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A Shade Colder is a new magazine for conversations about and around art in Estonia and beyond. The publication launches at a time when the region has found itself at the centre of international discussions. We hope that through the lens of contemporary art and visual culture the magazine will become an inspiration and a […]
\n","content":"\nA Shade Colder is a new magazine for conversations about and around art in Estonia and beyond. The publication launches at a time when the region has found itself at the centre of international discussions. We hope that through the lens of contemporary art and visual culture the magazine will become an inspiration and a useful source for engaging with this part of the world.
\n\n\n\nThe first issue, The Eyes of My Other aims to open a multicentric view on art (history). We are seeking to expand and provide a more nuanced perspective on Estonian art, while framing it within an international context. The issue explores ways of (re)framing Estonian visual culture, born between the East and the West, both in the past and the present, looking at both individual artistic practices as well as institutional efforts.
\n\n\n\nIn doing so, the artists and writers featured in this issue conjure images of (frightening) beauty, discuss decolonisation outside the national project, carefully consider local complexities, and being aware of the differences and agency of the gaze from inside and out, they look for shared narratives between art in Estonia and elsewhere.
\n\n\n\nHighlighting a multiplicity of perspectives is crucial, so that complex social, political and cultural processes would not be reduced to simplistic ideas and discussed based on out-dated concepts and models. This is especially urgent in the light of Russia’s vicious war against Ukraine, the consequences of which will be with us for years to come. A Shade Colder stands in solidarity with the Ukrainian people and will be donating 50% of the proceeds of the sales of its first issue to the Ukrainian Cultural Centre in Estonia, which has been providing support in Ukraine since 2014, as well as the Ukrainian Emergency Art Fund, directly targeting the needs of the art community in Ukraine.
\n\n\n\nKaarin Kivirähk is the editor-in-chief of A Shade Colder.
\n","title":"Kaarin Kivirähk"},{"id":"cG9zdDoxMzg=","content":"\nKeiu Krikmann is the editor of A Shade Colder.
\n","title":"Keiu Krikmann"}]},"contributors":null}},{"id":"cG9zdDoxNjU=","title":"The Undinous Court","slug":"the-undinous-court","uri":"/the-undinous-court/","date":"2022-04-09T18:19:12","excerpt":"I was invited to write on “the different images of beauty that emerge when discovering hidden histories and how these images bleed into and change our perspective on the present”. As part of this project, I was brought on a research trip to Tallinn, where I met artworks, artists, designers and researchers. The following notes, […]
\n","content":"\nI was invited to write on “the different images of beauty that emerge when discovering hidden histories and how these images bleed into and change our perspective on the present”. As part of this project, I was brought on a research trip to Tallinn, where I met artworks, artists, designers and researchers. The following notes, in the most spurious, tangential, threadbare, even subconscious way, contain the afterglow of some of these encounters and conversations and decorative turns.
\n\n\n\nI’ve written before – or tried to – about the sheer sensational force (and romance) of ‘recovery’, be it of artworks, personae, or even ways of feeling, of relating, of experientiality (including of art). I sometimes, against my better judgement, find myself thinking about a moment of the recovery process in terms of an exhumation, one that releases a kind of psychic charge – of course, exhumation is often bounded by a context so deeply, horrifically colonial that it is not a helpful word for the kind of recovery I’m thinking of – and then of course the term ‘recovery’ has serious limits – edges which begin to fray very quickly under scrutiny. The kind of recovery I’m thinking of is, more often than not, in direct contravention of that kind of history-making (disinterment, exhumation of tombs, looting, atrocity). Perhaps the easiest and most well-known recent example of the kind of recovery I mean would be Saidya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, which reupholsters the “extravagance, ornament and shine” of Black social existence, of “the utopian longings and the promise of a future world that resided in waywardness and the refusal to be governed.”
\n\n\n\nFragment of a recovery play
Dramatis Personae
Heraldrine, a member of the Undinous Court, having been ‘a visitor’ there since before theye can remember
Undinous Ordinators
Assistant Ordinator
Act I Scene I: A soiree is being given by the Ordinators of the Undinous Court – one of several courts in the Anti-Palace. The party is being given in honour of the discovery of an antique.
\n\n\n\nIn the centre of the Anti-Palace’s ante-saloon, on display, is a huge faintly green glass vessel – almost heart-shaped, with multitudinous tubes spiralling hither and thither – many are cracked, and all are broken high up with the effect of trailing off into the air or another dimension. Whatever they might have been connected to is now impossible to envisage. In the heart of the almost-heart is a threaded mass of threads – networks spun from cords and fibres of silver and aquamarine, rose and gold, which trail off into the various tubes, in places looking like compact fairy moss clogging the heart of a dryad or zephyr but in a very healthy sort of manner.
\n\n\n\nThe Assistant Ordinator:
How delicious, it really is unspeakable.
The Ordinator I:
We exhumated the whole thing from the bowels of the earth ourselves.
The Assistant Ordinator:
Oh, you mean that hole in the ground in your back garden?
The Ordinator II:
Yes!
The Assistant Ordinator:
Where, pray tell, is Heraldrine, how disappointing that theye are going to miss the-
Enter Heraldrine
\n\n\n\nHeraldrine (looking at the glass vessel):
…
…
………….
\n\n\n\nOrdinator II:
Yes, we knew you’d like it.
Assistant Ordinator:
I think theye are going to faint if you ask me.
Often descriptions of uncovering, unearthing and object revelation will centre around the moment of ‘discovery’ or shortly after – a painting being dusted and 300 years of stored up Time and History and Unseen-ness and so on hitting the finder/viewer, or a photograph or a diary issuing a singular chronological heave, a flash of temporal dislocation exposing the now of then (or vice versa), but the actual experience is considerably more prolonged. Sure, there can be that big seismic thwack. But it really comes in waves or trickles slowly. The exertion of then on now. Of now on then on now.
\n\n\n\nThat said, exhumation still comes to my mind because it recalls something of that psychic release – the sensational but also ‘something else-ness’ that happens on say really looking at a photograph that hasn’t been seen for decades – the sense of dredging up a magic that exerts itself on the present, of an object being seen.
\n\n\n\nAs much as these terms come easily because they, at least descriptively, come close to a moment in the process of recovery and verbally sate the way it feels, they could very easily be misread, could figure what I’m describing as a kind of insipid spume – a little rhetorical fancy that in the end means nothing because, say finding a piece of art from several decades ago doesn’t actually do anything to the world… “What the hell is a ‘psychic charge?’” etc. But aside from being constitutionally dull – the flattening of a romantic turn – this reading would be (grievously) incorrect.
\n\n\n\npresumed to be from Act I, Scene II. In which Heraldrine inquires into the nature of the Undines and remembers why theye came to the Undinous court in the days before time choked up entirely
\n\n\n\nHeraldrine, waking up in bed after theire fainting episode, recalls theire Compartment Life – in other words that in-between life, always, running like a green underground stream, was a life no less or more just simply in-between – a realisation which came to them upon looking at the mass of threads on the heart-like glass chamber … theire Compartment Life is Mottine, and upon knowing that she is Mottine, she dons Heraldrine’s favourite jewels, doublet, and so on, and takes herself to the Minor Undine Library – there she browses for several hours before finding what she knew would be there:
The Memoirs of Mottine Mottine Firrre-Mottine
Thursday, March 3rd
I am here. I unpacked my paints today and walked around. It is so cold in the studios. The fountain struck me, and I will have to tell you about it another time. I have to go to meet the other painters and hope they are as I have dreamt they will be.
Sunday, April 4th
It is a month on (sorry) and I literally weep at the naivety of my last entry. I have made no friends here. Everyone avoids me. Not just because they know what I am but because … I don’t know it is hard to express. It is more than that.
Monday, April 5th
I have decided to paint the fountain.
Tuesday, April 6th
A new painter has arrived and has been installed in the studio next to mine. He peeped his head in yesterday and I wanted to die because I thought he seemed so charming, and I knew we would never be friends.
Wednesday, May 6th
I have made friends with the boy in the next studio. Even in May the studios are so cold, and we spent the day hunting for portable heaters and found some in a basement which no one seems to know exists – perhaps 300 centuries of Things lie there – I mean some real discarded masterpieces and everything but most importantly heaters.
It is, by the way, a month again since my last entry. So my neighbour: One day – can’t remember when now – shortly after he popped his head in and I wanted to die – I saw him standing in front of the great fountain which is in itself a curiosity. For example, the fountain is of a Rebis (or similar), some ancient god of both sexes or neither, and it is completed in a dark blue stone and plashes away all day and people come and sit on it or throw things in it, occasionally, or sometimes push each other into it, or jump on the ice when it’s frozen reflecting the silver of everything – and yet no one ever comments upon it. It is so clearly a vestige of the Before Times or Between Times. Well, this was the first time I ever saw anyone really taking it in. So I resolved that, when he next popped his head in, if he ever did again, I would ask him about it and show him my painting.
Well, I waited and waited one day, and nothing, and nothing the next, and looked for him every time I was painting by the fountain. When he finally popped his head in a week on, I basically screamed so loudly he jumped back and his glasses literally fell off his face: “The fountain!”
And he picked up his glasses and I think, piecing things together, came to look at the painting.
He told me the story of the undines – who are visible everywhere in this city but only vestiges of vestiges.
Thursday, May 41st
He spoke to me about something called a recovery play. These were in fact a popular form around 300 years ago – about the point at which things kept getting dredged up and people became adept and Finding Things … the force he said of recovery was so intense people started making plays about them, to process; the force he said was all a matter of material history. That also the Context of these Things became available again and thus so did the form, the perfume of the era or something like this surfaced, so the plays were ways to rediscover the form but let the form operate on the world once more through these objects that had been suppressed or lost … He said during the period of the plays … of repressed histories being allowed to work on the world and this changing history and so on and so forth, Time literally changed. In texture but in other ways. How couldn’t it? He was he said, writing and staging a recovery play. Two actually, one about a recovery play he had found and the other – here I almost died again – about the fountain.
Heraldrine in the night [unreadable] to the display room [unreadable] the arched windows show greenish sky.
There the glass object [unreadable] lit by a candle.
HERaldine [sic] takes a glass hammer and strikes.
Heraldrine, surrounded by broken glass touches the interior object and begins to speak. It is as if Heraldrine is reading the threads, finding subtle kinds in the changes of hue and incongruous patterns and weft and so on – rifts like a music score.
\n\n\n\nHeraldrine: For example [unreadable] truncated… erased, obscured, buried or simply lost… when in the world again, the form becomes available to us even if simply to talk about the work, to think about the object… experience it. But the … is operating on the world again … in a way that has not been permissible.
\n\n\n\nHere, for example, we learn what? That a herald of the city… came and was made privy to a great constitutional beauty presiding under the land.
\n\n\n\nThat beneath the Undinous city great wefted [unreadable] for nothing and Melded thoroughly to the frothing and still and moving springs and the ore ore ore and black ore
\n\n\n\nIn this book were patterns… ornaments… and illustrations of figures dancing… tapestries of figures dancing… older paintings on walls of peoples dancing in the carvings… in the chambers of the Undinous city to which I came. The undines, which appear in myth and not live here, were people from… who left their brothers and sisters to live with mortals – hence in the myth ‘takes the form of a beautiful man’
\n\n\n\nHence in the myth ‘takes the form of the beautiful woman’
\n\n\n\nHence in the myth ‘androgynous’
\n\n\n\nThere’s a scene in a book I’ve never finished, in which the murals start moving over the walls… it’s… ornament… and indeed… early conceptions of ornament as flickering… light sand water to suggest some sort of motion or… the… pattern… grottos, cave walls and so on. And in the grottos – one in particular, was a pool and the grotto nymphs known as grottiness – really an ancient kind of undine swam there and passed in and out of the crystal walls and ate the pearls to remain as they were.
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\n","title":"Shola von Reinhold"}]},"contributors":null}},{"id":"cG9zdDo2","title":"From Life. On the work of Anu Põder","slug":"from-life-on-the-work-of-anu-poder","uri":"/from-life-on-the-work-of-anu-poder/","date":"2022-03-20T15:45:15","excerpt":"When you encounter the art of Anu Põder, the first thing you are likely to feel is: Her work speaks of life in a manner so lucid and intense that what it says must be directly taken from life. It addresses the pain of coming to pieces, as well as the power of personal growth, […]
\n","content":"\nWhen you encounter the art of Anu Põder, the first thing you are likely to feel is: Her work speaks of life in a manner so lucid and intense that what it says must be directly taken from life. It addresses the pain of coming to pieces, as well as the power of personal growth, in a viscerally existential, bodily way. In doing so, Põder breaks with how the canon of modern art, written by and for men, has defined the form life has to take on in art: that of a linear career, which makes a red thread emerge, as artists master adversities, and sum their findings up tidily and tightly in one coherent body of work. The pressure to fit this form is still on, maybe more so than ever, as social media rewards the compact packaging of art and life. With Põder things take a different route. To develop a passion for her work is to appreciate how she deals with life interrupting art, as she returns to making pieces in intervals, while parenting, and making a living. Following this existentially syncopated rhythm, she revises, twists and layers her work in incredibly vibrant ways. So the body of work Põder creates during her lifetime is not governed by one rigid concept of identity. It grows and diversifies, in step with life changing.
\n\n\n\nThe extended version of this essay develops this critique of canonical career thinking on art and life in a slow meditation. This abbreviated edit now focuses on key aspects of violence and growth in Põder’s art. Her work testifies to pain inflicted on body and soul. And it speaks of empowerment, yet not in terms of victorious mastery. It won’t resort to a linear heroic tale of conquering pain. In revising, twisting and layering work, Põder instead shifts the weight of pain. It stays there, but comes to exist alongside the power to grow, undenied, acknowledged, addressed, and as such, adding momentum to a counter-push towards living, and growing, as the interplay between weights and forces remains in motion:
\n\n\n\n[…] Emptiness (Tühjus, 1985) seems pivotal in that in this work Põder pushes her approach to breaking bodies apart to a limit where the violent quality and traumatic dimension of the work are fully disclosed. In this piece, different textile objects and rounded amorphous shapes are strapped to the wire mesh of a metal fence using long ropes. Amongst them are patches of crinkled textile that look as if they could be the filling of the more voluminous of the shapes. So you perceive them as intestines spilling from lacerated body parts. At the centre of the assemblage Põder has mounted a sheet of pink plastic moulded in such a manner that the outlines of a female torso (breast, collarbone, armpit, hips) can be traced. Yet this body has next to no volume. It’s as if its skin had been stripped and discarded like a piece of clothing which, in its bulges and crinkles, still suggests the curves and folds of the body it once covered. Dismembered, gutted, skinned and left to dry on the fence, this body strikes you as having been subjected to extreme violence. In the history of sculpture, the torso can be seen as being associated with various romantic ideas of beauty (in ruins). But here we are looking at no headless Heracles. In Emptiness the fragmentation of the body speaks of actual dismemberment. In doing so, the work doesn’t merely represent trauma. It enacts it. Strapping the resemblances of dismembered body parts onto a metal fence around the skin stripped off a torso brings the traumatic force to bear. The impression that Emptiness leaves firmly imprints the connection between violence and fragmentation on your memory.
