vacant backdrops for her brushy voice to be laid bare upon arching winter birches and autumnal foliage.
\n\n\n\nHer work from the 60s and 70s, probably her most well-known, beams with life; the brightest colours possible squeezed out in response to the grey backdrop of the basement she painted in and one assumes the stultifying, bureaucratic grey of Soviet-occupied Estonia. In her youth, there were sneaky overnight trips to chill with the non-conformists in Leningrad and whispers of psychic liberations wafting over borders. I’m not sure Malle Leis would ever consider herself a Soviet hippie, but for me there’s definitely a vibe. Whimsical, bold, playful, her diptych Red Horses (1972/4) is totally emblematic of this moment in her work: a bent and smeary double rainbow arcing over two red horses (echoes of nudey Petrov-Vodkin and his equine wash) with rich blue bridles backdropped by an utterly flat pale blue sky. Astride one horse, a young woman with red hair gently breezing, wears a pale poppy orange t-shirt and shorts matching her hair, barefoot and smiling. Over a blue enclosure that foregrounds the painting, a trio of Kelly green clovers drift by in the wind. It almost feels naive in its carefree wonder and is utterly loveable for it.
\n\n\n\nIt’s probably valid to say something about horses and suppressed/emerging female sexuality here, and of course the same goes for Leis’ most beloved subject: flowers. But I’ll gently evade any Freudian speculation, and say simply that these don’t have to necessarily symbolize anything but that they inspire so many feelings connected to the erotic that they are just a tongue-lick away from sexy (And I’ve never been a woman riding a horse, so I’ll let others speak on that specific sensation). But flowers and fruits were always the sex organs of plants. When animals first stumbled out of the ocean, the exclusively green foliage evolved into the fleshy and flowery to attract creatures (from insects to us) to better propagate themselves. Or to put it more simply, flowers re-invented themselves for our pleasure. And sometimes fearlessly unfurled or tightly deployed, there is always pleasure here.
\n\n\n\nWhile one gets the feeling that Malle Leis must have glimpsed the print Flowers (1964) by Andy Warhol, if she did spot this famed screenprint in the wild, whatever ideas she plucked from it took on a very specific form as she clearly had a botanist’s eye for the details of the various fruits, flowers, and sundry plants that leaf, curl, and bloom through her flat and fulsome pictures. While Warhol was generally interested in celebrating the banal, flipping the high artiness of it all upside-down, looking at Malle Leis’ flowers, she found in the simply vivid hues a subject to obsess over, endlessly refine, hone her style. You feel her care and connection in every great mullein and rose. The stylized simplicity is never quite shed from her portraits, but her flowers (without forgetting their origins in idealistic pop) become ever more particular. They begin in the 60s fluidly abstracted, but become with each passing year almost slavish in their detail. The flowers lose their specific place in the mundane and their context disappears into emptiness, from hard black and sky blue to atmospheric cloudy green, while the blooms became ever more precisely rendered. A similar phenomenon occurs in her portraits, the softly idealized become ever more specific, reaching their apotheosis in the bird’s nest tangle of a beard in her portrait Raul from 1990.
\n\n\n\nBut let’s step back for a moment to Leis’ flowers, the sheer lush open squirm of all these blooms deserves a moment of reverie here. Petals like speckled goldenrod tongues loll out alongside tightly packed and plump buds ready to burst (Anais Nin: “And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.”). Stamens bulbously pop and perfect leaves wave sharp as cut crystal. Strawberries plump from pale green to lusty red along writhing stems tenderly rendered. Roses already bursting look coyly about to lose their petals like dropping their first veil and at other times tumble, cut from unknown heights against inky black skies. Leis’ all over 60s flower fields and her explosive use of colour becomes tightly contained within these folds. By 2009, these monochrome backdrops let go of flowers for a canvas or three and confronts modernity. Those fluid stems and bright blooms in New Brave World II, 2009, become wires and cords (I think I spot a duo of USB-A cords and a golden microchip) and this take on modernity is hard to read. Is it a hard response to the primacy of technology or turning her botanical eye to a new crop of colours blooming from every laptop and cellphone? This painting with its precision and composition, its uncanny atmosphere has moments from the same strange world of German painter Monika Baer.
\n\n\n\nWhilst they echo the scientific detail of botanical drawings and take on some of the early Renaissance Netherlandish obsession with precision in the plant world, they never quite lose their 60s Pop potential. And though a professionally trained artist, you can feel her work wavering between some contemporary international sense of art, the layered history of painting, and the native affections for the folkloric, trying to find her place in a shifting world. But no matter where Leis found herself throughout her career from Soviet nonconformity to feeling ignored during Soros-era art funding to her late-career revival, you feel the courage of her colours and the potential of prismatic light in every luscious petal.
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\n","title":"Andrew Berardini"}]},"contributors":null}},{"id":"cG9zdDo3NDI=","title":"Art as a way of creating safer spaces, possibilities for intimacy and connection. A conversation with Sarah Nõmm and Maria Izabella Lehtsaar","slug":"art-as-a-way-of-creating-safer-spaces-possibilities-for-intimacy-and-connection-a-conversation-with-sarah-nomm-and-maria-izabella-lehtsaar","uri":"/art-as-a-way-of-creating-safer-spaces-possibilities-for-intimacy-and-connection-a-conversation-with-sarah-nomm-and-maria-izabella-lehtsaar/","date":"2022-07-08T10:21:18","excerpt":"I’m leaving rainy Helsinki behind and approaching sunny Tallinn, where I meet Sarah at her studio, and Maria Izabella is joining us on zoom from their studio in Mainz. Maria Izabella and Sarah’s show Hardcore Gentleness is about to open this summer at Vent Space in Tallinn (28–31 August), and we’ve agreed to chat about […]
\n","content":"\nI’m leaving rainy Helsinki behind and approaching sunny Tallinn, where I meet Sarah at her studio, and Maria Izabella is joining us on zoom from their studio in Mainz. Maria Izabella and Sarah’s show Hardcore Gentleness is about to open this summer at Vent Space in Tallinn (28–31 August), and we’ve agreed to chat about art and life. I’m thinking of their works and themes of desire, intimacy, safety and sexuality, as my body is soaked to the bone in overflowing infatuation for someone I spent last night with. I’m looking out the window of the Tallink Megastar ferry, and waves of love wash over me. It’s a good day to talk about thirst and connection.