\n\n\n\n[…] Fast forward to future work and the sense of traumatic force may, likewise, stay with you when you see the tall textile figures Põder sculpted between 1992 and 1993. Many (not all) of them have a head and limbs. Indeed, they seem to express a sense of recomposition, of getting things back together, getting ready to move and act. Still, the imprint left by pieces such as Emptiness, continues to haunt even these sculptures. After the force of the fragment hits you, no body in Põder’s work will ever look whole again. Something keeps tearing at them. Coiled (Keerus, 1993), for example, is a tall female figure, its skin made from layers of blue fabric strips, as if it were bandaged from head to toe. As the title spells out, the arms and legs of the figure are coiled. The arms look like the horns of a ram. The legs are twisted around each other like two ropes. The figure palpably exudes an immense tension. It looks torturous.
\n\n\n\nYet Coiled only looks like a body in pain when we read its limbs as being coiled and twisted inwards. What if we pictured the re-coil of the limbs un-coiling and releasing their tension? The figure would pivot around itself and unleash the force of a whirlwind. What looked painful from one angle, appears incredibly powerful from another. Are we confronted by actual pain? Or power in a state of potential? Both readings seem valid. So again, here, we have a turning point. From the position of the work, different aspects of previous or future works may once more come into view. Pain or power? Or both? Looking back at works from the eighties, the amazing On One Foot from Lasnamäe (Ühel Jalal Lasnamäelt, 1986) jumps out. The sculpture is made from two, slightly coiled, entwined plaster tubes covered in patches of skin-coloured leather from which metal spikes protrude. […] There are many of them, and they have definitely become weapons. As Estonian sculpture historian Juta Kivimäe explains, the title of the piece alludes to a ride across town on a line where the buses are notorious for being overcrowded. As bodies fight for space, limbs rub up against each other and get tangled; everybody has their spikes out, limbs become weaponised, pores grow thorns. This is fierce. And funny. And very close to life. A life not merely defined by suffering but by an urge to fight back and persist. These spiky body parts – in the mode of becoming weapon – express an insistent will to live. Spinoza called it conatus, a lust for life, or rather, the sheer power to persevere. Every spike speaks of it. And so do the coiled limbs of Coiled. Twist me? Watch me uncoil and fly in your face! When you look at it this way, the tension that the many bodies in Põder’s work exude, could very well be a result of the pressures imposed on them. But it could equally be perceived as the powers of life, ready to release themselves.
\n\n\n\nThe release could, but may not have to, come in the form of violent assertiveness. It could also take on the form of growth. Look at Composition (Kompositsioon, 1988). With its many curves and folds, this plaster sculpture painted green looks like the most potent form of otherworldly life, a mollusc with multiple sexual organs and orifices. Have you ever seen an octopus move on land? Its jelly body seems to shift shape every second as it slips and slides onwards: an intelligent organ in motion. Indeed, when in Composition we move from the fragment to the fold, a whole universe of expansive being opens up in modes of unfolding, unfurling, uncoiling. In Long Bag (Pikk kott, 1994), a long train of cloth unrolls across the floor from the silhouette of a woman made from the same cloth. She seizes the space effortlessly with the matter her body produces. This is power. What do we see if we now look back upon the pieces that primarily read as manifestations of traumatic forces? They will still manifest trauma. But another dimension of their materiality may yet reveal themselves. Inspired by Long Bag, we might imagine what Emptiness would look like if, like the cloth trailing across the floor, the wire mesh fence were in a horizontal position. Would it not make the structure resemble a bed and the stuffed objects cushions, the crinkled fabric blankets and the discarded skin a jacket cast on the floor upon which to sleep? If we were to look at it like this, the piece would still speak of a fight, but from this perspective, the struggle would be one of making a place for bodies to rest.
\n\n\n\nNot just any artwork is capable of engendering such twists and reversals. I would argue that it takes a particular kind of power to express the conflicting dimensions of life in such an intimate manner, in layers that open up progressively and retroactively. It may be persistence that keeps someone journeying back and forth in the depths of lived, embodied memory. But when it comes to the manner in which Põder manifests these forays into the depths of life, it’s striking that, persistent as they may be, duration as such does not seem to matter. Engaging with her work is not like reading Proust or Joyce, who translated their memory mining into overwhelmingly detailed accounts that take an age to read and probably took even longer to write. Põder’s timing is different. Her works are crystalline, they contract a whole world of conflicting nuances into concise forms, which then keep shifting before you, like glass shards in a prism. In this sense, her pieces are much like Clarice Lispector’s novels. They are short, explosive, deep and dense. In all their brevity, they venture to the core of the Earth and back, time and again, in the glimpse of an eye. It’s the timing of mystic thoughts that hits you, sharply, while you are immersed in matters of the material world. “I capture sudden instants” Lispector writes in The Stream of Life (Água Viva, 1973), “that bring their own death with them and others are born – I capture the instants of metamorphosis, and their sequence and concomitance have a terrible beauty.”1 C. Lispector, The Stream of Life. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989, p. 7. This is Põder: instants of metamorphosis, shape shifting, captured from within the very element of life, in full acknowledgement of the cruel reversals that occur, as traumatic forces and the power to persevere keep clashing.
\n\n\n\nIt takes guts to expose oneself to such reversals and clashes by exploring the depths of embodied memory in one’s art. In this sense, Põder’s work is truly gutsy. Infinitely more so than the work of many artists – traditionally most of them male – who avoid the shock of realising that nothing was or stays quite as it seemed, by hammering out the selfsame identical type of work: the work which, at one point in their life, they thought was a good idea to make, and which they henceforth make for the rest of their lives. Art history unfortunately praises as ‘consistency’ what may amount to little more than a man’s fear of confronting the fact that the tectonic plates below him are constantly moving. (For if he dared dig deeper, the layers of his work might actually start moving too.) I would read Põder’s Man’s head with a flag (Mehe Pea Lipuga, 1984) along these lines, as a mockery of the fearful narrow-mindedness that accompanies a stereotypical man’s craving for clear focus in life. The piece resembles the head of a man, all but eyes and mouth covered in pink leather, as if he were clad in chain mail or some futuristic form of helmet. At the top of his head there’s a flag ready to point wherever the wind is blowing. From the rear of his neck strange bulging shapes protrude, writhe and wrap around the back of his head. Oblivious to the ghostly occurrences his own body produces behind him, he looks ahead, unmoved, unperturbed, with an air of great resolve, ready to march into battle or take on ‘great projects’. Oh, what a fool. If you are raised to fight your way through life like this, like a man, other men will keep asking you what position you take, what ideas you represent, what ideology you focus your energies around. They teach you to confuse life with whatever sign you could put on a flag to signify what you stand for. As if that is all there is. What else there might be would be easy to perceive, if only you took off the darn helmet for a second and recognised what was going on behind you and all around you, all the time.
\n\n\n\n[…] Experiencing the reality of your surroundings with this enhanced sense of awareness, asks for other responses: no grand resolutions, but the intimate engagement with the forces that shapes life in relations. So in Põder’s works, forces tearing bodies apart clash with forces that make them grow spikes, fight back and expand beyond measure. The work is fierce, forceful, and full of unappeased difference and unconsolidated non-identity. In short, it is too fierce to be recuperated by conclusive words of appraisal. As the life work of an experienced artist, meaning the work of someone who has lived her life to the fullest, it would seem these artworks need no appeasement. They ask for guts, to be grasped and grappled with, in the course of ongoing encounters.
\n\n\n\nAn earlier version of this text was published in Anu Põder. Be Fragile! Be Brave!, a book accompanying an exhibition of the same name at Kumu Art Museum in Tallinn in 2017.
\n\n\n\nAnu Põder (1947–2013) was an Estonian sculptor and installation artist. Throughout her career, she experimented with new abstract forms and a variety of materials from plaster and wood, charcoal and textile, to light, scent and taste. Põder’s work was inspired by her own experience as well as her surroundings and environment in the city and in the countryside, at home and at work.
She studied at the Estonian State Art Institute’s sculpture department from 1970 to 1976. Until 1986, Põder worked as a freelance artist and after that, shared her time between her artistic practice and her students at the Estonian State Art Institute and Tartu Art School. Põder’s works belong to the collections of the Art Museum of Estonia, Tartu Art Museum and to her family. In 2021, the second original version of the work Tongues (Activation Version) (1998) was acquired by the Tate.
In recent years, Anu Põder’s work has been exhibited at Kumu Art Museum (2017), 13th Baltic Triennial in Vilnius (2018), Pori Art Museum (2019), La Galerie Noisy-Le-Sec in Paris (2019), and Liverpool Biennial (2021). Three works by Anu Põder are presented at the 59th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia Milk of Dreams (curated by Cecilia Alemani).
Jan Verwoert is a critic and writer on contemporary art and cultural theory. He is a contributing editor of frieze magazine and his writing has appeared in different journals, anthologies and monographs.
\n","title":"Jan Verwoert"}]},"contributors":null}},{"id":"cG9zdDoxNTk=","title":"Decolonise that – Estonian identity as indigenous and/or white","slug":"decolonise-that-estonian-identity-as-indigenous-and-or-white","uri":"/decolonise-that-estonian-identity-as-indigenous-and-or-white/","date":"2022-04-09T18:09:58","excerpt":"When I began writing this essay, I was struggling a little to find a good word to characterise the way in which race has become a prominent and much debated issue in Estonian society. But the right word is not fascinating, ambivalent, or surprising. It is not surprising that race is increasingly perceived as a […]
\n","content":"\nWhen I began writing this essay, I was struggling a little to find a good word to characterise the way in which race has become a prominent and much debated issue in Estonian society. But the right word is not fascinating, ambivalent, or surprising. It is not surprising that race is increasingly perceived as a key problem in Estonia. Quite the contrary, it is no wonder at all.
\n\n\n\nWhen the Rendering Race exhibition (2021) in the project space of the new permanent exhibition at Kumu Art Museum in Tallinn became the focus of debates around race in Estonia, one could hardly say that it was entirely unpredictable, even if it was probably hard to foresee the heated public and private criticism on such a massive scale. The avalanche of negative reactions were centred on both the curator Bart Pushaw’s initial impulse to map and problematise early 20th century Estonian art in respect to race and colour, as well as the decision to change the previously racially charged titles for neutral ones. Taking into account the spread of the BLM movement in Estonia and the simultaneous growth in popularity of radical right-wing political movements and parties in the country, all of this is not surprising.
\n\n\n\nIn parallel, Eastern Europeans are just beginning to realise that the memory of their trauma, the terrors of the Second World War and the memory of slavery exist in a shared space of remembrance and the two have been influencing each other in multidirectional ways. People with different backgrounds and positions are asking how we should think about decolonisation and critical race theory in connection this region. How can we find a method and a voice to use when speaking about the colonial realities of Eastern Europe and its decolonisation, while these concepts are defined by a mass of historical and theoretical work on the colonial and racial experience of the West? And is there such a thing as a specifically Eastern European colonial legacy?
\n\n\n\nHistory does not explain everything. Sometimes it explains hardly anything at all. Often, the best it can do is show us that things are more complicated than they seemed. Yet, in the face of the decolonisation debates, a look back at the complicated and dynamic history of Estonian identifications of race, whiteness and indigeneity might prove useful. It might even offer one explanation for the often painful reactions to the word race in Estonia.
\n\n\n\nAfter the 13th century crusades, the Estonian speaking population was gradually turned into serfs under the rule of the German-speaking elites. From the early modern period onwards, they were also represented as culturally and racially inferior. Along with the spread of European colonisation, Estonians were more and more often compared with the native peoples of the North. Due to the Estonian language belonging to the same group as the Finno-Ugric and Samoyedic languages, the 18th and 19th century German authors eagerly associated the Estonians with the Finno-Ugric, but also other Nordic peoples, including the Itelmens, Inuits and other native peoples of America. In the late 18th century, Johann Gottlieb Herder famously called the Estonians the last savages of Europe and compared them to the Sami and Samoyedic peoples.
\n\n\n\nAt that time, such comparisons, resulting in borealist stereotypes and arguments about Estonians being closer to nature than to culture also served to legitimate the socio-cultural segregation of the unfree peasantry in these lands that had become the Baltic provinces of the Russian Empire in the early eighteenth century. The Russian imperial ethnographic discourse placed Estonians somewhere between what its authors perceived as the savage natives of the North and the more civilised peasantry of its European provinces. While preparing the exhibition The Conqueror’s Eye: Lisa Reihana’s In Pursuit of Venus (2019) at Kumu Art Museum, we were struggling to find the origins of an image depicting Estonians and sought advice from colleagues at the Russian Museum of Ethnography. We discovered that the image originated from Julian Simashko’s Russian Fauna, or Description and Depiction of Animals occurring in the Russian Empire (Русская фауна, или Описание и изображение животных, водящихся в Империи Российской) published in St Petersburg in 1850–1851.
\n\n\n\nThe Enlightenment writers and philosophers were the first to realise the potential of reversing the meaning of the native imagery, as they effectively turned their own vision of the noble savage into a powerful tool for criticising European nobility. At the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries, the Baltic German Enlighteners adapted these ideas. They also compared the serfdom of the Baltic peasantry to colonial slavery. From the 1860s onwards, the activists of the Estonian national movement likewise learned to use such analogies. Although the emancipation of the peasantry had taken place already in 1816/1819, it took the reforms of the 1850s to liberate the peasants from unfree labour and improve their socio-economic status. Among Estonian national activists, this resulted in considerable solidarity towards the slaves and indigenous peoples suffering from colonialism across the globe. For example, the first Estonian historical novels that were published by the leading national poetess Lydia Koidula in the 1860s were written about slave rebellions in the Americas.
\n\n\n\nElements of this solidarity with the oppressed and othered indigenous communities were still visible in the Estonian visual culture of the early 20th century. For example, ethnographic portraits by Ants Laikmaa depict with equal respect and sympathy the North Africans and the Estonian peasantry. But as the social mobility of Estonians increased and the nation state was formed in 1918, these associations became less frequent. Instead, Estonian visual culture shows a growing interest in racial differentiation, thereby raising the question of to what extent this could relate to how eager Estonians were to become white themselves. In the interwar period, narratives of slavery and associations with colonial slaves were gradually overshadowed by attempts to create a more victorious past for Estonians.
\n\n\n\nThe question of what happens when the former colonised subject becomes the coloniser is central to the exhibition at the Estonian pavilion of the 59th Venice Biennale (2022) by Kristina Norman and Bita Razavi. The project, titled Orchidelirium. An Appetite for Abundance looks at the life and work of the Estonian botanical illustrator Emilie Rosalie Saal and her husband, the writer and photographer Andres Saal, who became members of the Dutch colonial administration and thus part of the white elite in Indonesia at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. What happens when Estonians, who were just recently in the position of non-white native serfs, turn their gaze towards colonised subjects? How will their hybrid identities balance between the desire to imitate the colonial elites and show solidarity with the colonised subjects?
\n\n\n\nIn fact, these questions are relevant for Estonian identity throughout the 20th century. Like many European countries, Estonia has witnessed a number of ruptures throughout the century, experiencing the founding of a nation state in the aftermath of the Russian revolutions, the loss of its independence during the Second World War, the Soviet occupation, and the regaining of sovereignty in 1991. A crucial element in reviving Estonian national identity in the late Soviet period was their identification with the small indigenous Finno-Ugric peoples. Living across Russia, from Karelia to Siberia, they still included communities with more traditional lifestyles and customs. There had previously been pan-Finno-Ugric movements, but only then did the idea of the indigenous roots of Estonians gain a wider resonance.
\n\n\n\nCrucial to this was the artistic research of prominent Soviet Estonian artists, filmmakers, writers, musicians in the 1970–1980s, including, for example, the writer and documentary film director and the future president of Estonia, Lennart Meri, the composer Veljo Tormis, and the artist Kaljo Põllu. The success of the Finno-Ugric revival among the rapidly urbanising Estonians was partly based on those authors’ skilful combination of the roles of artists and scientists. Teaching at the State Art Institute of the Estonian SSR from 1978 onwards, Põllu organised annual expeditions to Finno-Ugric peoples with his students. He also cooperated closely with ethnographers, linguists, and other academics.
\n\n\n\nThe relationship Kaljo Põllu and his contemporaries had with Finno-Ugric indigeneity was in many ways controversial. On the one hand, they differed from the Western gaze, taking a step further and identifying themselves and their nation with these indigenous cultures. On the other hand, they did not position themselves as indigenous authors either, but rather took the position of intermediaries. They remained at a safe distance, maintaining their position as the more civilised, modernised white brothers to their Finno-Ugric Siberian siblings, who embody the authentic roots of Estonians.
\n\n\n\nWhy did the white Estonian artists, writers and filmmakers re-fashion themselves as natives in such a serious, scientific way? Their turn towards indigenous cultures resonates with a broader fascination with heritage and folklore, emblematic of the last decades of the Soviet Union and often explained as part of the disillusionment with the Socialist utopia after the suppression of the Prague Spring – the anti-Soviet uprising in Czechoslovakia in 1968. This trend, however, coincides with a more global crisis of industrial modernity and also the rise of environmental awareness. In Estonia, the propagators of Finno-Ugric heritage cooperated with environmentalists too. The latter, in their turn, adapted the identification of Estonians as indigenous people, often comparing them to native Americans and other colonised peoples (who had become icons of environmental movements also elsewhere).
\n\n\n\nDuring the collapse of the Soviet Union, the idea of Estonians as indigenous people and comparisons with other native peoples gained a new momentum. As in other Eastern European countries, Estonian environmental and national activists alike drew comparisons between extractivism in European colonies and the exploitation of the Estonian and the other Soviet republics’ resources by the Soviet Union. This gave the idea of the indigenous identity of Estonians a clearly political dimension. During his presidency (1992–2001), Lennart Meri continued to emphasise these connections; for example, comparing Estonians to the colonised African peoples in the United Nations assemblies. At the same time, central to Meri’s speeches and understanding of history was the idea of Estonia as an outpost of European and Western civilisation on its Eastern border. This vision also has telling contradictions, as it presents Estonia simultaneously as a representative of the indigenous colonised subjects and their European colonisers.
\n\n\n\nThe ambivalent desire to be white and indigenous at the same time seems to characterise Estonian identity in a broader sense – and the internal tensions resulting from this hybrid identity might also explain the painful reactions to issues of race and decolonisation. As stated above, one way of solving these anxieties might be to work through the multi-layered histories of these identifications.
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\n","title":"Linda Kaljundi"}]},"contributors":null}},{"id":"cG9zdDoxNDU=","title":"The Terrifying and Mundane Seduction of Orchids","slug":"the-terrifying-and-mundane-seduction-of-orchids","uri":"/the-terrifying-and-mundane-seduction-of-orchids/","date":"2022-04-09T17:46:16","excerpt":"Encountering beauty evokes a desire to experience it first hand, to be near it, to have it rub off on you but also to own it – and this is exactly what the fascination with and the global trade in orchids has been driven by. This industry operates on such a massive scale that it […]
\n","content":"\nEncountering beauty evokes a desire to experience it first hand, to be near it, to have it rub off on you but also to own it – and this is exactly what the fascination with and the global trade in orchids has been driven by. This industry operates on such a massive scale that it seems almost mundane, banalising the destruction it leaves behind – it has a long history ranging from treasure hunting to mass market availability.
\n\n\n\nTaking this as a starting point, artists Kristina Norman and Bita Razavi together with curator Corina Apostol conceived Orchidelirium. An Appetite for Abundance, tracing a story of global interconnections between art, colonialism, botany and dualities, to be presented at the Estonian pavilion at the 59th Venice Biennale. At the heart of the exhibition is the story of a relatively unknown artist Emilie Rosalie Saal (1871–1954), whose work as a botanical artist was closely tied to her life in Indonesia, where she relocated when her husband was employed by the Dutch colonial authorities as a cartographer.
\n\n\n\nWhat was it that inspired you about Emilie Saal’s story initially? Has your perception and perhaps attitude towards her work changed during the two years you have worked on Orchidelirium?
Corina Apostol: The project started with an exhibition I began developing with Kristina on histories of colonialism, and the role of Estonians in it, and to provide an alternative view to the understanding that Estonians have been, above all, the colonised and not the colonisers. On the one hand, we wanted to unearth and highlight Emilie Saal’s story and to focus on female subjectivity and the universe she lived and worked in. But as the project developed, I also wanted to point to her role in the colonial project, as her botanical art was also a tool of the empire. So, the project is also looking at the consequences of colonialism in the present.
Kristina Norman: When we were conceiving the project, we were absolutely sure that one part of my Orchidelirium film trilogy would focus on the contemporary workings of neo-colonial extractivism in Indonesia. Figuratively, our aim was to try and trace the legacy and ecological footprints that our protagonist and her fascination with tropical orchids left in Indonesia. But due to Covid-related travel restrictions our planned on-site collaboration with Indonesian creators and communities couldn’t happen. I ended up making a film that follows peat that is being extracted on an unprecedented industrial scale from the Estonian bogs for Phalaenopsis nurseries in the Netherlands that use this natural material as a substrate for growing orchids. The natural habitat of Phalaenopsis overlaps with the former Dutch colonies in Indonesia and now these displaced tropical organisms, with their roots squeezed together with Nordic peat into plastic pots, travel back to Estonia where local consumers have no clue that by buying an orchid they greatly contribute to the decline of local biodiversity as well as the quality and accessibility of drinking water.
To me, one of the central questions in the project is that of privilege and its contingent nature – it may increase or decrease as a person moves from context to context. However, there are certain aspects like race, gender and class, that determine the extent to which this is possible. Although not born into wealth, Saal’s whiteness allowed her to gain access to a world of privilege and attain a position in Dutch colonial society. As evident in the novels of her husband, the Saals, coming from a class of peasants and servants to the Baltic German nobility in Estonia, were also sympathetic towards the colonised people of Indonesia. Yet, there are gaps between sympathy, identification and accountability.
CA: We were fascinated by the question of what happens when a person from a humble background, a place that was not even a country at the time (Estonia became independent in 1918 – Ed.) goes to Indonesia and becomes a member of the elite in the Dutch society. We do not know Emilie’s exact thoughts, as we do not have her writings anymore, but she definitely inhabited a position of privilege. But we do have the writings of her husband Andres, who although working for the Dutch, criticised them as well. He saw similarities in the Estonian and Indonesian struggle for independence, for self-determination; and through writing, he introduced Estonians to Indonesian society and culture. The Saals probably saw themselves as more enlightened than the local Dutch elite, yet they were part of the colonial system.
Bita Razavi: Privilege for sure is contingent but also relative. Reading Saal’s biographies, the first things that attracted my attention were the notions of class, access and privilege, which inevitably became the focal point of my work. We often think of class as something that is assigned to people – each person is born with a set of privileges. Being from a third world country (Razavi was born in Iran – Ed.), I have to confess that’s very true. But how much is it possible to tackle these assigned privileges and how much choice is involved? The story of the Saals seem to be so much about the choices they made, while they were no doubt also aware of the privilege that being European bestowed on them. They improved their social class and climbed the colonial hierarchy by moving to Indonesia and choosing to work for the Dutch East Indies. Such choices weren’t equally available for indigenous Indonesians.
The question of privilege does not only stem from the historical timeline of the project but is also very much present in its contemporary presence. The exhibition takes place in a space of privilege, both in a metaphorical and physical sense, afforded to the Estonian commission temporarily when the Netherlands invited Estonia to the Rietveld pavilion in Giardini. How do you claim a space of privilege that is perhaps not quite yours – would you want to do that and on what terms?
CA: There have not been other projects exploring the connection between the Netherlands, Indonesia and Estonia in this way. On my part, I want to create a connection between the research I’ve gathered as presented at the pavilion and references to the building itself. Even though we did not manage to conduct extensive research in Indonesia due to Covid, we are inviting Eko Supriyanto, an Indonesian artist to make an intervention in the space – he will present a newly commissioned video Anggrek (Orchid) in relation to Kristina’s trilogy and the archival material. Through this, we are also trying to problematise and look at the site itself, to peel away its Modernist simplicity, its whiteness. Bita and Kristina are addressing the architecture of the building more specifically and do so in very different ways.
KN: When imagining our future project and looking at the images of the Rietveld pavilion, I couldn’t help but recognise its similarities with Baltic German manors in Estonia but also the luxurious colonial villas in the Saal’s family photographs. The white marble and large glass panels surrounding the main entrance to the pavilion reminded me of manorial verandas, the iconic stages for the performance of social class. I imagined Emilie and Andres growing up in Estonia, seeing the German nobility spending their leisure time on the verandas of their manors while their gaze renders their peasant servants as a natural part of the landscape. Exotic plants and noble ladies painting them might have also been part of such veranda scenes. These could have been the images that Andres and Emilie carried with them to Indonesia, where they found themselves in the position to re-embody them themselves. It really is exciting to consider that Emilie did not associate privilege with mere leisure but with women’s artistic aspirations. Surely, these aspirations relied heavily on the invisible labour and came at the expense of the aspirations of Indonesian women…
BR: I view the Giardini and this particular pavilion as a space of privilege and look critically at the relationship between national presentations and global power imbalances. To address this, my work considers the history of the Rietveld pavilion itself and closely relates to its architecture. My site-specific interventions deal with the modernist architecture of the pavilion, its materials, lights, and shadows. Re-enacting class divisions inscribed in Dutch colonial architecture, as well as in Estonian manor houses, the work engages the viewer to reflect on the notions of hierarchy and privilege through the manipulation of the exhibition entrances. Talking about the venue as a space of privilege raises the question of hierarchy within the field of contemporary art as well. I see the venue as an effective stage that offers greater visibility. It’s such a privilege to have visibility as an artist and to use it for change, to talk about privilege and hierarchy, and to challenge them.
I have been left with the impression that you, Kristina and Bita, are both working with dualities in a sense. Bita, I am thinking of the way you have created two different paths for the visitors to follow in the space and your use of shadows. Kristina, in your films you explore dualities through the figure of the doppelgänger. How do you see that these dualities are received and experienced by the visitors to the exhibition?
BR: Fluidity and the transformations of the characters of our story brought the concept of duality to the works. In my installation, duality appears in every single element; natural vs artificial shadows, each visible for one of the two groups of audiences who enter the exhibition space from two different entrances. Additionally, my work includes a platform that acts as a space of privilege and enables two different perspectives – insider-outsider, perpetrator-victim – and the crossover between these roles.
KN: My film trilogy is essentially a set of intuitive images — three images of colonial processes, tensions, and transformations within inner and outer worlds of my imaginary Emilie Saal. I found the motif of the doppelgänger a helpful tool also to invite the viewer to consider the discussed phenomena from multiple perspectives. But above all, the doppelgänger motif is evoked to reflect on hybrid identities arising from colonial relations, from cultural transfer, from the fantasies and desires shared by the coloniser and the colonised.
The second part of the title, An Appetite for Abundance evokes a desire for lushness; however, there is a thin line between that and greed, in this case colonial greed. Within the context of this project, you show what happens when appetite becomes unsatiable hunger and how an individual’s desire for beauty is linked to much wider (global) mechanisms of extractivism. To what extent do you think it is possible to appease this appetite or is there any way this appetite could be subverted into something positive?
CA: The appetite part was inspired by a photograph created by Andres and Emilie Saal that I found at the Estonian Literary Museum. At the time, it was popular to make still-lifes of fruit that Europeans thought were rare; these were most likely seen as decoration rather than food. The photograph depicts an ornate image of an abundance of food and plants – it evoked ideas of hunger, hunting and collecting. However, the motivation for doing botanical art can be quite different. For example, the Indonesian Association of Botanical Artists, established in 2017, create illustrations that are meant to promote botany in a more direct and emotional way. They raise awareness about endangered plants and the need to conserve certain plants by actively holding exhibitions and online workshops to raise awareness of local plants in Indonesia.
Thinking of the allure of flower painting – there are ways in which beauty can be terrifying. Beauty is also intricately linked to power, either as a tool to achieve it or as something to be subjugated to it. However, beauty is not synonymous with sensuality or eroticism, yet Orchidelirium seems to include elements of all three – how do you grapple with the tension between these notions?
KN: In the context of Emilie’s work, I think the notions of beauty and of danger are very much interlinked as they pertain to the realm of representation. In line with what Corina mentioned earlier in this conversation, beautiful, meticulous, painterly or photographic depictions of exotic flora have been used by Europeans throughout their colonial history to present tropical nature as fertile and yielding abundance as if by itself. These images continue to render the labour of indigenous people working in plantations invisible and silence the voices of those people and non-humans whose habitats have been destroyed earlier in history and are being ruined and exploited right now. In Western culture, the exotic is often connected to suppressed desires and sexuality. In my film trilogy, erotic energy is used to empower the agency of resistance and to fuel the subversion of colonial hierarchies.
Keiu Krikmann is the editor of A Shade Colder.
\n","title":"Keiu Krikmann"}]},"contributors":null}},{"id":"cG9zdDoxNjI=","title":"Sickly-Sweet Monsters at the Ethnography Museum","slug":"sickly-sweet-monsters-at-the-ethnography-museum","uri":"/sickly-sweet-monsters-at-the-ethnography-museum/","date":"2022-04-09T18:15:42","excerpt":"At first glance, Jaanus Samma’s works resemble souvenirs with ethnographic motifs and some even evoke pure nationalist kitsch. This is, of course, a treacherous trap, set for the unsuspecting viewer. The artist seems to approach folk heritage and the past in the most conservative way possible; however, on closer inspection it becomes evident that the […]
\n","content":"\nAt first glance, Jaanus Samma’s works resemble souvenirs with ethnographic motifs and some even evoke pure nationalist kitsch. This is, of course, a treacherous trap, set for the unsuspecting viewer. The artist seems to approach folk heritage and the past in the most conservative way possible; however, on closer inspection it becomes evident that the national ornament has, in fact, been stripped of pathos and solemnity – under the layer of ethnographic beauty bubbles an explosive mix of provocative questions. Jaanus Samma’s works have been discussed as homonationalist acts1 Toomistu, T. 15 May 2021. Homonatsionalismi kriipiv visioon. Available at: https://www.sirp.ee/s1-artiklid/c6-kunst/homonatsionalismi-kriipiv-visioon/, where the queer subject and their desires seem to have been secretly written into the national narrative and history. Indeed, Samma works with archives, historic museology and history and almost produces sugar-coated ‘monsters’ to be incorporated into the heteronormative narrative of national history. Yet, these meek additions have the capacity to blow apart the heteronormative power matrix and the glossy images of nationalism.