\n\n\n\nTo start off, I just now realised there’s a meme that funnily relates to your practices: Maria Izabella you’ve used nail clippers as elements in Your Brain is a Bedroom, and Sarah you’ve used body hair and hair as material. In the meme there are two images, before and after. The first says something like My pre-date ritual before, and the latter My pre-date ritual now. The before-image depicts shaving armpit hair, and the now-image depicts cutting nails. I think that’s a nice meme in relation to your practice, as you’re dealing with body image and patriarchal standards of beauty and desirability, and sexuality of course, as cutting nails in this case refers to queer sex.
Sarah Nõmm: Haha yes! I think hair is a very stigmatised material, when it’s anywhere else than hair, eyelashes or eyebrows. I feel every person who tries to fit the normative has had problems with body hair growing. We all have responsibility for normalising body hair and taking the perceived grossness out of it. Like sometimes when I go to parties, and I have armpit hair, people just pull on them, and I’m like “what the fuck!” In my practice, I’m using it as a symbol that carries a variety of meanings. I’m trying to actively fight the norms regarding body hair and bodily expression.
Also related to bodily expression and the body as an active subject, how did you, Maria Izabella start working with imagery of boxing, the hitting hand and boxing gloves?
Maria Izabella Lehtsaar: Boxing was initially a hobby of mine, something separate from art. When art became work for me, boxing was something that differed from that, something physical. I had been interested in it as a child already, but I wasn’t allowed to do it, I had to do dance classes. So now, as a grown-up I wanted to start. And then it found its way into my art: the boxing gloves and the wrapping and hands came naturally. I see myself as if in a first-person shooting game, that’s how I see myself in my daily life, hands are the first thing I see of myself. It was interesting that for an artist, hands are such an important tool, and in boxing hands are a boxing tool and a protecting tool. In boxing, hands have to be protected, and at the same time my hands are protecting my head. It’s interesting to think how they have a double-meaning: to protect and be protected. The boxing studios that I’ve been to haven’t really been that inviting though, I haven’t felt I belong to those clubs.
Sarah Nõmm: Yeah, I’ve always been fond of boxing because my dad was a boxer in the late 90s, but I’ve also been discouraged from going; the energy in those spaces is a bit different to what I’d like.
Is this something that you find in other fields in life as well? You’ve mentioned earlier that you find the art field very masculine-driven, or that the energy might not be the most inviting for you? How do you see yourselves in relation to the field: do you see there is space for you?
Maria Izabella Lehtsaar: I’ve always felt isolated because of the topics I deal with, like mental health or my queerness, and other people don’t really know how to talk about these topics. Overall, my life experience is quite isolated because I’m neurodivergent, so I feel I have to mask in order to fit into spaces. It’s been funny to me to feel that double-down in art spaces.
Sarah Nõmm: At the Estonian Academy of Arts, some departments are a bit masculine-driven. I remember an instance, when I had a conversation with one of the professors and tried to make him understand why I’m working with body hair, trauma, relationships, sex and BDSM, and he said “I can see these feminist topics are now in fashion.” I could always almost hear his thoughts, he just didn’t understand, and it was hard to find a common ground. These are not just topics that are “in fashion” but they are actually important and need to be analysed and talked about.
In the field in general, it has been a relatively nice experience for me, as it has been slowly changing for the better. Also because of the internet, it’s quite easy to connect to others that are thinking about and working with similar topics, and there, find a sense of sharing.
Maria Izabella Lehtsaar: The main reason why I didn’t stop talking about the things I deal with, was that it’s so nice when someone thanks me and says they feel the same but haven’t seen any representation before. It’s humbling and warms my heart if I can provide that space, create a little corner where those things are addressed.
A lot of times, you make something and you never hear what people have felt or experienced. But it’s so valuable!
Maria Izabella Lehtsaar: I’ve even made friends with people who’ve reached out via Instagram and commented on my work. I think it’s really typical of the Eastern European queer experience to connect online and that community is really important. And even before Covid the community very much existed online.
Sarah Nõmm: The energetic impulse from others is so important; an artist really needs that. But it’s a basic human need too.
I’d be curious to know what you’ve been thirsting, yearning after lately?
Sarah Nõmm: Ah, very primitive things, like love and lust, funky human connections. I live for that connection.
Maria Izabella Lehtsaar: Maybe it’s basic but mutual understanding. It’s so exciting when someone’s on the same page as you. I haven’t felt so understood in a long time as I feel now by someone. And also, after isolating, basic physical connection, like hugging someone, non-sexual touch, I love it.
For me, they’re very much the same things. Sometimes an intellectual connection, like having a deep, sharp conversation with someone who knows what you’re talking about and you get new ideas from them and you’re like, wow, my mind is blown, like these brain orgasms. But I’m not always up for that, I guess I’d say that anything that gets me to the next level, somehow accelerates or changes the mode. But always love! When thinking of love or sexuality or wanting to make a connection, how do you see artistic practice fitting into all of that? What is the impact that your art practice has in your life? Because sometimes I think my motivations for making art are very selfish, like I want to do something in my life and that guides my practice. I want big changes but also really small ones. Once I even built a whole exhibition around the desire to spend time with an artist I had a crush on. So artistic practice is like a vehicle in my life to get connected and to process that need.
Sarah Nõmm: These needs and wants are definitely very intertwined. I’ve started working with shibari as a symbol. I like shibari as a pleasurable act, but through art I can dig deeper and make time for it, and also interpret it in an artistic way. And when I started thinking of non-monogamy and doing research on that, I met a girl who was polyamorous and I fell for her, and it all came together. In shibari, the safety aspect is so important, the feeling that someone is holding you. And since hormones are involved – rush of endorphins – it’s very addictive.
Maria Izabella Lehtsaar: For me too, even if I wouldn’t want something to become a project, I still somehow vent through creating. At first, my art practice was more about me venting, but at one point I found myself accidentally retraumatising myself, so I had to step back and think through how I want to represent myself through art. It’s only quite recently that I’ve twisted the narrative in a way that it’s not so much about me anymore, and that feels healthier. I started detaching myself and made an alter ego, Mesimagus, that’s like a third person presenting something that’s not personal. It made me more interested in making art.