\n\n\n\nAt his recent exhibition (in collaboration with Carlos Motta) Otherness, Desire, the Vernacular2Otherness, Desire, the Vernacular. In collaboration with Carlos Motta. 19 November 2021 – 16 January 2022. Curated by Denis Maksimov. Temnikova & Kasela Gallery, Tallinn, Samma exhibited a traditional woven wedding tapestry titled Personal Mythology. The tapestry was created using traditional materials and in the most ‘authentic’ way possible – it was woven on anachronistically narrow looms and also includes errors in the pattern. The tapestry was a masterful imitation of a 19th century north Estonian tapestry, used during ritual wedding rides. Alongside traditional trees of life, tankards, churches and the traditional kaheksakand patterns, we also see symbols from the artist’s previous work. Among other things, the tapestry includes jockstraps, outhouses, a toilet pull, New Year’s Boys in costumes made of reed, directly and retrospectively referring to Samma’s earlier work. Instead of the heterosexual married couples usually depicted on wedding blankets, Samma is displaying decorative figures of men without shirts, also present in his earlier project Applied Art for a Gay Club. So, the form of a wedding tapestry is cunningly used to display secret symbols from the artist’s personal mythology that supposedly undermine heteronormativity in a non-violent manner.
\n\n\n\nAt the exhibition Pattern, Samma exhibited 19th century coifs (tanu), on loan from the Estonian National Museum, side by side with drawings and embroidery inspired by the headwear. With these works, Samma continues exploring the hidden cruising culture and fetishes in gay communities, also present in his previous projects. Here, the focus is on men’s underwear and jockstraps, provocatively decorated with perfectly executed national floral embroidery. The coif signalled the wearer to be a married woman – Estonian peasant women had to wear these daily as a symbol of that status. Furthermore, as part of a wedding ritual, the freshly married woman was slapped on the head or in the face with the coif and told, ‘…forget sleep and remember your husband!’ The beautifully embroidered coif was a sign that the woman was no longer single, and moreover, it was also meant to remind her of her position within that union at all times.
\n\n\n\nThese embroidered patterns, created by illiterate women are the only letters we have of them. We could say that these patterns are essentially and specifically ‘Estonian’, but obviously, international fashions have not left the work of these women untouched either. These baroque floral patterns, originally from north Estonia, acquired strong nationalist associations only later on, at the beginning of the 20th century, when the Estonian National Museum acquired the most aesthetic and ‘authentically Estonian’ examples of garments for their collections and these became known as folk dress. The founders of the museum hoped that based on the items they collected, local artists and applied artists could develop an idiosyncratic Estonian national style. With a layover as a tool for the Estonian authoritarian regime of the 1930s, these patterns also made it into art of the Stalinist era and are still represented in conservative nationalist applied art in full glory today.
\n\n\n\nLooking from a distance, Jaanus Samma’s dignified flower motif wreath drawings would fit well in both the castle of Konstantin Päts, the authoritarian president of Estonia, as well as a Stalinist palace of culture; however, taking a closer look, we see that this is not sincere national kitsch after all. What meanings emerge when patterns stolen from the coifs of married women come to decorate jockstraps as part of the hidden heritage of gay culture? Is this a homonationalist incursion into the heritage of Estonian national ethnography or the grief of the queer subject recently declared incapable of marriage3In November 2021, the Legal Affairs Committee of the Estonian Parliament released a statement regarding the current Family Law in Estonia, saying that it is not discriminatory as it does not prohibit marriage to anyone who is capable of marriage. The capability, however, is defined by the Family Law, which states that marriage is concluded between a man and a woman. With this statement, the Legal Affairs Committee essentially declared anyone in a non-heterosexual relationship incapable of marriage. (– Ed.), and dipped in glamour?
\n","featuredImageId":"cG9zdDoyNjE=","featuredImage":{"node":{"id":"cG9zdDoyNjE=","sourceUrl":"https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/jaanussamma_fotod.png","mediaItemUrl":"https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/jaanussamma_fotod.png","srcLQIP":"https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/jaanussamma_fotod-45x45.png","srcSet":"https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/jaanussamma_fotod-1351x1350.png 1351w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/jaanussamma_fotod-300x300.png 300w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/jaanussamma_fotod-1024x1024.png 1024w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/jaanussamma_fotod-150x150.png 150w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/jaanussamma_fotod-768x767.png 768w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/jaanussamma_fotod-45x45.png 45w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/jaanussamma_fotod-789x788.png 789w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/jaanussamma_fotod-1014x1013.png 1014w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/jaanussamma_fotod-1126x1125.png 1126w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/jaanussamma_fotod.png 1443w","altText":"","caption":null,"title":"jaanussamma_fotod","mediaDetails":{"width":1443,"height":1442}}},"categories":{"nodes":[{"slug":"features","name":"Features"}]},"terms":{"nodes":[{"name":"The Eyes of My Other","slug":"the-eyes-of-my-other","description":"April 2022","id":"dGVybTo0","issueFields":{"issueColor":"#bdffab","accentColor":"#000000","productUrl":"https://shop.ashadecolder.com/products/the-eyes-of-my-other"}}]},"articleAuthors":{"articleAuthors":{"nodes":[{"id":"cG9zdDo2OA==","content":"\nAndreas Kalkun received his PhD degree in Estonian and Comparative Folklore at the University of Tartu and is currently working as a senior researcher at the Archival Library of the Estonian Literary Museum. His main area of study is the religion and the songs of the Seto women but he has also researched the history of folkloristics, the heritage of obscenities, and the LGBT history in Estonia.
\n","title":"Andreas Kalkun"}]},"contributors":null}},{"id":"cG9zdDoxMjI=","title":"Market Values","slug":"market-values","uri":"/market-values/","date":"2022-04-09T17:22:23","excerpt":"Market Values is a search for an aesthetic expression that is situated in a space between the post-Soviet legacy, rich folk craft traditions, inborn admiration for modernism and an uncritical adoration of Scandinavian minimalism. Working on this project has been a long brewing process, reminding me of making what my family calls ümbermajatee or outside-the-house- […]
\n","content":"\nMarket Values is a search for an aesthetic expression that is situated in a space between the post-Soviet legacy, rich folk craft traditions, inborn admiration for modernism and an uncritical adoration of Scandinavian minimalism. Working on this project has been a long brewing process, reminding me of making what my family calls ümbermajatee or outside-the-house- tea. This tea has no set formula, it is made by simply pouring hot water on any aromatic weed you can find outside your house in the summer. Ümbermajatee is utterly seasonal and coincidental but also strongly situated in its surroundings. The tea is a bit different every day. It does not subscribe to any recipe or specific historical background; it is not credited to anyone in particular and is created by simply observing what is mulling around me. Offline and outside. The following pages are posters made in 2020 that have been reformatted for magazine pages in 2022. You can find more at www.marketvalues.ee or find me online @pafkabrit.
\n\n\n\nBrit Pavelson is a graphic designer based in Tallinn, Estonia. Her work is currently driven by decorative practices in graphic design, for their healing power, sustainability potential and vessels for intuitive storytelling.
\n","title":"Brit Pavelson"}]},"contributors":null}},{"id":"cG9zdDoxMTI=","title":"From Family Photo Albums to the White Cube – Interview with Diana Tamane","slug":"from-family-photo-albums-to-the-white-cube-interview-with-diana-tamane","uri":"/from-family-photo-albums-to-the-white-cube-interview-with-diana-tamane/","date":"2022-04-09T15:01:26","excerpt":"Diana Tamane is an artist from Riga, Latvia, currently based in Tartu, Estonia. In her practice, she explores the line between the intimate and the artistic, using photos, drawings and videos from her family archives or images created in dialogue with her family members. Her recent exhibitions include Antibiography at the Centre d’Art Maristany, Spain, […]
\n","content":"\nDiana Tamane is an artist from Riga, Latvia, currently based in Tartu, Estonia. In her practice, she explores the line between the intimate and the artistic, using photos, drawings and videos from her family archives or images created in dialogue with her family members. Her recent exhibitions include Antibiography at the Centre d’Art Maristany, Spain, Allied at the Kyiv Biennial 2021, and Flower Smugglers as part of the Frame of Sopot Photography Festival, Poland. Her artist book Flower Smuggler received the Author’s Book Award at Recontres d’Arles and was shortlisted for the Aperture First Photobook Awards in 2020. Perhaps this work is a good example of her practice – Tamane used photographs her grandmother had taken of the flowers she had either grown in her garden or had been gifted and combined these with a story of her grandmother being denied passage across the Latvian-Russian border with flowers she wanted to bring to her grandfather’s grave in an area annexed from Latvia by the USSR in 1945. Through combining the personal with the political, Tamane has a unique way of shining light on geopolitical realities through the lived experiences of ordinary people, her close ones. We meet on my 31st birthday and one day after her 36th birthday, over a table of tulips and cake in her home in Tartu, to discuss how she feels about her art being read as feminist, women’s power, and the turning point from trauma to healing that has provoked a change in her artistic position.
\n\n\n\nHow is the cake?
It’s really good, thank you! So, there is even a birthday cake this year. Now the day is complete.
You were telling me about how you didn’t speak Estonian when you came to Tartu Art School, so you felt like your works needed to speak for themselves. How did it happen that you are still living here 15 years later?
I started studying in an art school in Latvia when I was 12. There, I took academic drawing, painting and sculpture, but in the last year we also had a photography class. I fell in love with the process of developing in the dark room. I would stay late and lose track of time. After I graduated from high school, Tartu Art College seemed like a good option, as there was nowhere to study photography in Latvia. After moving to Tartu, I travelled a lot and lived in different countries. For a year I went to Portugal as an Erasmus student, then moved to Barcelona to do an internship. After I graduated from Tartu, I moved to Brussels for my master’s degree and continued at HISK’s (Hoger Instituut Voor Schone Kunsten – Vlaanderen) art residency programme for two years in Ghent. I was planning to stay in Belgium because it was going well. I had received several awards and grants, but at some point, I realised they don’t really need me there. There are so many artists in Belgium already. For some reason, I never allowed myself to consider going back to Estonia. Then one day I realised I could, and I felt such relief, so I packed my stuff and left. Here it’s different, there is space to evolve and it feels like home at the moment.
How come you felt you could go back to Estonia, and not to Latvia?
It’s like I had two lives. Before I was 20 and after. I cannot imagine that I would go back to Latvia. When I arrived in Tartu, I immediately felt in sync with the city, like its rhythm and my own were moving at the same pace.
Looking at some of your works, I started thinking about the misogynist attitude that prioritises the “official” history, often written by men – an example of this is monuments of men on horses, whereas small personal details like family photos or diaries remain less visible. For example, looking at the photo series Family Portrait depicting your mother’s lineage, or the work Blood Pressure showing your great grandmother’s notes documenting her blood pressure readings on the backs of the photos from her personal album. Many of these items might look insignificant, but they are important to someone. Do you find yourself conflicted about crossing the boundary between a photograph as your grandmother’s personal item and exhibiting it as a piece of art?
Daily rituals take a lot of time and have great importance in our lives. They can be considered insignificant by some, but it’s what really carries us. As an artist you are like a magician. It is here [points as if at an object] but it doesn’t mean anything. As an artist, I take it, bring it, let’s say into a white cube – and it is like baptizing it, the object becomes sacred.
Regarding personal rituals, did your birthday yesterday have any special meaning for you?
I started the day in the way I wish more days would start – slowly, with warm lemon water, meditation, reading, and afterwards I went to a 5Rhythm dance class. In the evening, my friend came over for dinner. I would love it if this year was about slowing down, connecting to things and people who bring me joy.
I want to do things differently, to be a better friend to myself. Sometimes we know what we should do, but it hasn’t yet settled into our system, into our body. But now I feel some things are settling down for me. I mean I can still push myself sometimes, but I really have started to feel that always running somewhere is violence against myself.
A lot of your work is auto-biographical or auto-ethnographic; it includes conversations with your family or observes your father in the garden. Among other things, these are feminist methods. Some of your work is probably read as feminist art. How do you feel about that?
I prefer not to be put into a box, any box. Of course, I am feminist, but that’s not the place I make my work from. My fear is that when we say it’s a feminist work then people don’t see that there are so many other layers. But I am interested in women’s experiences and want to tell stories about women in a way that would support them. I’ve sometimes had an issue with the feminist vibe – in my eyes it creates a division between men and women. But it is time to take responsibility and acknowledge that both men as well as women have contributed to the patriarchal system. Of course, there are the sad statistics that every fourth woman has experienced physical or sexual abuse and we carry these traumas in our bodies. Most of us have trauma, personal or collective. We can stick with it, but we can also choose to let it go. It’s time for women to appreciate themselves. We can do a lot, we can give birth, we can have careers, be artists, healers, truck drivers like my mother, and I think women’s choices need to be honoured. A woman should also be supported if she chooses to be around the kitchen and raise children.
That statement is also feminist.
Yeah, it is.
We wanted to talk about women. What are your latest revelations regarding being a woman?
In recent years, I’ve realised that honouring the cycle is important. The daily cycles, seasons of the year and the menstrual cycle – through these we connect to nature and to ourselves. Based on what I have experienced and what I have also heard from my female friends, issues around menstruation were never discussed with us by our mothers or were talked about in a negative way. But I think it’s a gateway to our power and a place of wisdom. It used to be something that I never paid attention to. Now I have a different approach. It’s like you have these four phases [menstruation, follicular phase, ovulation, luteal phase – P.K.] connected to the seasons, there are phases when we must rest and when we are more productive and I try to respect that. There are times we are invited to go inwards and times when we are more communicative and open. It is very interesting for me to navigate all that, how at some point I am overwhelmed by a range of emotions, everything comes to the surface, it can feel dark and deep, but then I look at what my body wants to tell me: what needs my attention, what needs change. Maybe not every woman feels this, but I personally feel those phases strongly.
You have exhibitions coming up at the Contemporary Art Museum of Estonia (EKKM) in Tallinn and at Tartu Art Museum and Kogo gallery in Tartu. You mentioned that you feel like you are at a turning point as an artist. Could you tell me more about that?
In a way, my upcoming exhibitions at EKKM and Kogo gallery summarise my practice of the last decade. The EKKM exhibition Typology of Touch summarises the works related to the female lineage of my family, which have been completed during the last 12 years. At Kogo gallery, I will show my latest project Under the Same Sky. It’s an installation and a documentary film about three generations of women – the grandmother Tamara, who was born in Ukraine; the mother Irina, born in the Latvian SSR; and the daughter Sonya, who is half-Korean and grew up in Spain. For the last 17 years, the family has been living in the tourist city of Fuengirola in Costa del Sol, Spain.
But these days I am making more intuitive work. For example, I make drawings which are partly based on meditation and breathwork – I synchronise my breath with my drawing, I am interested in the use of the psychosomatic method in art.
I used to be interested in some sort of tension. Now I feel another kind of energy and perhaps I can start a new chapter. I would like to be more present, and to communicate more joy for life. I remember a long time ago a friend of mine said something about Louise Bourgeois: “You know it’s sad that she held on to her pain until the end”. It’s important to let go of things that do not serve us, to be transformed as humans and see where it brings us as artists.
Would you say that your previous work was created from a place of trauma?
I like what curator Martin Germann said about family in relation to my work: “It is a room or matrix we will never leave, and if we escape it, we inevitably escape in relation to it.” It’s a way of dealing with certain issues and finding a way to communicate. For me this became my language for speaking to them, it opened communication between us.
So, you feel that art is your language to speak not only to the art audience but to your family as well?
Yes, it’s like a thread that facilitates connection. It’s my love language.
Piret Karro is a cultural critic and curator based in Tallinn. Her academic background lies in Gender Studies and Semiotics, and she is currently the Head of Exhibitions at Vabamu museum.
\n","title":"Piret Karro"},{"id":"cG9zdDo2NA==","content":"\nHanna Samoson explores the boundaries of art and tries to perceive the unknown. Being in constant motion as an intuitive creator, her work is characterized by quick and spontaneous decisions. Since the beginning of 2022, he has been searching for her dream along the 2222 islands belonging to Estonia.
\n","title":"Hanna Samoson"}]},"contributors":null}},{"id":"cG9zdDoxMzQ=","title":"Searching for a label: The New East","slug":"searching-for-a-label-the-new-east","uri":"/searching-for-a-label-the-new-east/","date":"2022-04-09T17:36:05","excerpt":"The New East is a term used to mediate the contemporary culture of the ex-Soviet and Eastern bloc countries for Western audiences. Since its rise in the early 2010s, the label has received both adoration and criticism. It refers to and identifies a visual narrative which is sought after by visitors from outside the region […]
\n","content":"\nThe New East is a term used to mediate the contemporary culture of the ex-Soviet and Eastern bloc countries for Western audiences. Since its rise in the early 2010s, the label has received both adoration and criticism. It refers to and identifies a visual narrative which is sought after by visitors from outside the region but often also presented by local artists, musicians, designers and other creative minds.
\n\n\n\nWe asked six artists, curators and writers from Estonia and the Baltics how they view the term New East today, more than 30 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Do people relate to this label, which evokes an outsider’s gaze but also has been embraced by some in the region? Are there any particular traits that unite the visual culture of the former Soviet countries?
\n\n\n\nAndres Kurg is a senior researcher at the Estonian Academy of Arts in Tallinn, Estonia. His research looks at architecture in the Soviet Union from the 1960s to 1980s.
The term New East first brings to mind previous similar terms, like New Europe or Emerging Europe, that appeared in the early 2000s around the enlargement of the European Union and aimed to represent the culture and politics of the new member states. At the time there was a heightened interest in the built heritage of the late Socialist period that found its way into many coffee-table books and popular exhibitions, where it was shown as bizarre and otherworldly, like “spaceships” left behind by “aliens”, deeming these structures to be exceptions to the modernist norm originating from the West. Although the New East is applied to a broader territory (including Russia, Central Asia and the Caucasus), there are similarities in the ways in which these countries and their cultural output is represented under the label. There still seems to be a strong emphasis on the ruins of the so-called Second World, on socialist modernism that is thus exoticized as a quirky divergence from the core modernism originating from France or Germany. And as an exotic other, the New East is at the same time a projection of the promises of indulgence and pleasure denied back home.
\n\n\n\nThe question then would be how to gain control over the representations of the New East or, perhaps more realistically, add new analytical renditions to the existing clichéd ones? I guess more than bringing out new and “exotic” material on Eastern Europe, we need to theorise it from our own point of view and show the interconnections and entanglements of modernities that have been kept separate; to deprovincialize the New East. That does not mean writing Eastern Europe “into” an existing global narrative, but realising that in coming into contact with the socialist heritage and the contemporary culture of the New East, the Western narrative and its corresponding hierarchies are themselves bound to change.
\n\n\n\nKatja Novitskova is an artist born in Tallinn and currently based in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Her works explore the touching points between visual culture and science fiction. She represented Estonia at the 57th Venice biennale in 2017.
Perhaps I have been a bit out of touch (or more like lumped into another category), but I have never really consciously thought about the New East as an umbrella term before. And definitely not in reference to myself or my artistic work. I can sort of understand where it might be coming from – based on examples, such as Demna Gvasalia, Cxema and Tommy Cash, we can see that it’s about a generation of people who grew up through the dark, poor and free (in our memory) 1990s and whose aesthetic and cultural sensibilities were radically shaped by the consequences of the collapse of the Soviet Union.
\n\n\n\nDue to the arrival of market economies in the region, this generation has been able to learn to speak a new global language, which it then used to shoot out from the local cultural spheres onto the stage of international exchange. From the outside perspective there is perhaps an uncanny peculiarity and commonality to this cultural output that has become a distinct trend that also fuels itself. But what is interesting to me are the parallels that one can spot between the rise of let’s say Gvasalia and someone like Virgil Abloh, the first being a child immigrant from Georgia to Germany and the second, a child of immigrants from Ghana to the USA – these are parallels that go beyond regional specifics. I try to see what I do more in this vein, how it extends outwards from my background and allows me to work on contemporary issues in dialogue with the wider world. I think the part of the New East that is about generational truth and experience has already grown roots into contemporary culture, but the part that is a temporary trend has or is about to lose relevance (and that’s ok).
\n\n\n\nHansel Tai is a Chinese-born artist and jeweller based in Tallinn, Estonia. His work focuses on queer culture in the post-internet era.
I think one of the most interesting aspects of the term New East is that it was a cliché coined by the West – outsiders gazing in. Personally, I cannot imagine anyone wanting to embrace this term. It seems inherently limiting and evokes inferiority, doesn’t it? As though describing something new, but already delineating its brilliance as merely regional.
\n\n\n\nOne cannot help but think how the New East compares to the Old West or the New West? In many ways the “New” in “New East” was never clearly defined. But there was indeed a cultural big bang after the collapse of the USSR and Eastern Europe’s newfound freedom attracted Western media rushing into the liberated lands in order to observe them under a closer lens.
\n\n\n\nToday, Generation Z across the world uses the same iPhone models, and on their iPhones the same Netflix shows are being streamed. In many ways, we are merging into a global hotpot (quite literally, because of climate change). In order to claim your distinct identity in this sea of sameness, you need to look towards your heritage, go deeper, back in time.
\n\n\n\nIn this sense, the term New East is a reminder of diversity, celebrating differences, it does not erase but reclaims. I think people often forget that a movement and a cultural aesthetic always consists of individuals, and shaping it is the task of every young person today. Maybe a New New East appears (can I coin this)? For me, this new development perfectly reflects the art scenes in Estonia. One of the best examples is the fashion culture. The Estonian Gen Zs are not afraid to confront and mutate the Soviet aesthetic into something else. And there is much to express!
\n\n\n\nInga Lāce is the C-MAP Central and Eastern Europe Fellow at The Museum of Modern Art, New York and a curator at the Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art.
I think we are poignantly reminded of the lived experience of being in the East every time the periodic cycle of geopolitical calamities starts again somewhere in the region. Just in the past couple of years, we’ve witnessed an uprising and the subsequent violent crackdown in Belarus. In addition, in the summer of 2021, borders were particularly under assault: the Lukashenko incited hybrid war – a refugee crisis – at the Latvian, Lithuanian and Polish borders with Belarus. Then, military tension at the Ukrainian and Russian border, and in early 2022, the unexpected uprising in Kazakhstan that destabilised a much larger area neighbouring China.
\n\n\n\nWhile the term New East seems well suited to describing largely fashion, design, and pop-music related trends, I would say that terms like these often lack a critical quality and fail to account for the history of the post-socialist and post-Soviet areas. Whichever terms are used, it is important to consider the diverse and dynamic history of the region in order to understand the present. The omission of that complexity leads to the right-wing nationalist tendencies, disguised as patriotism.
\n\n\n\nI think that trauma heals slowly and that is also an active process. Looking for new wor(l)ds to talk about our experience, conduct research and interpret the region’s history from a contemporary position is still relevant and will be for years to come. So, there are numerous pressing themes, such as environmental (art) histories and colonialism that need to be analysed from a particular regional position that notably differs from that of the West and prioritises a transnational perspective. We are already seeing exhibitions by artists from a generation whose lives and careers were not marked by the shock of transitioning from the Soviet to the post-Soviet era, which allows them to bring in new perspectives, both aesthetically and content-wise.
\n\n\n\nEha Komissarov is a curator at Kumu Art Museum, the largest branch of the Art Museum of Estonia, where she has been working since the 1970s. In the 1990s, Eha Komissarov became the leading contemporary art curator in the newly independent Estonia.
As a practicing curator of a former Soviet republic, I love the formulation New East. However, its use is not unproblematic – when we talk about art history more specifically, the term New East is often used to refer exclusively to Soviet artists and art discourses. I think that the former Soviet republics in the Baltic region should not be included in this, we should be considered from a different perspective. Our attitude during the Soviet period was clearly anti-Soviet and our gaze was turned towards the West. Even though we did this in a blind and idealising manner, by now we see that it might have worked to our advantage. Today, we see that the former Soviet republics that did not have cultural connections with the West (in addition to art I also mean jazz, rock, pop culture, fashion, lifestyle) are struggling to form a unified front against Russia. During but also after the Soviet period, the Baltic states were desperately looking to differentiate themselves from other (former) Soviet regions, which led to a merging with the West from a different starting point.
\n\n\n\nDespite restrictions, in the Baltics as well as in other socialist countries of Eastern Europe, a serious effort was made to maintain a dialogue with international art movements. This was a political stance that benefitted these countries greatly later on: they adjusted fast because their crooked relationship to the West helped them escape the cultural shock that hit other Soviet republics hard.
\n\n\n\nWhen it comes to the former Soviet Union and socialist republics, it is difficult if not impossible to work the art discourse of the transitional period of the 1990s into a smooth theory that can be easily understood by everyone. We need to communicate very clearly how difficult it was to survive then, to develop and gain recognition – and what the role of art was in this. It is extremely important especially today, taking into account Russia’s political moves in recent years, that we take a stand against its chauvinist attitude and expose the kind of colonial ambitions it has always had towards the former Soviet republics and socialist countries.
\n\n\n\nHelgi Saldo is a non-binary drag performer and artist based in Tallinn, Estonia. Find them on Instagram @helgi_saldo and on IDA Radio, where they host the show Homokringel.
I think the need to define Estonians through the term New East is more of an issue for Westerners than anyone else. I define my drag practice as Eastern European body horror, so I can only roll my eyes when I see Estonia promoted as a Northern European country; I find this to be a strange reaction provoked by shame. And the same goes for the part of the West that sees us as somehow exotic and dangerous. Being a small nation is weirdly queer; I see many parallels and similarities in the way in which Estonians and queers must justify their existence or choices to larger groups. I understand the conflict is real and also why these steps are necessary, but I think we should address our history and the present according to who we are, what we need and what we have as a nation, and not worry about how the West defines us, even if our culture is closely linked to the West or we borrow from each other.
\n\n\n\nThe interviews were conducted in January 2022.
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\n","title":"Kaarin Kivirähk"}]},"contributors":null}},{"id":"cG9zdDoxNzE=","title":"Your guide to Estonia and beyond 2022","slug":"your-guide-to-estonia-and-beyond-2022","uri":"/your-guide-to-estonia-and-beyond-2022/","date":"2022-04-09T18:36:23","excerpt":"TOP PICKS RECOMMENDED BEYOND When visiting Estonia, it is easy to plan a short visit to Helsinki (2-hour ferry ride from Tallinn) or Riga (4-hour bus ride from Tallinn or Tartu)
\n","content":"\nLasnamäe Pavilion (Lindakivi square), Tallinn
While Tallinn Art Hall’s historical building is being renovated, the Art Hall will open in a new location in the district of Lasnamäe in Autumn 2022. The highlights of the 2022 programme include Barricading the Ice Sheets, an exhibition by Oliver Ressler (curated by Corina L. Apostol, 27 August – 6 November) still in the historical building, and a group show Is There Hope for Lovely Creatures? (curator: Tamara Luuk, 26 November – 5 February) in the new locationn.
Kumu Art Museum, Tallinn
Until 10 October
The exhibition Art in the Comfort Zone? The 2000s in Estonian Art offers insights into the art of the noughties. The exhibition is curated by Eha Komissarov and Triin Tulgiste.
Typology of Touch, EKKM, 14 April – 5 June (Tallinn)
Half Love, Tartu Art Museum, 17 June – 16 October (Tartu)
Artist Diana Tamane presents two solo shows simultaneously at EKKM in Tallinn, and Tartu Art Museum in Tartu. 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.
Kai Art Center, Tallinn
9 April – 26 June
The exhibition presents six artists – the German ars viva prize winners for 2022, Lewis Hammond, Tamina Amadyar and Mooni Perry, and three remarkable emerging artists from the Baltic region Laura Põld, Anastasia Sosunova and Janis Dzirnieks. The curator of the exhibition is Maria Helen Känd.
Vana-Võromaa Culture House Gallery, Võru
6 May – 26 June
The exhibition deals with the relationship between Estonians and their natural environment. Using bitter humour and sustainable gestures, the show attempts to raise awareness of the impact of today’s actions on our dream future. The exhibition is curated by Siim Preiman (Tallinn Art Hall).
Narva Art Residency, Narva
7 May – 8 June
Taking place in two chapters in Vienna and Narva, the exhibition initiates dialogues between a generation of upcoming artists, while aiming to find common ground within the diverse scope of contemporary painterly expressions. The show is curated by Lilian Hiob and Julius Pristauz.
Kogo gallery, Tartu
30 June – 27 August
The show, curated by Jurriaan Benschop with artists Veronika Hilger (Munich), Milla Aska (Helsinki) and Paula Zarina-Zemane (Riga), introduces three contemporary painters.
Tallinn Botanical Garden, Tallinn
29 September – 30 October
8th Artishok Biennial, curated by Ann Mirjam Vaikla, brings together 10 international artists and 10 art critics at the botanical garden, which will become the site of and for collective learning/unlearning for the invited participants. During the opening marathon 10 commissioned artworks will be presented, each of them accompanied by newly written critical texts. The final exhibition and collection of texts offers visitors 100 different ways to interpret the artworks and their artists.
EKKM, Tallinn
27 August – 16 October
The largest solo show of Tallinn based artist Taavi Suisalu deals with the changing self-image in the era of algorithmic imagination, attention economy and rapidly developing technologies.
When visiting Estonia, it is easy to plan a short visit to Helsinki (2-hour ferry ride from Tallinn) or Riga (4-hour bus ride from Tallinn or Tartu)
\n\n\n\nHelsinki Art Museum HAM, Helsinki
2 February – 29 May
Curator Denis Maksimov has invited five Estonian artists to each respond to a work from the HAM collection by choosing an existing artwork of their own to be exhibited alongside the collection piece.
Kiasma Art Museum, Helsinki
8 April – 16 October
Extending to all floors of the Kiasma building, exhibition is a comprehensive view of the latest trends in international contemporary art. The exhibition culminates in autumn 2022 with the Lithuanian participatory opera Sun and Sea.
2 September – 9 October
Various locations in Riga
The annual art festival SURVIVAL KIT will this year be inspired by the title of a poem by Ojārs Vācietis. The poem, forever timely, directs us towards questions related to free speech, the power of the voice and the vocal, the role of the sonic in resistance, revolution and dissent, and those that wish to silence such voices.
“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. 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.