Yeah, when dealing with personal stuff in art, it’s very fragile and very delicate terrain. You get lost or broken easily if you leave yourself too exposed.
Sarah Nõmm: Every time I put something out there, I feel like I’m standing naked in the gallery, and everyone else is wearing clothes. But for me it gets gradually easier to be naked. Maybe there’s some masochism in there, it’s very therapeutic.
For me, it’s a very mixed feelings situation, like feeling deeply ashamed and excited at the same time. Being like “look, here are my insides”, but feeling terrified and super embarrassed. In relation to being fragile and terrified, do you think that it is possible to build structures for oneself that support in this aloneness? Was the isolation project, Loveless 2, for example, a way of creating a safer space for you?
Maria Izabella Lehtsaar: Isolation came from a personal need, as I found out I am neurodivergent. I felt alone, and I wanted to think about what a safer space is for me, being a queer person as well. The new me didn’t fit with the ideas many people in my life had about me and I had to cut people out. Through this project I found a way to be vulnerable again, and to be surrounded by people.
Sarah Nõmm: The power of being vulnerable!
I’m thinking of the title of your upcoming exhibition, Hardcore Gentleness. Do you think the world is ready for hardcore gentleness?
Sarah Nõmm: My pink cultural bubble is quite safe, but when I’m outside of that bubble, it’s a very scary world. The world is not accepting of vulnerability, but we’re taking baby steps.
Maria Izabella Lehtsaar: The term world is funny, but when you take the courage to be gentle in a hardcore way, the right people will find you, and you will form your own little world.
Maria Izabella Lehtsaar is a Tallinn-based artist, working primarily with themes of queer experience and mental health, often exploring the fine line between reality and fantasy. Their works and motifs are simultaneously modest, loud and captivating. They blend pop culture aesthetics and sensitive black-and-white graphics, combining them in textiles, drawing and text.
Sarah Nõmm is a Tallinn-based artist, working mainly in the media of sculpture, installation, video and performance. Her practice focuses on the woman’s body and the spaces around it. Her works are often based on personal experience and look at the body in the context of folk traditions, myths, taboos and everyday rituals, while also analysing the underpinning gender inequality. She often uses traditional handicraft techniques in her practice, such as spinning yarn, felting and weaving on looms.
Max Hannus is a curator and writer working in the intersections of sexual/romantic relationships and art making. Their practice is autobiographic, and they’re always searching for (queer) love. They work with different forms of writing: mundane, unpretentious, blunt – always looking for sincerity.
\n","title":"Max Hannus"},{"id":"cG9zdDo3Nzk=","content":"\nElo Vahtrik is an artist. Currently, she is infatuated with photography.
\n","title":"Elo Vahtrik"}]},"contributors":null}},{"id":"cG9zdDo2MTI=","title":"Ofthyrst","slug":"ofthyrst","uri":"/ofthyrst/","date":"2022-07-08T13:34:19","excerpt":"1. how do ye fele? how do you feel? un-mored, ye saye unmoored, you say un-mored, as in, a bote floten on a bodie of watere, a solid driften arounde unmoored, as in, a boat floating on a body of water, a solid drifting around on a liquyd, thyngs that held ye in the worlde, […]
\n","content":"\n
how do ye fele?
how do you feel?
un-mored, ye saye
unmoored, you say
un-mored, as in, a bote floten on a bodie of watere, a solid driften arounde
unmoored, as in, a boat floating on a body of water, a solid drifting around
on a liquyd, thyngs that held ye in the worlde, sutured ye in-to tyme & nou &
on a liquid, things that held you in the world, sutured you into time & now & [a) leave house twice a week at most b) rigid structure to day c) world predictable & knowable & infinitely repeatable (running stitch) d) empty lack of people – stability & predictability & safety e) low chance of balance being upset f) routine is emotional regulation g) you are trying to become solid, calcified, in – – – like a rock? no a fossil (sexy fossil)]
nou
now
& nou
& now
gon, dissolv’d, yforsopied, al to grotes [routine]
gone, dissolved, disintegrated, all to tiny pieces
tyme
expansiv, voide, an unlefliche preuelage but also – unmored
time
expansive, empty, an unbelievable privilege but also – unmoored
here is the – – – firstli
here is the – – – first of all
saye to yoreselfe, iyam a bagge, a sak, of wett, ai, al-wayes, lekinge, iyam ai
say to yourself, i am a bag of liquid, ever, always, leaking, i am eternally
a porus bagge of watere, pisse & shite & shite & teres & squyrt & pisse &
a porous bag of water, piss & shit & shit & tears & squirt & piss &
mucis & slet & mucis mucis slet pisse blod blod, blod & pisse
mucus & snot & mucus mucus snot piss blood blood, blood & piss
saye to yoreselfe iyam not a solide iyam wett & this is gode and sexie and
say to yourself i am not a solid i am wet & this is good and sexy and as it shold be as it should be
sexie
sexy
how sexie
how sexy
ye hav to remembre it is sexie
you have to remember it is sexy
ye ar a bagge of wett & betymes ye leke & sooth þe bagge shal forsopie
you are a bag of wet & sometimes you leak & soon the bag shall dissolve
entire & ye shal leke ayen
entirely & you will leak again
go bak to þe – – –
\n\n\n\ngo back to the – – –
not a solide driften arounde on a liquyd
not a solid drifting around on a liquid
a bagge of wett,
a bag of liquid,
ye
you
tyme moue not for-warde, onli, it ebbe & it floue & it pushe & it hale & it come
time doesn’t only move forward, it ebbs & it flows & it pushes & it pulls & it comes
& it go
& it goes
[…]
Sandor Ferenczi: For, we reflected, what if the entire intrauterine existence of the higher mammals were only a replica of the type of existence which characterised that aboriginal piscine period, and birth itself nothing but a recapitulation on the part of the individual of the great catastrophe which at the time of the recession of the ocean forced so many animals, and certainly our own animal ancestors, to adapt themselves to a land existence, above all to renounce gill-breathing and provide themselves with organs for the respiration of air?