\n","featuredImageId":"cG9zdDo0Mzc3","featuredImage":{"node":{"id":"cG9zdDo0Mzc3","sourceUrl":"https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/Peafoto_-Paul-O_Neill-speaking-at-Positioning.-Yelyzaveta-Babaieva-copy-scaled.jpg","mediaItemUrl":"https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/Peafoto_-Paul-O_Neill-speaking-at-Positioning.-Yelyzaveta-Babaieva-copy-scaled.jpg","srcLQIP":"https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/Peafoto_-Paul-O_Neill-speaking-at-Positioning.-Yelyzaveta-Babaieva-copy-45x68.jpg","srcSet":"https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/Peafoto_-Paul-O_Neill-speaking-at-Positioning.-Yelyzaveta-Babaieva-copy-scaled.jpg 1707w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/Peafoto_-Paul-O_Neill-speaking-at-Positioning.-Yelyzaveta-Babaieva-copy-200x300.jpg 200w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/Peafoto_-Paul-O_Neill-speaking-at-Positioning.-Yelyzaveta-Babaieva-copy-683x1024.jpg 683w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/Peafoto_-Paul-O_Neill-speaking-at-Positioning.-Yelyzaveta-Babaieva-copy-768x1152.jpg 768w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/Peafoto_-Paul-O_Neill-speaking-at-Positioning.-Yelyzaveta-Babaieva-copy-45x68.jpg 45w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/Peafoto_-Paul-O_Neill-speaking-at-Positioning.-Yelyzaveta-Babaieva-copy-525x788.jpg 525w","altText":"","caption":null,"title":"Peafoto_ Paul O_Neill speaking at Positioning. Yelyzaveta Babaieva copy","mediaDetails":{"width":1707,"height":2560}}},"categories":{"nodes":[{"slug":"commentary","name":"Commentary"}]},"terms":{"nodes":[{"name":"Practices in Dialogue","slug":"practices-in-dialogue","description":"October 2025","id":"dGVybTozMw==","issueFields":{"issueColor":"#c7d7bf","accentColor":"#4c4332","productUrl":null}}]},"articleAuthors":{"articleAuthors":{"nodes":[{"id":"cG9zdDoxMzY=","content":"\nKaarin Kivirähk is the editor-in-chief of A Shade Colder.
\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":"\nA Shade Colder is a new magazine for conversations about and around art in Estonia and beyond. The publication launches at a time when the region has found itself at the centre of international discussions. We hope that through the lens of contemporary art and visual culture the magazine will become an inspiration and a […]
\n","content":"\nA Shade Colder is a new magazine for conversations about and around art in Estonia and beyond. The publication launches at a time when the region has found itself at the centre of international discussions. We hope that through the lens of contemporary art and visual culture the magazine will become an inspiration and a useful source for engaging with this part of the world.
\n\n\n\nThe first issue, The Eyes of My Other aims to open a multicentric view on art (history). We are seeking to expand and provide a more nuanced perspective on Estonian art, while framing it within an international context. The issue explores ways of (re)framing Estonian visual culture, born between the East and the West, both in the past and the present, looking at both individual artistic practices as well as institutional efforts.
\n\n\n\nIn doing so, the artists and writers featured in this issue conjure images of (frightening) beauty, discuss decolonisation outside the national project, carefully consider local complexities, and being aware of the differences and agency of the gaze from inside and out, they look for shared narratives between art in Estonia and elsewhere.
\n\n\n\nHighlighting a multiplicity of perspectives is crucial, so that complex social, political and cultural processes would not be reduced to simplistic ideas and discussed based on out-dated concepts and models. This is especially urgent in the light of Russia’s vicious war against Ukraine, the consequences of which will be with us for years to come. A Shade Colder stands in solidarity with the Ukrainian people and will be donating 50% of the proceeds of the sales of its first issue to the Ukrainian Cultural Centre in Estonia, which has been providing support in Ukraine since 2014, as well as the Ukrainian Emergency Art Fund, directly targeting the needs of the art community in Ukraine.
\n\n\n\nKaarin Kivirähk is the editor-in-chief of A Shade Colder.
\n","title":"Kaarin Kivirähk"},{"id":"cG9zdDoxMzg=","content":"\nKeiu Krikmann is the editor of A Shade Colder.
\n","title":"Keiu Krikmann"}]},"contributors":null}},{"id":"cG9zdDoxNjU=","title":"The Undinous Court","slug":"the-undinous-court","uri":"/the-undinous-court/","date":"2022-04-09T18:19:12","excerpt":"I was invited to write on “the different images of beauty that emerge when discovering hidden histories and how these images bleed into and change our perspective on the present”. As part of this project, I was brought on a research trip to Tallinn, where I met artworks, artists, designers and researchers. The following notes, […]
\n","content":"\nI was invited to write on “the different images of beauty that emerge when discovering hidden histories and how these images bleed into and change our perspective on the present”. As part of this project, I was brought on a research trip to Tallinn, where I met artworks, artists, designers and researchers. The following notes, in the most spurious, tangential, threadbare, even subconscious way, contain the afterglow of some of these encounters and conversations and decorative turns.
\n\n\n\nI’ve written before – or tried to – about the sheer sensational force (and romance) of ‘recovery’, be it of artworks, personae, or even ways of feeling, of relating, of experientiality (including of art). I sometimes, against my better judgement, find myself thinking about a moment of the recovery process in terms of an exhumation, one that releases a kind of psychic charge – of course, exhumation is often bounded by a context so deeply, horrifically colonial that it is not a helpful word for the kind of recovery I’m thinking of – and then of course the term ‘recovery’ has serious limits – edges which begin to fray very quickly under scrutiny. The kind of recovery I’m thinking of is, more often than not, in direct contravention of that kind of history-making (disinterment, exhumation of tombs, looting, atrocity). Perhaps the easiest and most well-known recent example of the kind of recovery I mean would be Saidya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, which reupholsters the “extravagance, ornament and shine” of Black social existence, of “the utopian longings and the promise of a future world that resided in waywardness and the refusal to be governed.”
\n\n\n\nFragment of a recovery play
Dramatis Personae
Heraldrine, a member of the Undinous Court, having been ‘a visitor’ there since before theye can remember
Undinous Ordinators
Assistant Ordinator
Act I Scene I: A soiree is being given by the Ordinators of the Undinous Court – one of several courts in the Anti-Palace. The party is being given in honour of the discovery of an antique.
\n\n\n\nIn the centre of the Anti-Palace’s ante-saloon, on display, is a huge faintly green glass vessel – almost heart-shaped, with multitudinous tubes spiralling hither and thither – many are cracked, and all are broken high up with the effect of trailing off into the air or another dimension. Whatever they might have been connected to is now impossible to envisage. In the heart of the almost-heart is a threaded mass of threads – networks spun from cords and fibres of silver and aquamarine, rose and gold, which trail off into the various tubes, in places looking like compact fairy moss clogging the heart of a dryad or zephyr but in a very healthy sort of manner.
\n\n\n\nThe Assistant Ordinator:
How delicious, it really is unspeakable.
The Ordinator I:
We exhumated the whole thing from the bowels of the earth ourselves.
The Assistant Ordinator:
Oh, you mean that hole in the ground in your back garden?
The Ordinator II:
Yes!
The Assistant Ordinator:
Where, pray tell, is Heraldrine, how disappointing that theye are going to miss the-
Enter Heraldrine
\n\n\n\nHeraldrine (looking at the glass vessel):
…
…
………….
\n\n\n\nOrdinator II:
Yes, we knew you’d like it.
Assistant Ordinator:
I think theye are going to faint if you ask me.
Often descriptions of uncovering, unearthing and object revelation will centre around the moment of ‘discovery’ or shortly after – a painting being dusted and 300 years of stored up Time and History and Unseen-ness and so on hitting the finder/viewer, or a photograph or a diary issuing a singular chronological heave, a flash of temporal dislocation exposing the now of then (or vice versa), but the actual experience is considerably more prolonged. Sure, there can be that big seismic thwack. But it really comes in waves or trickles slowly. The exertion of then on now. Of now on then on now.
\n\n\n\nThat said, exhumation still comes to my mind because it recalls something of that psychic release – the sensational but also ‘something else-ness’ that happens on say really looking at a photograph that hasn’t been seen for decades – the sense of dredging up a magic that exerts itself on the present, of an object being seen.
\n\n\n\nAs much as these terms come easily because they, at least descriptively, come close to a moment in the process of recovery and verbally sate the way it feels, they could very easily be misread, could figure what I’m describing as a kind of insipid spume – a little rhetorical fancy that in the end means nothing because, say finding a piece of art from several decades ago doesn’t actually do anything to the world… “What the hell is a ‘psychic charge?’” etc. But aside from being constitutionally dull – the flattening of a romantic turn – this reading would be (grievously) incorrect.
\n\n\n\npresumed to be from Act I, Scene II. In which Heraldrine inquires into the nature of the Undines and remembers why theye came to the Undinous court in the days before time choked up entirely
\n\n\n\nHeraldrine, waking up in bed after theire fainting episode, recalls theire Compartment Life – in other words that in-between life, always, running like a green underground stream, was a life no less or more just simply in-between – a realisation which came to them upon looking at the mass of threads on the heart-like glass chamber … theire Compartment Life is Mottine, and upon knowing that she is Mottine, she dons Heraldrine’s favourite jewels, doublet, and so on, and takes herself to the Minor Undine Library – there she browses for several hours before finding what she knew would be there:
The Memoirs of Mottine Mottine Firrre-Mottine
Thursday, March 3rd
I am here. I unpacked my paints today and walked around. It is so cold in the studios. The fountain struck me, and I will have to tell you about it another time. I have to go to meet the other painters and hope they are as I have dreamt they will be.
Sunday, April 4th
It is a month on (sorry) and I literally weep at the naivety of my last entry. I have made no friends here. Everyone avoids me. Not just because they know what I am but because … I don’t know it is hard to express. It is more than that.
Monday, April 5th
I have decided to paint the fountain.
Tuesday, April 6th
A new painter has arrived and has been installed in the studio next to mine. He peeped his head in yesterday and I wanted to die because I thought he seemed so charming, and I knew we would never be friends.
Wednesday, May 6th
I have made friends with the boy in the next studio. Even in May the studios are so cold, and we spent the day hunting for portable heaters and found some in a basement which no one seems to know exists – perhaps 300 centuries of Things lie there – I mean some real discarded masterpieces and everything but most importantly heaters.
It is, by the way, a month again since my last entry. So my neighbour: One day – can’t remember when now – shortly after he popped his head in and I wanted to die – I saw him standing in front of the great fountain which is in itself a curiosity. For example, the fountain is of a Rebis (or similar), some ancient god of both sexes or neither, and it is completed in a dark blue stone and plashes away all day and people come and sit on it or throw things in it, occasionally, or sometimes push each other into it, or jump on the ice when it’s frozen reflecting the silver of everything – and yet no one ever comments upon it. It is so clearly a vestige of the Before Times or Between Times. Well, this was the first time I ever saw anyone really taking it in. So I resolved that, when he next popped his head in, if he ever did again, I would ask him about it and show him my painting.
Well, I waited and waited one day, and nothing, and nothing the next, and looked for him every time I was painting by the fountain. When he finally popped his head in a week on, I basically screamed so loudly he jumped back and his glasses literally fell off his face: “The fountain!”
And he picked up his glasses and I think, piecing things together, came to look at the painting.
He told me the story of the undines – who are visible everywhere in this city but only vestiges of vestiges.
Thursday, May 41st
He spoke to me about something called a recovery play. These were in fact a popular form around 300 years ago – about the point at which things kept getting dredged up and people became adept and Finding Things … the force he said of recovery was so intense people started making plays about them, to process; the force he said was all a matter of material history. That also the Context of these Things became available again and thus so did the form, the perfume of the era or something like this surfaced, so the plays were ways to rediscover the form but let the form operate on the world once more through these objects that had been suppressed or lost … He said during the period of the plays … of repressed histories being allowed to work on the world and this changing history and so on and so forth, Time literally changed. In texture but in other ways. How couldn’t it? He was he said, writing and staging a recovery play. Two actually, one about a recovery play he had found and the other – here I almost died again – about the fountain.
Heraldrine in the night [unreadable] to the display room [unreadable] the arched windows show greenish sky.
There the glass object [unreadable] lit by a candle.
HERaldine [sic] takes a glass hammer and strikes.
Heraldrine, surrounded by broken glass touches the interior object and begins to speak. It is as if Heraldrine is reading the threads, finding subtle kinds in the changes of hue and incongruous patterns and weft and so on – rifts like a music score.
\n\n\n\nHeraldrine: For example [unreadable] truncated… erased, obscured, buried or simply lost… when in the world again, the form becomes available to us even if simply to talk about the work, to think about the object… experience it. But the … is operating on the world again … in a way that has not been permissible.
\n\n\n\nHere, for example, we learn what? That a herald of the city… came and was made privy to a great constitutional beauty presiding under the land.
\n\n\n\nThat beneath the Undinous city great wefted [unreadable] for nothing and Melded thoroughly to the frothing and still and moving springs and the ore ore ore and black ore
\n\n\n\nIn this book were patterns… ornaments… and illustrations of figures dancing… tapestries of figures dancing… older paintings on walls of peoples dancing in the carvings… in the chambers of the Undinous city to which I came. The undines, which appear in myth and not live here, were people from… who left their brothers and sisters to live with mortals – hence in the myth ‘takes the form of a beautiful man’
\n\n\n\nHence in the myth ‘takes the form of the beautiful woman’
\n\n\n\nHence in the myth ‘androgynous’
\n\n\n\nThere’s a scene in a book I’ve never finished, in which the murals start moving over the walls… it’s… ornament… and indeed… early conceptions of ornament as flickering… light sand water to suggest some sort of motion or… the… pattern… grottos, cave walls and so on. And in the grottos – one in particular, was a pool and the grotto nymphs known as grottiness – really an ancient kind of undine swam there and passed in and out of the crystal walls and ate the pearls to remain as they were.
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\n","title":"Shola von Reinhold"}]},"contributors":null}},{"id":"cG9zdDo2","title":"From Life. On the work of Anu Põder","slug":"from-life-on-the-work-of-anu-poder","uri":"/from-life-on-the-work-of-anu-poder/","date":"2022-03-20T15:45:15","excerpt":"When you encounter the art of Anu Põder, the first thing you are likely to feel is: Her work speaks of life in a manner so lucid and intense that what it says must be directly taken from life. It addresses the pain of coming to pieces, as well as the power of personal growth, […]
\n","content":"\nWhen you encounter the art of Anu Põder, the first thing you are likely to feel is: Her work speaks of life in a manner so lucid and intense that what it says must be directly taken from life. It addresses the pain of coming to pieces, as well as the power of personal growth, in a viscerally existential, bodily way. In doing so, Põder breaks with how the canon of modern art, written by and for men, has defined the form life has to take on in art: that of a linear career, which makes a red thread emerge, as artists master adversities, and sum their findings up tidily and tightly in one coherent body of work. The pressure to fit this form is still on, maybe more so than ever, as social media rewards the compact packaging of art and life. With Põder things take a different route. To develop a passion for her work is to appreciate how she deals with life interrupting art, as she returns to making pieces in intervals, while parenting, and making a living. Following this existentially syncopated rhythm, she revises, twists and layers her work in incredibly vibrant ways. So the body of work Põder creates during her lifetime is not governed by one rigid concept of identity. It grows and diversifies, in step with life changing.