holden yoreself in a bagge it is too much, ye saye, i wante to fucke the see &
holding yourself in a sac is too much, you say, I want to fuck the sea and
forsopie
dissolve
i wante to fucke the see & forsopie
I want to fuck the sea and dissolve
[…]
i wante to fucke the see and forsopie
I want to fuck the sea and dissolve
i wante to be the mist hitten the face of a hyker in the brecon becons / i
I want to be the mist hitting the face of a hiker in the brecon beacons / I
wante to go doun the urethrill chanell of a gote, & up the xylemm of a wodie
want to travel down the urethral channel of a goat, and up the xylem of a woody
stemme pelargonyum / I longe to be the vernish of muciss on the skin of a
stemmed pelargonium / I long to be the sheen of mucus on the skin of a
slug, the jelly-lyke sak of bakteryal cytoplasum / i wante to find mineself in
slug, the jelly-like sac of bacterial cytoplasm / i want to find myself in
the pittd bordels of the endoplasumec rityculum of a nerue celle, som-where
the pitted edges of the endoplasmic reticulum of a nerve cell, somewhere
along the legg of an instagram influencer / to be part of the nile / to be an
along the leg of an instagram influencer / to be part of the nile / to be an
egge, boilen in a pote of bobelen me / i longe to be the snou totrodden
egg, boiled in a pot of bubbling me / I long to be the snow trodden
under-fote on mount kita / to be caustik, vapouring bobels in the botel of
underfoot on Mount Kita / to be the caustic, evaporating bubbles in the bottle of
mountain dew / this be profounde lustfulnesse, an unendeable orgasum
Mountain Dew / this is a profound desire, an unending orgasm
I treuli longe
I truly want
[…]
ye entere the watere, &
you enter the water &
ye unholde yoreself entire
you lose yourself entirely
yore skin moisteþ, fingeres snarcheþ, the hardend cruste of ded skin on yore
your skin becomes moist, fingers pruning, the hardened crust of dead skin on your
heels bicomeþ mothe-wok, than softe, a flatt, whyt wen cross the pigmented
heels will become a squashy, soft white glaze across the pigmented
skein under-neathe
skin underneath
fingere nayles bicomeþ softe & plyant, tresses fannen in euery place, waften
finger nails become soft and pliant, hair fanning in every direction, wafting
fronds lyke see-wede
fronds like seaweed
sands & saltes absorpt bi þe see, biginne to forwere & waste the cortices of
absorbed salts and carried sand particles begin to erode and break down the layers of
yore skin: fyrst the epydermes,
your skin: first the epidermis,
epythelyall lauirs shivere & flake in moiste
epithelial layers gently sloughing off in moist
shides
flakes
the basall lamyna, mor fin then the fin-moste
the basal lamina, finer than the finest
silke, off-lifteþ in one,
floteþ awei from yore bodie lyke diafanys
silk, lifts off in one,
floats away from your body like a diaphanous
ektoplasum, sightful in a moment fore it forsopieþ in the pouning of her
ectoplasm, visible only for a second before it disintegrates in the buffer of her
wawes
waves
the dermys shal be langer to waste doun,
the dermis will take longer to break down,
the coars connectyf tissu shal wit-stand the
the coarse connective tissue resisting the
forweren of þe see
erosion of the sea
The blod vessils, nekid, leke redd wisps in-to her blew – mayhap smal fish
The blood vessels, naked, leak red wisps into her blue – perhaps small fish
shal smelle the nekid blod vessils, & the smal fish acom & shal biginne to
will smell the naked blood vessels, & they come to take small
forbite
bites
blod outburst euer & ai, mor & mor, as smal chunks of flesch are nypped off
blood continues to stream out, more and more, as small chunks of flesh are nipped off
bi the fish-kin, mor chunks & culpouns of ye flaken in-to þe see wit ech
by these fish, particles and hunks of me flaking into the sea with each
cheue of there molares
bite of their teeth
they cheue ye up, thei tak ye awei from her, but no fres: thei shal digeste ye,
they chew you up, they take you away from her, but no matter: they will digest you,
shite some parts
& encorporat other parts in-to their
excrete some parts
& encorporate other parts into their
beinge, & sitthen or soon, thei shal die, & thei too shal liquifie: bi outher wei,
being, & sooner or later, they will die, & they too will liquefy, one way or another
ye shal
you will
sitthen or soon, be part of her
sooner or later, be part of her
yore flesch-fatt, yellew & thik, a jel-lyk shining
yore fat, yellow and thick, a jelly-like sheen
that now is yore upper, this shal nat blende in-to her – it shal
that is now your upper surface, does not dissolve into her – it
need the coars graines of sand
takes the rough sand particles
to forewere yore fatt,
to break off your fat,
not tremblen chunkes, but in stede as a clottid,
not in wobbling chunks, but instead as a clotted,
cloudi emulcioun that shal lifte to the
cloudy emulsion that rises to the
topp & sitte as a spume on her wawes
surface and sits as a froth atop her waves
& finalli, as yore hypodermis falle awei, yore inners ybared
and finally, as your hypodermis falls away, your insides are exposed
connectif tissus upbreste faste & ye
connective tissues break down quickly and you
softli
softly
implode,
implode,
lyke a plume of clottid redd ink,
like a plume of clotted red ink,
ylased wit globose flaks of flesch & organals,
riddled with lumpen aggregates of flesh and organs,
ye scatere,
you disperse,
bicome part of her,
become part of her,
wide-wher,
de-centred,
eueri wher
everywhere
Rebecca Jagoe is an autistic artist, writer and editor based in Wales. Working across objects, drawing, textiles, printed texts, performance, and workshops, their practice variously explores the ideological construction of monstrosity and madness in Western culture; the relationship between clothing, illness, and gender; and human intimacy with other-than-humans. They are currently on the Freelands Fellowship at g39 in Cardiff, where they are researching the traces of animistic thought found in late Medieval European languages.