\n\n\n\nThe extended version of this essay develops this critique of canonical career thinking on art and life in a slow meditation. This abbreviated edit now focuses on key aspects of violence and growth in Põder’s art. Her work testifies to pain inflicted on body and soul. And it speaks of empowerment, yet not in terms of victorious mastery. It won’t resort to a linear heroic tale of conquering pain. In revising, twisting and layering work, Põder instead shifts the weight of pain. It stays there, but comes to exist alongside the power to grow, undenied, acknowledged, addressed, and as such, adding momentum to a counter-push towards living, and growing, as the interplay between weights and forces remains in motion:
\n\n\n\n[…] Emptiness (Tühjus, 1985) seems pivotal in that in this work Põder pushes her approach to breaking bodies apart to a limit where the violent quality and traumatic dimension of the work are fully disclosed. In this piece, different textile objects and rounded amorphous shapes are strapped to the wire mesh of a metal fence using long ropes. Amongst them are patches of crinkled textile that look as if they could be the filling of the more voluminous of the shapes. So you perceive them as intestines spilling from lacerated body parts. At the centre of the assemblage Põder has mounted a sheet of pink plastic moulded in such a manner that the outlines of a female torso (breast, collarbone, armpit, hips) can be traced. Yet this body has next to no volume. It’s as if its skin had been stripped and discarded like a piece of clothing which, in its bulges and crinkles, still suggests the curves and folds of the body it once covered. Dismembered, gutted, skinned and left to dry on the fence, this body strikes you as having been subjected to extreme violence. In the history of sculpture, the torso can be seen as being associated with various romantic ideas of beauty (in ruins). But here we are looking at no headless Heracles. In Emptiness the fragmentation of the body speaks of actual dismemberment. In doing so, the work doesn’t merely represent trauma. It enacts it. Strapping the resemblances of dismembered body parts onto a metal fence around the skin stripped off a torso brings the traumatic force to bear. The impression that Emptiness leaves firmly imprints the connection between violence and fragmentation on your memory.
\n\n\n\n[…] Fast forward to future work and the sense of traumatic force may, likewise, stay with you when you see the tall textile figures Põder sculpted between 1992 and 1993. Many (not all) of them have a head and limbs. Indeed, they seem to express a sense of recomposition, of getting things back together, getting ready to move and act. Still, the imprint left by pieces such as Emptiness, continues to haunt even these sculptures. After the force of the fragment hits you, no body in Põder’s work will ever look whole again. Something keeps tearing at them. Coiled (Keerus, 1993), for example, is a tall female figure, its skin made from layers of blue fabric strips, as if it were bandaged from head to toe. As the title spells out, the arms and legs of the figure are coiled. The arms look like the horns of a ram. The legs are twisted around each other like two ropes. The figure palpably exudes an immense tension. It looks torturous.
\n\n\n\nYet Coiled only looks like a body in pain when we read its limbs as being coiled and twisted inwards. What if we pictured the re-coil of the limbs un-coiling and releasing their tension? The figure would pivot around itself and unleash the force of a whirlwind. What looked painful from one angle, appears incredibly powerful from another. Are we confronted by actual pain? Or power in a state of potential? Both readings seem valid. So again, here, we have a turning point. From the position of the work, different aspects of previous or future works may once more come into view. Pain or power? Or both? Looking back at works from the eighties, the amazing On One Foot from Lasnamäe (Ühel Jalal Lasnamäelt, 1986) jumps out. The sculpture is made from two, slightly coiled, entwined plaster tubes covered in patches of skin-coloured leather from which metal spikes protrude. […] There are many of them, and they have definitely become weapons. As Estonian sculpture historian Juta Kivimäe explains, the title of the piece alludes to a ride across town on a line where the buses are notorious for being overcrowded. As bodies fight for space, limbs rub up against each other and get tangled; everybody has their spikes out, limbs become weaponised, pores grow thorns. This is fierce. And funny. And very close to life. A life not merely defined by suffering but by an urge to fight back and persist. These spiky body parts – in the mode of becoming weapon – express an insistent will to live. Spinoza called it conatus, a lust for life, or rather, the sheer power to persevere. Every spike speaks of it. And so do the coiled limbs of Coiled. Twist me? Watch me uncoil and fly in your face! When you look at it this way, the tension that the many bodies in Põder’s work exude, could very well be a result of the pressures imposed on them. But it could equally be perceived as the powers of life, ready to release themselves.
\n\n\n\nThe release could, but may not have to, come in the form of violent assertiveness. It could also take on the form of growth. Look at Composition (Kompositsioon, 1988). With its many curves and folds, this plaster sculpture painted green looks like the most potent form of otherworldly life, a mollusc with multiple sexual organs and orifices. Have you ever seen an octopus move on land? Its jelly body seems to shift shape every second as it slips and slides onwards: an intelligent organ in motion. Indeed, when in Composition we move from the fragment to the fold, a whole universe of expansive being opens up in modes of unfolding, unfurling, uncoiling. In Long Bag (Pikk kott, 1994), a long train of cloth unrolls across the floor from the silhouette of a woman made from the same cloth. She seizes the space effortlessly with the matter her body produces. This is power. What do we see if we now look back upon the pieces that primarily read as manifestations of traumatic forces? They will still manifest trauma. But another dimension of their materiality may yet reveal themselves. Inspired by Long Bag, we might imagine what Emptiness would look like if, like the cloth trailing across the floor, the wire mesh fence were in a horizontal position. Would it not make the structure resemble a bed and the stuffed objects cushions, the crinkled fabric blankets and the discarded skin a jacket cast on the floor upon which to sleep? If we were to look at it like this, the piece would still speak of a fight, but from this perspective, the struggle would be one of making a place for bodies to rest.
\n\n\n\nNot just any artwork is capable of engendering such twists and reversals. I would argue that it takes a particular kind of power to express the conflicting dimensions of life in such an intimate manner, in layers that open up progressively and retroactively. It may be persistence that keeps someone journeying back and forth in the depths of lived, embodied memory. But when it comes to the manner in which Põder manifests these forays into the depths of life, it’s striking that, persistent as they may be, duration as such does not seem to matter. Engaging with her work is not like reading Proust or Joyce, who translated their memory mining into overwhelmingly detailed accounts that take an age to read and probably took even longer to write. Põder’s timing is different. Her works are crystalline, they contract a whole world of conflicting nuances into concise forms, which then keep shifting before you, like glass shards in a prism. In this sense, her pieces are much like Clarice Lispector’s novels. They are short, explosive, deep and dense. In all their brevity, they venture to the core of the Earth and back, time and again, in the glimpse of an eye. It’s the timing of mystic thoughts that hits you, sharply, while you are immersed in matters of the material world. “I capture sudden instants” Lispector writes in The Stream of Life (Água Viva, 1973), “that bring their own death with them and others are born – I capture the instants of metamorphosis, and their sequence and concomitance have a terrible beauty.”1 C. Lispector, The Stream of Life. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989, p. 7. This is Põder: instants of metamorphosis, shape shifting, captured from within the very element of life, in full acknowledgement of the cruel reversals that occur, as traumatic forces and the power to persevere keep clashing.
\n\n\n\nIt takes guts to expose oneself to such reversals and clashes by exploring the depths of embodied memory in one’s art. In this sense, Põder’s work is truly gutsy. Infinitely more so than the work of many artists – traditionally most of them male – who avoid the shock of realising that nothing was or stays quite as it seemed, by hammering out the selfsame identical type of work: the work which, at one point in their life, they thought was a good idea to make, and which they henceforth make for the rest of their lives. Art history unfortunately praises as ‘consistency’ what may amount to little more than a man’s fear of confronting the fact that the tectonic plates below him are constantly moving. (For if he dared dig deeper, the layers of his work might actually start moving too.) I would read Põder’s Man’s head with a flag (Mehe Pea Lipuga, 1984) along these lines, as a mockery of the fearful narrow-mindedness that accompanies a stereotypical man’s craving for clear focus in life. The piece resembles the head of a man, all but eyes and mouth covered in pink leather, as if he were clad in chain mail or some futuristic form of helmet. At the top of his head there’s a flag ready to point wherever the wind is blowing. From the rear of his neck strange bulging shapes protrude, writhe and wrap around the back of his head. Oblivious to the ghostly occurrences his own body produces behind him, he looks ahead, unmoved, unperturbed, with an air of great resolve, ready to march into battle or take on ‘great projects’. Oh, what a fool. If you are raised to fight your way through life like this, like a man, other men will keep asking you what position you take, what ideas you represent, what ideology you focus your energies around. They teach you to confuse life with whatever sign you could put on a flag to signify what you stand for. As if that is all there is. What else there might be would be easy to perceive, if only you took off the darn helmet for a second and recognised what was going on behind you and all around you, all the time.
\n\n\n\n[…] Experiencing the reality of your surroundings with this enhanced sense of awareness, asks for other responses: no grand resolutions, but the intimate engagement with the forces that shapes life in relations. So in Põder’s works, forces tearing bodies apart clash with forces that make them grow spikes, fight back and expand beyond measure. The work is fierce, forceful, and full of unappeased difference and unconsolidated non-identity. In short, it is too fierce to be recuperated by conclusive words of appraisal. As the life work of an experienced artist, meaning the work of someone who has lived her life to the fullest, it would seem these artworks need no appeasement. They ask for guts, to be grasped and grappled with, in the course of ongoing encounters.
\n\n\n\nAn earlier version of this text was published in Anu Põder. Be Fragile! Be Brave!, a book accompanying an exhibition of the same name at Kumu Art Museum in Tallinn in 2017.
\n\n\n\nAnu Põder (1947–2013) was an Estonian sculptor and installation artist. Throughout her career, she experimented with new abstract forms and a variety of materials from plaster and wood, charcoal and textile, to light, scent and taste. Põder’s work was inspired by her own experience as well as her surroundings and environment in the city and in the countryside, at home and at work.
She studied at the Estonian State Art Institute’s sculpture department from 1970 to 1976. Until 1986, Põder worked as a freelance artist and after that, shared her time between her artistic practice and her students at the Estonian State Art Institute and Tartu Art School. Põder’s works belong to the collections of the Art Museum of Estonia, Tartu Art Museum and to her family. In 2021, the second original version of the work Tongues (Activation Version) (1998) was acquired by the Tate.
In recent years, Anu Põder’s work has been exhibited at Kumu Art Museum (2017), 13th Baltic Triennial in Vilnius (2018), Pori Art Museum (2019), La Galerie Noisy-Le-Sec in Paris (2019), and Liverpool Biennial (2021). Three works by Anu Põder are presented at the 59th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia Milk of Dreams (curated by Cecilia Alemani).
Jan Verwoert is a critic and writer on contemporary art and cultural theory. He is a contributing editor of frieze magazine and his writing has appeared in different journals, anthologies and monographs.
\n","title":"Jan Verwoert"}]},"contributors":null}},{"id":"cG9zdDoxNTk=","title":"Decolonise that – Estonian identity as indigenous and/or white","slug":"decolonise-that-estonian-identity-as-indigenous-and-or-white","uri":"/decolonise-that-estonian-identity-as-indigenous-and-or-white/","date":"2022-04-09T18:09:58","excerpt":"When I began writing this essay, I was struggling a little to find a good word to characterise the way in which race has become a prominent and much debated issue in Estonian society. But the right word is not fascinating, ambivalent, or surprising. It is not surprising that race is increasingly perceived as a […]
\n","content":"\nWhen I began writing this essay, I was struggling a little to find a good word to characterise the way in which race has become a prominent and much debated issue in Estonian society. But the right word is not fascinating, ambivalent, or surprising. It is not surprising that race is increasingly perceived as a key problem in Estonia. Quite the contrary, it is no wonder at all.
\n\n\n\nWhen the Rendering Race exhibition (2021) in the project space of the new permanent exhibition at Kumu Art Museum in Tallinn became the focus of debates around race in Estonia, one could hardly say that it was entirely unpredictable, even if it was probably hard to foresee the heated public and private criticism on such a massive scale. The avalanche of negative reactions were centred on both the curator Bart Pushaw’s initial impulse to map and problematise early 20th century Estonian art in respect to race and colour, as well as the decision to change the previously racially charged titles for neutral ones. Taking into account the spread of the BLM movement in Estonia and the simultaneous growth in popularity of radical right-wing political movements and parties in the country, all of this is not surprising.
\n\n\n\nIn parallel, Eastern Europeans are just beginning to realise that the memory of their trauma, the terrors of the Second World War and the memory of slavery exist in a shared space of remembrance and the two have been influencing each other in multidirectional ways. People with different backgrounds and positions are asking how we should think about decolonisation and critical race theory in connection this region. How can we find a method and a voice to use when speaking about the colonial realities of Eastern Europe and its decolonisation, while these concepts are defined by a mass of historical and theoretical work on the colonial and racial experience of the West? And is there such a thing as a specifically Eastern European colonial legacy?
\n\n\n\nHistory does not explain everything. Sometimes it explains hardly anything at all. Often, the best it can do is show us that things are more complicated than they seemed. Yet, in the face of the decolonisation debates, a look back at the complicated and dynamic history of Estonian identifications of race, whiteness and indigeneity might prove useful. It might even offer one explanation for the often painful reactions to the word race in Estonia.
\n\n\n\nAfter the 13th century crusades, the Estonian speaking population was gradually turned into serfs under the rule of the German-speaking elites. From the early modern period onwards, they were also represented as culturally and racially inferior. Along with the spread of European colonisation, Estonians were more and more often compared with the native peoples of the North. Due to the Estonian language belonging to the same group as the Finno-Ugric and Samoyedic languages, the 18th and 19th century German authors eagerly associated the Estonians with the Finno-Ugric, but also other Nordic peoples, including the Itelmens, Inuits and other native peoples of America. In the late 18th century, Johann Gottlieb Herder famously called the Estonians the last savages of Europe and compared them to the Sami and Samoyedic peoples.
\n\n\n\nAt that time, such comparisons, resulting in borealist stereotypes and arguments about Estonians being closer to nature than to culture also served to legitimate the socio-cultural segregation of the unfree peasantry in these lands that had become the Baltic provinces of the Russian Empire in the early eighteenth century. The Russian imperial ethnographic discourse placed Estonians somewhere between what its authors perceived as the savage natives of the North and the more civilised peasantry of its European provinces. While preparing the exhibition The Conqueror’s Eye: Lisa Reihana’s In Pursuit of Venus (2019) at Kumu Art Museum, we were struggling to find the origins of an image depicting Estonians and sought advice from colleagues at the Russian Museum of Ethnography. We discovered that the image originated from Julian Simashko’s Russian Fauna, or Description and Depiction of Animals occurring in the Russian Empire (Русская фауна, или Описание и изображение животных, водящихся в Империи Российской) published in St Petersburg in 1850–1851.
\n\n\n\nThe Enlightenment writers and philosophers were the first to realise the potential of reversing the meaning of the native imagery, as they effectively turned their own vision of the noble savage into a powerful tool for criticising European nobility. At the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries, the Baltic German Enlighteners adapted these ideas. They also compared the serfdom of the Baltic peasantry to colonial slavery. From the 1860s onwards, the activists of the Estonian national movement likewise learned to use such analogies. Although the emancipation of the peasantry had taken place already in 1816/1819, it took the reforms of the 1850s to liberate the peasants from unfree labour and improve their socio-economic status. Among Estonian national activists, this resulted in considerable solidarity towards the slaves and indigenous peoples suffering from colonialism across the globe. For example, the first Estonian historical novels that were published by the leading national poetess Lydia Koidula in the 1860s were written about slave rebellions in the Americas.