\n","title":"Rebecca Jagoe"}]},"contributors":null}},{"id":"cG9zdDo5NjA=","title":"Curating against a backdrop of war","slug":"curating-against-a-backdrop-of-war","uri":"/curating-against-a-backdrop-of-war/","date":"2022-07-08T10:21:42","excerpt":"On 17 February 2022, crates with over a hundred works representing Moscow and Baltic Conceptualism arrived at Kumu Art Museum in Estonia from the Zimmerli Art Museum in New Jersey. A five-year-long cooperation between the two museums to organise Thinking Pictures. Conceptual Art from Moscow and the Baltics was coming to an end. The three curators of […]
\n","content":"\nOn 17 February 2022, crates with over a hundred works representing Moscow and Baltic Conceptualism arrived at Kumu Art Museum in Estonia from the Zimmerli Art Museum in New Jersey. A five-year-long cooperation between the two museums to organise Thinking Pictures. Conceptual Art from Moscow and the Baltics was coming to an end. The three curators of the exhibition – Anu Allas, Liisa Kaljula and Jane A. Sharp – had met in New Jersey to start research at the Norton and Nancy Dodge Collection of Nonconformist Art from the Soviet Union in 2016.1Norton Dodge was an American economist and art collector, who started collecting unofficial Soviet art during his study trips to the Soviet Union in the 1960s and 1970s. In 1991, he donated his collection to Rutgers University in New Jersey. The collection holds more than 20,000 pieces of unofficial art from different Soviet republics. On 24 February 2022, when the exhibition team at Kumu Art Museum was about to open the crates and start condition checking the artworks, Russia instigated a war against Ukraine. Instead of unpacking and condition checking, all exhibition preparations, which engaged a dozen departments in the museum were halted and instead, difficult discussions commenced inside the institution. As it felt inappropriate to talk about dialogue between Moscow and the Baltics when another Eastern European nation was being bombed, should we cancel the show altogether? Should we leave out the Russian artists and join the boycott of Russian culture started elsewhere in Europe? What is Russian culture in this context, when the Soviet Union was made up of various ethnicities and cultures, most of them often labelled Russian? These were the questions the curators and directors were trying to resolve in a seemingly impossible situation.
\n\n\n\nThe Covid-19 pandemic, economic instability and climate change were already in effect, when the war hit Eastern Europe at the beginning of 2022. So, on the one hand, cultural institutions had already had some experience in crisis management, but on the other, resources were slowly being depleted and nervousness had started to set in. How could we manage the programme and the budget in the fog of such a crisis, as it was impossible to foresee what happens next year, even next month or next week? How long will the war last? Will it bring additional economic turbulence? Or spill over into other countries in Eastern Europe? Might it happen that in addition to programme changes and budget cuts, the museum might have to evacuate whole collections or be required to offer bomb shelter for hundreds of people? This was the context in which discussions between the directors and the curators got under way, and as a public institution, we also had to take time to reach a consensus. The Estonian Ministry of Culture left museums full autonomy to make their own decisions during the crisis, but also the responsibility for their programming choices. While the management was worried of not being able to protect the museum in case of incidents, the curators were against leaving out artists based on their Russian/Slavic sounding family names, since avoiding the splitting of unofficial art according to nationality had been the aim of the project from the very start.
\n\n\n\nIn the end, a consensus was reached in the museum: to open the exhibition with empty halls as an anti-war statement and an act of solidarity from one post-Soviet nation to another and install the works gradually, while closely following developments in Eastern Europe, hoping for the war to end soon.
\n\n\n\nBy the beginning of April, war crimes committed by the Russian army were beginning to emerge and it was becoming chillingly clear to us Eastern Europeans that genocide was being carried out in Ukraine, while Western Europe still refused to believe their eyes.
\n\n\n\nOur exhibition halls were kept empty at the time, and it was then we truly realised what a sensitive job our exhibition designers had done just a few weeks earlier. In only two nights Mari Kurismaa and Tuuli Aule had come up with a design for a grey space where all museological elements, such as podiums, vitrines, wall texts and etiquettes would be present, while the art works would be missing, only to be marked by ghostly grey shapes on the walls. From one perspective, the design was inspired by the conceptual art histories, where classical art objects would disappear and be replaced by a critical discourse that would ask questions about the institutional positioning of art. But from another perspective, the post-apocalyptic grey space, or so we assumed, would be reminiscent of the black-and-white photographs of European museums during World War II, of the ghostly Louvre and Hermitage, where empty frames were the only signs left of the artworks that once inhabited these spaces. Or the countless Eastern European museums that were bombed and turned into dust during the war; among these museums was also the predecessor of the Art Museum of Estonia, destroyed in the 1944 March bombing of Tallinn by the Soviet air force. But this immersive environment, or so we hoped, would not only resonate with the feelings of Estonian citizens – our regular visitors – but equally so with tens of thousands of Ukrainian refugees who had reached Estonia during the first months of war and were granted free entrance to museums.
\n\n\n\nDuring the first sombre weeks, when the exhibition stood empty and the grey shadows painted on the walls marked the missing art works, we unconsciously animated several other traditions of the war time museum. Such as giving curatorial tours to our visitors and telling them about paintings that were not there and activating the imagination of our visitors. Additionally, the instructors of the museum’s education department gave handicraft workshops outside the museum for Ukrainian children who made up a considerable proportion of the refugees. Even though the war remained more than a thousand kilometres away from us, these ghost tours and the workshops were our way of tackling the new dark realisation that Eastern Europe was no longer a safe place, that we were once again living on the geopolitical seismic border between East and West. The way many Estonians feel about Ukrainians, sending money and delivering medical supplies and everyday items in their own cars, showed that the Russian aggression had indeed activated the Soviet era layers in the national psyche. We can see the same happening in Latvia, Lithuania and Poland, all the countries of Eastern Europe that know what it means to be under Moscow’s dictate. Even though there are some smaller and bigger gaps in our Eastern European chain of solidarity, it has been great to see how the former Eastern bloc is now taking an approach to European foreign policy based on values rather than pragmatics. The Estonian prime minister Kaja Kallas and Lithuanian foreign minister Gabrielius Landsbergis soon became the Baltic voices of this consciousness also in the international media.
\n\n\n\nOne of the aims of our solution was to provoke discussion about the role of culture during such a crisis and the mission of museums during war. The empty halls were, perhaps, irritating to some of our audience, but we still hoped the display would be viewed as a critical museological experiment by many. And in this we did succeed, as the exhibition was reviewed from a variety of perspectives: some of the reviewers praised us for a sensitive solution, while others condemned us for not having the courage to show Moscow dissidents. For example, while the Ukrainian artist Bohdana Korohod saw the exhibition as a decolonial statement of letting go of the Moscow-centred art histories,2Kohorod, B. 2022. Mõtlevad pildid mõtleb dekoloniaalsetest praktikatest. Müürileht (19 April 2022). the Estonian critic Hanno Soans deemed it an empty gesture that helped neither Ukraine nor Estonia.3Soans, H. 2022. Sõnaatlas ja mälutöö – meie oma vene hingeelu. Sirp (25 March 2022). Our Facebook post with photographs of empty halls went viral among Ukrainian speakers as “an exhibition of Russian artists who supported the war”, even though most of the Moscow conceptualists had long emigrated from Russia and had no connections to Putin’s regime. There were different opinions even inside the museum about whether we should boldly exhibit and support the Moscow dissident artists or leave them in storage: some were afraid that in the black and white world of war there was no space for nuance, whereas some thought that it was especially important to support dissident culture now as Russia needed so badly to change, to have democratic alternatives to the totalitarian path it had once again taken. At the same time, there was a public campaign in Riga to collect funds to remove the Soviet era Victory monument, and in Tallinn, art history students were considering changing the topics of their BA and MA theses about Soviet era art. The latter was especially surprising as it had never even occurred to me that academic freedom could once again – after the highly politicised art histories written in the 1990s – suffer because of the geopolitical situation in our region. However, I was convinced we have to continue researching our Soviet era history sine ira et studio, not because it was a great time but because it was our history.
\n\n\n\nAfter the first month of total silence in the exhibition space, we started installing the first works at the end of April, adding carefully only one work or one series to each of the themed rooms, installing a new one every two weeks. To avoid highlighting works based on the nationality of the artist, we decided to install black-and-white works first and move slowly towards the more colourful material, treating the Moscow and the Baltic material the same way. In the room titled Fading Images, we started with the Russian artist Vadim Zakharov — who was protesting in front of the Russian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale around the same time — to talk about the disappearing of Russian culture during the war. The first dialogues in the exhibition hall between the Baltic and the Moscow artists were beginning to appear somewhere in the middle of May, and we witnessed no anger among the visitors, no incidents of pouring red colour over the famous works of Moscow conceptualism. I went to the exhibition hall regularly to ask guards if anything had happened, but the guards only passed on complaints about missing labels or lack of light in places where wheelchairs could access the exhibition, never about the content of the exhibition. But we were still making plans no more than two weeks ahead and found ourselves in a position contrary to the role of the curator as we had known it so far. Instead of having a sense of control and totality of vision, both of these had long slipped through our fingers like sand. In fact, the design of the exhibition was the only solid thing about the whole project: the grey shapes were painted on the wall, so they either had to be filled or left there to speak of the gaps, the missing works. And only later did we find out from the Lithuanian feminist curator Laima Kreivyte that what we had done was post-curating, an art of public discourse rather than curatorial act of power.
\n\n\n\nLiisa Kaljula is an Estonian curator and art historian, based in Tallinn, Estonia. She has written articles, edited catalogues and curated exhibitions about the art of the late socialist and post socialist eras, such as Maria Kapajeva. The Dream Is Wonderful, Yet Unclear (2017) at Narva Art Residency, Sots Art and Fashion. Conceptual Clothes from Eastern Europe (2019) and Thinking Pictures. Conceptual Art from Moscow and the Baltics (2022), both at Kumu Art Museum. She is currently working at the Painting Collection of the Art Museum of Estonia and has recently completed her PhD at Tallinn University, dedicated to the appropriation of Soviet visual culture in Estonian art.
\n","title":"Liisa Kaljula"}]},"contributors":null}},{"id":"cG9zdDo2NDk=","title":"City profile. Catching the spirit of southern Estonia","slug":"city-profile-catching-the-spirit-of-southern-estonia","uri":"/city-profile-catching-the-spirit-of-southern-estonia/","date":"2022-07-08T10:22:37","excerpt":"Võru is a small, yet lively town in southern Estonia – with a bit more than 12,000 inhabitants, it accommodates several art venues and has recently started celebrating its own gallery nights. Stella Mõttus, a young art professional who runs two of the main gallery spaces in the town, tells me that all her summer weekends […]
\n","content":"\nVõru is a small, yet lively town in southern Estonia – with a bit more than 12,000 inhabitants, it accommodates several art venues and has recently started celebrating its own gallery nights. Stella Mõttus, a young art professional who runs two of the main gallery spaces in the town, tells me that all her summer weekends are already booked with different art events she is organising in Võru. Mõttus is one of the driving forces in the local art community: having started her studies in Tartu University and worked for Kogo gallery in Tartu, she came back to her home town to start working at the gallery space of the local museum.
\n\n\n\nWhen travelling from the capital Tallinn, you have to first pass by the second biggest city in Estonia, Tartu, which is much like a border city between northern and southern Estonia. After passing Tartu, the landscape starts to change and you can really feel as if you have gone through a gate to the South: hilly landscape, vast fields, numerous magical lakes and dark woods replace the flat landscape of the northern part of Estonia. Võru is not far from the larger cities in the region. By bus, you can reach Võru from Tallinn in about four hours, if you are coming from Tartu, the town is only one-hour drive away. From the Latvian capital Riga, Võru is a three-hour drive away. The borders of Latvia (in the South) and Russia (in the East) are both only about 30 km from the town.
\n\n\n\nThe new central hub for Võru’s art scene, the studio complex Liiva-ATE (ate is short for atelier) was established in 2019 on the initiative of the local artistic community. Now 13 creative minds work here, their mediums ranging from video editing and graphic design to ceramics and printmaking. The waiting-list is long as many new possible renters are queuing up to get a comfortable atelier in the building with a friendly vibe. The house itself is privately owned by local entrepreneur Roland Lust who has renovated the building and has many plans to develop the creative hub further. All the new renters must be approved by the existing tenants.
\n\n\n\nOn the ground level of Liiva-ATE, a small shop, stocking products from people working in the building, was established last year. A staircase takes the visitor into the basement of the building where you can find a contemporary art space, Kanal gallery. Located in an old vehicle inspection pit, the name means channel in Estonian, and was the word used to describe the basements under a garage.
\n\n\n\nStella Mõttus, who runs the gallery as a side project to her museum work at the Vana-Võromaa Kultuurikoda, says that the opening season of the space last year centred around well-known names in the Estonian scene who still had a connection to Võru. “It was a completely new space and I wanted to invite bigger names in order to see how it works out,” she tells me, “Peeter Laurits has been living in the nearby village of Kütiorg for a long time, Marge Monko has previously had exhibitions in Võru and so on. This year, as the place is already more established, I was thinking more about artists who could work with the space as a venue for installations and who could be interesting both for the local community but also the Estonian art scene in general. We are exhibiting many young artists this year, for example, Kertu Rannula will have her first solo show here in June. She is working with widely used Snapchat and Tiktok filters, looking into the trend of plastic surgeries that imitate these filters.” An open call for the end of the year programme will be announced in June.
\n\n\n\nAlthough officially called a gallery, Kanal functions more as an artist-run-space than a commercial gallery. The funding for the space comes from the Estonian Cultural Endowment and the priority is to pay artist fees. “Some people ask how we can pay the fees for the artists but for us it is the primary goal, even if we have to cut other costs. Above all, the space is meant for artists but it is also created for the local community and so the artist must always either connect their exhibition to Võru or organise a public event. For example, this spring, Laura Kuusk organised an art day for local kids, which was extremely successful, we had more than 70 children come into the gallery in one day. It was a lot of fun!”
\n\n\n\nAt the beginning of this year, the exhibition Universe of the Farmyard: Creators of Southern Estonia at Kumu Art Museum explored the south Estonian identity and its expressions in art from the beginning of the 20th century. “Historically the southern areas of Estonia had been part of Livonia for centuries. The borders of Estonian-speaking areas were joined into one administrative unit after the 1917 February Revolution. Even at the beginning of the 20th century, but more so in the 1920s and the 1930s, a unique Estonian identity started to form”, writes curator Liis Pählapuu in the catalogue. She continues: “The distinct spirituality contained in the identity of southern Estonia has been described in numerous literary and anthropological studies. Examinations of the nature of creative people from southern Estonia have repeatedly highlighted their romantic dispositions, cheerfulness, and propensity towards fantasy and sincerity compared to the seemingly more realistic sensibility of the people from the flat landscapes of northern Estonia.” And among different regions of the so-called southern states, “Võrumaa is usually considered the most distinct bearer of the spirit of southern Estonia, and the cornerstone of the identity of its inhabitants is the viability of its dialect, võro kiil.”
\n\n\n\nI also meet Toomas Kuusing, an artist who moved to Võru only a few years ago from Tallinn. He wanted to escape the skyrocketing prices of real estate, which make it impossible to afford an apartment there. During the last couple of years, his works have become somewhat a symbol of the southern Estonian mentality, the myths and black humour. He even illustrated the newest version of the national epic Kalevipoeg, which was published in the local Võro dialect. Although illustration work kept him occupied during Covid, he now feels the need to return to his own practice again. Kuusing started at Liiva-ATE but now owns a studio space in the same lovely wooden house he lives in. He is painting and making prints and currently preparing for a group show in Finland. He says: “Somehow now there are more people and places than a few years ago. I would even say that we wouldn’t need any more art venues here in this small town. But we could have more concerts and maybe also a residency space for artists, musicians and writers. This would be nice.”
\n\n\n\nThe varied programme of the gallery space in the Vana-Võromaa Kultuurikoda museum features contemporary art shows but also design and applied arts exhibitions. When I was visiting in May, the exhibition Pinefulness (curator Siim Preiman), originally produced for Tallinn Art Hall, was on show. “I am thinking a lot about having more exhibition exchanges with other institutions,” Mõttus tells me, “It makes sense to show things that have been previously exhibited in Tallinn, as not everyone is able to travel.” Pinefulness focuses on the Estonian relationship to the forest from an ecocritical perspective. Cutting down the forests has been an immense issue in Estonia for several years and as many in the region are employed in the wood industry, the show really got to people. The curator stayed in Võru during the installation period and after the opening gave tours and spoke with the locals about the issue which touched many people’s hearts.
\n\n\n\nIn the very centre of Võru, we find the beautiful lake Tamula with a beach popular among the locals as well as tourists, enjoying walks on the promenade, the views from the benches or hanging out at the bungalow bar in summer. This is the place where the artist and designer Sigrid Liira has mounted a small displaycase-gallery, called Võru Showcase. Initially from Võru, she was studying in Tallinn but came back there with her partner Silver Marge.
\n\n\n\nThe showcase gallery has a long history: originating from Prague, it was given to the Estonian-French artist Camille Laurelli who tried it out in Grenoble and later in Tallinn where it was used by different artists. Now Laurelli left it to Liira and Marge to start a new life in Võru. “The location was chosen based on the fact that so many people pass this place or hang out here in the summer,” Sigrid tells, “It has been very cool to see how people stop and scratch their head sometimes. The idea has been to bring unexpected things here and maybe to shake things up a bit. Last year, we had a conceptual exhibition by Triin Tamm, the showcase was filled with sand and people were discussing what it could mean, if this can be considered art and so on. I like when art starts discussions.” Sigrid hopes to open up the Showcase for local art school students as well. “But I would also be happy to host international artists. As the transport and production are both so cheap for such a small space, it would be a really nice way to introduce international artists in Võru.”
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\n","title":"Kaarin Kivirähk"}]},"contributors":null}},{"id":"cG9zdDo3OTQ=","title":"Guide to exhibitions in Estonia and beyond for Summer 2022","slug":"the-summer-travelling-guide-to-exhibitions-in-estonia-and-beyond-for-summer-2022","uri":"/the-summer-travelling-guide-to-exhibitions-in-estonia-and-beyond-for-summer-2022/","date":"2022-07-08T11:46:11","excerpt":"Top picks in Estonia: Beyond:
\n","content":"\nUue Kunsti Muuseum, Pärnu City Gallery, Pärnu Artists House, Pärnu Cultural Centre, Pärnu
In the coastal town of Pärnu, the traditional Man and Woman show opened on 9 June for the 29th time. The summer-long exhibition is being questioned by a show of the same title at the Pärnu City Gallery and Pärnu Artists House, opening on 25 June. After this, another traditional summer art event, the “IN Graafika” printmaking festival opens in these spaces. This summer is a great time to visit Pärnu as a new Cultural Centre has also been established this year, which promises to transform the community, neighbourhood and the city as whole into a collaborative creative hub for all people and fields.
Estonian Museum of Applied Arts and Design
17 June – 25 September
Looking Through Objects is an exhibition looking at the work of female designers from two countries, Estonia and Poland. The exhibition presents not only the objects designed, but also the designers themselves, their working environment and thoughts about the essence of their work. A total of 33 outstanding women in contemporary design are presented in the exhibition.
EKKM, Tallinn
18 June – 17 August
For the exhibition Greatest hits, convener Evelyn Raudsepp has invited six Estonian curators to choose one artwork they would like to revisit, or feel is particularly relevant for them in the current moment. The exhibition thus forms a mix-tape, where the significance of these contemporary art tracks is addressed through intimate letters to the artists.
Kanal gallery, Võru
12 June – 16 July
While analysing the essence of social media’s beauty filters, the relation between the filter and the user is under observation. Is a beauty filter a sticky parasite made as part of the system, which splits our self-image and profits from our insecurities, or is it a symbiosis, where the filter soon becomes part of our daily beauty routine? Kertu Rannula graduated from the Estonian Academy of Arts in 2022. Through site specific photo- and video installations, she researches the relationships, signs and symbols of contemporary people and culture.
Viljandi museum, Viljandi
11 June – 24 September
The exhibition is part of the project Artists in Collections, which brings together contemporary artists and the small museums of Estonia. Artist Edith Karlson asked the collection registrars to select one item from more than 150,000 objects in the museum and to record a justification for the importance of that object to them. Sometimes it is evident from the beginning what they are talking about, sometimes we must take time to ponder. The stories about the items are juicy, full of intriguing details and humour.
Kai Center, Tallinn
9 April – 7 August
The exhibition presents six artists – the ars viva prize winners Lewis Hammond, Tamina Amadyar, and Mooni Perry, as well as three remarkable emerging artists from the Baltic region: Laura Põld, Anastasia Sosunova, and Jānis Dzirnieks. By linking the position of the agent and the artist in the idea of the exhibition, the curator Maria-Helen Känd wants to highlight the importance and role of artists as mediators and shapers of the collective consciousness.
Viinistu Art Museum, Viinistu
18 – 19 August
Biotoopia is a series of conferences and art events in Estonia that seeks to build networks between the arts, sciences and biotic communities. This year’s event brings together different exhibitions and initiatives from all over Estonia. In the small fishing village of Viinistu there will be a performance by Jaanika Peerna and a concert by David Rothenberg on 18 August, followed by a trip to Mohni island the day after. Satellite events will also take place in Tallinn and Tartu.
Tartu Kunstimuuseum, Tartu
18 June – 16 October
Half-Love explores the relationship between the artist Diana Tamane and her younger half-sister Elina. This new body of work continues a long line of projects focused on her family, in which Tamane has collaborated with members of her extended family since 2010, with photography at the heart of the conversation. Tamane often uses her family members and herself as the leading characters in her work. The personal dimension in stories about Eastern European life allows for generalizations about how identity in the region has been shaped during the transitional period.
Zuzeum, Riga
June 4 – November 11
The exhibition at Zuzeum Art Centre in Riga introduces vibrant contemporary art collections in the Baltics while emphasising the social aspects of private collecting. The exhibition also poses a question: what is the future of collecting? The artworks and collections in the exhibition have been selected by Olga Temnikova, a gallerist and art advisor from Tallinn.
The National Museum, Oslo
From 11 June
One 11 June 2022 the largest art museum in the Nordic countries opened in Oslo. Here visitors can experience older and modern art, contemporary art, architecture and design all under one roof and in completely new ways. The first shows include I Call it Art , which takes the pulse of contemporary art in Norway today, with works by almost 150 artists and artist groups, and East of the Sun and West of the Moon, an exhibition of drawings by Erik Werenskiold and Theodor Kittelsen, completed around 150 years ago as illustrations for Norwegian fairy tales.
Kunsthalle Recklinghausen,
Recklinghausen
1 May – 7 August
For her first solo exhibition in Germany, the Estonian artist Flo Kasearu will be staging her own retrospective for the Kunsthalle. In her artistic practice, Kasearu dissects, explores, negotiates and celebrates the relationship between seriousness and humour, severity and wit. She often finds her material in the ordinary, in what happens in families and behind closed doors and is not supposed to be seen; and through her artistic practice she brings back those issues to the streets and to the people who affect them. Kasearu’s house in Tallinn is perhaps her most comprehensive work of art, reflecting Estonia’s post-Soviet heritage and capitalist reality. Kasearu will stage aspects, objects and themes from her House Museum in the Kunsthalle Recklinghausen. Her latest project will have an extended appearance in and around the Kunsthalle and the Ruhrfestspielhaus: the Disorder Patrol.
EMST, Athens
17 June – 30 October
Statecraft (and beyond) starts a programme by the new artistic director of EMST, Katerina Gregos. The show examines the structure and ideological power of speech, and mechanisms of the construction of the nation and the state and features works by 39 artists.
Museum of Modern Art (Museum on the Vistula), Warsaw
3 June – 2 October
The exhibition is the most extensive public display of Warsaw based artist Aleksandra Waliszewska’s works to date. Working closely with the artist, the show’s curators have chosen to display iconic examples of her vast oeuvre alongside historical works of Polish, Czech, Ukrainian and Baltic symbolist artists. The exhibition invites the viewer to see her mythological tropes, apocalyptic scenarios, and charged landscapes in a broader context. The settings of her paintings – forests and swamps, lost highways, and gloomy housing estates—evoke the specificity of Polish and Baltic landscapes.
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