\n\n\n\nElements of this solidarity with the oppressed and othered indigenous communities were still visible in the Estonian visual culture of the early 20th century. For example, ethnographic portraits by Ants Laikmaa depict with equal respect and sympathy the North Africans and the Estonian peasantry. But as the social mobility of Estonians increased and the nation state was formed in 1918, these associations became less frequent. Instead, Estonian visual culture shows a growing interest in racial differentiation, thereby raising the question of to what extent this could relate to how eager Estonians were to become white themselves. In the interwar period, narratives of slavery and associations with colonial slaves were gradually overshadowed by attempts to create a more victorious past for Estonians.
\n\n\n\nThe question of what happens when the former colonised subject becomes the coloniser is central to the exhibition at the Estonian pavilion of the 59th Venice Biennale (2022) by Kristina Norman and Bita Razavi. The project, titled Orchidelirium. An Appetite for Abundance looks at the life and work of the Estonian botanical illustrator Emilie Rosalie Saal and her husband, the writer and photographer Andres Saal, who became members of the Dutch colonial administration and thus part of the white elite in Indonesia at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. What happens when Estonians, who were just recently in the position of non-white native serfs, turn their gaze towards colonised subjects? How will their hybrid identities balance between the desire to imitate the colonial elites and show solidarity with the colonised subjects?
\n\n\n\nIn fact, these questions are relevant for Estonian identity throughout the 20th century. Like many European countries, Estonia has witnessed a number of ruptures throughout the century, experiencing the founding of a nation state in the aftermath of the Russian revolutions, the loss of its independence during the Second World War, the Soviet occupation, and the regaining of sovereignty in 1991. A crucial element in reviving Estonian national identity in the late Soviet period was their identification with the small indigenous Finno-Ugric peoples. Living across Russia, from Karelia to Siberia, they still included communities with more traditional lifestyles and customs. There had previously been pan-Finno-Ugric movements, but only then did the idea of the indigenous roots of Estonians gain a wider resonance.
\n\n\n\nCrucial to this was the artistic research of prominent Soviet Estonian artists, filmmakers, writers, musicians in the 1970–1980s, including, for example, the writer and documentary film director and the future president of Estonia, Lennart Meri, the composer Veljo Tormis, and the artist Kaljo Põllu. The success of the Finno-Ugric revival among the rapidly urbanising Estonians was partly based on those authors’ skilful combination of the roles of artists and scientists. Teaching at the State Art Institute of the Estonian SSR from 1978 onwards, Põllu organised annual expeditions to Finno-Ugric peoples with his students. He also cooperated closely with ethnographers, linguists, and other academics.
\n\n\n\nThe relationship Kaljo Põllu and his contemporaries had with Finno-Ugric indigeneity was in many ways controversial. On the one hand, they differed from the Western gaze, taking a step further and identifying themselves and their nation with these indigenous cultures. On the other hand, they did not position themselves as indigenous authors either, but rather took the position of intermediaries. They remained at a safe distance, maintaining their position as the more civilised, modernised white brothers to their Finno-Ugric Siberian siblings, who embody the authentic roots of Estonians.
\n\n\n\nWhy did the white Estonian artists, writers and filmmakers re-fashion themselves as natives in such a serious, scientific way? Their turn towards indigenous cultures resonates with a broader fascination with heritage and folklore, emblematic of the last decades of the Soviet Union and often explained as part of the disillusionment with the Socialist utopia after the suppression of the Prague Spring – the anti-Soviet uprising in Czechoslovakia in 1968. This trend, however, coincides with a more global crisis of industrial modernity and also the rise of environmental awareness. In Estonia, the propagators of Finno-Ugric heritage cooperated with environmentalists too. The latter, in their turn, adapted the identification of Estonians as indigenous people, often comparing them to native Americans and other colonised peoples (who had become icons of environmental movements also elsewhere).
\n\n\n\nDuring the collapse of the Soviet Union, the idea of Estonians as indigenous people and comparisons with other native peoples gained a new momentum. As in other Eastern European countries, Estonian environmental and national activists alike drew comparisons between extractivism in European colonies and the exploitation of the Estonian and the other Soviet republics’ resources by the Soviet Union. This gave the idea of the indigenous identity of Estonians a clearly political dimension. During his presidency (1992–2001), Lennart Meri continued to emphasise these connections; for example, comparing Estonians to the colonised African peoples in the United Nations assemblies. At the same time, central to Meri’s speeches and understanding of history was the idea of Estonia as an outpost of European and Western civilisation on its Eastern border. This vision also has telling contradictions, as it presents Estonia simultaneously as a representative of the indigenous colonised subjects and their European colonisers.
\n\n\n\nThe ambivalent desire to be white and indigenous at the same time seems to characterise Estonian identity in a broader sense – and the internal tensions resulting from this hybrid identity might also explain the painful reactions to issues of race and decolonisation. As stated above, one way of solving these anxieties might be to work through the multi-layered histories of these identifications.
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\n","title":"Linda Kaljundi"}]},"contributors":null}},{"id":"cG9zdDoxNDU=","title":"The Terrifying and Mundane Seduction of Orchids","slug":"the-terrifying-and-mundane-seduction-of-orchids","uri":"/the-terrifying-and-mundane-seduction-of-orchids/","date":"2022-04-09T17:46:16","excerpt":"Encountering beauty evokes a desire to experience it first hand, to be near it, to have it rub off on you but also to own it – and this is exactly what the fascination with and the global trade in orchids has been driven by. This industry operates on such a massive scale that it […]
\n","content":"\nEncountering beauty evokes a desire to experience it first hand, to be near it, to have it rub off on you but also to own it – and this is exactly what the fascination with and the global trade in orchids has been driven by. This industry operates on such a massive scale that it seems almost mundane, banalising the destruction it leaves behind – it has a long history ranging from treasure hunting to mass market availability.
\n\n\n\nTaking this as a starting point, artists Kristina Norman and Bita Razavi together with curator Corina Apostol conceived Orchidelirium. An Appetite for Abundance, tracing a story of global interconnections between art, colonialism, botany and dualities, to be presented at the Estonian pavilion at the 59th Venice Biennale. At the heart of the exhibition is the story of a relatively unknown artist Emilie Rosalie Saal (1871–1954), whose work as a botanical artist was closely tied to her life in Indonesia, where she relocated when her husband was employed by the Dutch colonial authorities as a cartographer.
\n\n\n\nWhat was it that inspired you about Emilie Saal’s story initially? Has your perception and perhaps attitude towards her work changed during the two years you have worked on Orchidelirium?
Corina Apostol: The project started with an exhibition I began developing with Kristina on histories of colonialism, and the role of Estonians in it, and to provide an alternative view to the understanding that Estonians have been, above all, the colonised and not the colonisers. On the one hand, we wanted to unearth and highlight Emilie Saal’s story and to focus on female subjectivity and the universe she lived and worked in. But as the project developed, I also wanted to point to her role in the colonial project, as her botanical art was also a tool of the empire. So, the project is also looking at the consequences of colonialism in the present.
Kristina Norman: When we were conceiving the project, we were absolutely sure that one part of my Orchidelirium film trilogy would focus on the contemporary workings of neo-colonial extractivism in Indonesia. Figuratively, our aim was to try and trace the legacy and ecological footprints that our protagonist and her fascination with tropical orchids left in Indonesia. But due to Covid-related travel restrictions our planned on-site collaboration with Indonesian creators and communities couldn’t happen. I ended up making a film that follows peat that is being extracted on an unprecedented industrial scale from the Estonian bogs for Phalaenopsis nurseries in the Netherlands that use this natural material as a substrate for growing orchids. The natural habitat of Phalaenopsis overlaps with the former Dutch colonies in Indonesia and now these displaced tropical organisms, with their roots squeezed together with Nordic peat into plastic pots, travel back to Estonia where local consumers have no clue that by buying an orchid they greatly contribute to the decline of local biodiversity as well as the quality and accessibility of drinking water.
To me, one of the central questions in the project is that of privilege and its contingent nature – it may increase or decrease as a person moves from context to context. However, there are certain aspects like race, gender and class, that determine the extent to which this is possible. Although not born into wealth, Saal’s whiteness allowed her to gain access to a world of privilege and attain a position in Dutch colonial society. As evident in the novels of her husband, the Saals, coming from a class of peasants and servants to the Baltic German nobility in Estonia, were also sympathetic towards the colonised people of Indonesia. Yet, there are gaps between sympathy, identification and accountability.
CA: We were fascinated by the question of what happens when a person from a humble background, a place that was not even a country at the time (Estonia became independent in 1918 – Ed.) goes to Indonesia and becomes a member of the elite in the Dutch society. We do not know Emilie’s exact thoughts, as we do not have her writings anymore, but she definitely inhabited a position of privilege. But we do have the writings of her husband Andres, who although working for the Dutch, criticised them as well. He saw similarities in the Estonian and Indonesian struggle for independence, for self-determination; and through writing, he introduced Estonians to Indonesian society and culture. The Saals probably saw themselves as more enlightened than the local Dutch elite, yet they were part of the colonial system.
Bita Razavi: Privilege for sure is contingent but also relative. Reading Saal’s biographies, the first things that attracted my attention were the notions of class, access and privilege, which inevitably became the focal point of my work. We often think of class as something that is assigned to people – each person is born with a set of privileges. Being from a third world country (Razavi was born in Iran – Ed.), I have to confess that’s very true. But how much is it possible to tackle these assigned privileges and how much choice is involved? The story of the Saals seem to be so much about the choices they made, while they were no doubt also aware of the privilege that being European bestowed on them. They improved their social class and climbed the colonial hierarchy by moving to Indonesia and choosing to work for the Dutch East Indies. Such choices weren’t equally available for indigenous Indonesians.
The question of privilege does not only stem from the historical timeline of the project but is also very much present in its contemporary presence. The exhibition takes place in a space of privilege, both in a metaphorical and physical sense, afforded to the Estonian commission temporarily when the Netherlands invited Estonia to the Rietveld pavilion in Giardini. How do you claim a space of privilege that is perhaps not quite yours – would you want to do that and on what terms?
CA: There have not been other projects exploring the connection between the Netherlands, Indonesia and Estonia in this way. On my part, I want to create a connection between the research I’ve gathered as presented at the pavilion and references to the building itself. Even though we did not manage to conduct extensive research in Indonesia due to Covid, we are inviting Eko Supriyanto, an Indonesian artist to make an intervention in the space – he will present a newly commissioned video Anggrek (Orchid) in relation to Kristina’s trilogy and the archival material. Through this, we are also trying to problematise and look at the site itself, to peel away its Modernist simplicity, its whiteness. Bita and Kristina are addressing the architecture of the building more specifically and do so in very different ways.
KN: When imagining our future project and looking at the images of the Rietveld pavilion, I couldn’t help but recognise its similarities with Baltic German manors in Estonia but also the luxurious colonial villas in the Saal’s family photographs. The white marble and large glass panels surrounding the main entrance to the pavilion reminded me of manorial verandas, the iconic stages for the performance of social class. I imagined Emilie and Andres growing up in Estonia, seeing the German nobility spending their leisure time on the verandas of their manors while their gaze renders their peasant servants as a natural part of the landscape. Exotic plants and noble ladies painting them might have also been part of such veranda scenes. These could have been the images that Andres and Emilie carried with them to Indonesia, where they found themselves in the position to re-embody them themselves. It really is exciting to consider that Emilie did not associate privilege with mere leisure but with women’s artistic aspirations. Surely, these aspirations relied heavily on the invisible labour and came at the expense of the aspirations of Indonesian women…
BR: I view the Giardini and this particular pavilion as a space of privilege and look critically at the relationship between national presentations and global power imbalances. To address this, my work considers the history of the Rietveld pavilion itself and closely relates to its architecture. My site-specific interventions deal with the modernist architecture of the pavilion, its materials, lights, and shadows. Re-enacting class divisions inscribed in Dutch colonial architecture, as well as in Estonian manor houses, the work engages the viewer to reflect on the notions of hierarchy and privilege through the manipulation of the exhibition entrances. Talking about the venue as a space of privilege raises the question of hierarchy within the field of contemporary art as well. I see the venue as an effective stage that offers greater visibility. It’s such a privilege to have visibility as an artist and to use it for change, to talk about privilege and hierarchy, and to challenge them.
I have been left with the impression that you, Kristina and Bita, are both working with dualities in a sense. Bita, I am thinking of the way you have created two different paths for the visitors to follow in the space and your use of shadows. Kristina, in your films you explore dualities through the figure of the doppelgänger. How do you see that these dualities are received and experienced by the visitors to the exhibition?
BR: Fluidity and the transformations of the characters of our story brought the concept of duality to the works. In my installation, duality appears in every single element; natural vs artificial shadows, each visible for one of the two groups of audiences who enter the exhibition space from two different entrances. Additionally, my work includes a platform that acts as a space of privilege and enables two different perspectives – insider-outsider, perpetrator-victim – and the crossover between these roles.
KN: My film trilogy is essentially a set of intuitive images — three images of colonial processes, tensions, and transformations within inner and outer worlds of my imaginary Emilie Saal. I found the motif of the doppelgänger a helpful tool also to invite the viewer to consider the discussed phenomena from multiple perspectives. But above all, the doppelgänger motif is evoked to reflect on hybrid identities arising from colonial relations, from cultural transfer, from the fantasies and desires shared by the coloniser and the colonised.
The second part of the title, An Appetite for Abundance evokes a desire for lushness; however, there is a thin line between that and greed, in this case colonial greed. Within the context of this project, you show what happens when appetite becomes unsatiable hunger and how an individual’s desire for beauty is linked to much wider (global) mechanisms of extractivism. To what extent do you think it is possible to appease this appetite or is there any way this appetite could be subverted into something positive?
CA: The appetite part was inspired by a photograph created by Andres and Emilie Saal that I found at the Estonian Literary Museum. At the time, it was popular to make still-lifes of fruit that Europeans thought were rare; these were most likely seen as decoration rather than food. The photograph depicts an ornate image of an abundance of food and plants – it evoked ideas of hunger, hunting and collecting. However, the motivation for doing botanical art can be quite different. For example, the Indonesian Association of Botanical Artists, established in 2017, create illustrations that are meant to promote botany in a more direct and emotional way. They raise awareness about endangered plants and the need to conserve certain plants by actively holding exhibitions and online workshops to raise awareness of local plants in Indonesia.
Thinking of the allure of flower painting – there are ways in which beauty can be terrifying. Beauty is also intricately linked to power, either as a tool to achieve it or as something to be subjugated to it. However, beauty is not synonymous with sensuality or eroticism, yet Orchidelirium seems to include elements of all three – how do you grapple with the tension between these notions?
KN: In the context of Emilie’s work, I think the notions of beauty and of danger are very much interlinked as they pertain to the realm of representation. In line with what Corina mentioned earlier in this conversation, beautiful, meticulous, painterly or photographic depictions of exotic flora have been used by Europeans throughout their colonial history to present tropical nature as fertile and yielding abundance as if by itself. These images continue to render the labour of indigenous people working in plantations invisible and silence the voices of those people and non-humans whose habitats have been destroyed earlier in history and are being ruined and exploited right now. In Western culture, the exotic is often connected to suppressed desires and sexuality. In my film trilogy, erotic energy is used to empower the agency of resistance and to fuel the subversion of colonial hierarchies.
Keiu Krikmann is the editor of A Shade Colder.
\n","title":"Keiu Krikmann"}]},"contributors":null}},{"id":"cG9zdDoxNjI=","title":"Sickly-Sweet Monsters at the Ethnography Museum","slug":"sickly-sweet-monsters-at-the-ethnography-museum","uri":"/sickly-sweet-monsters-at-the-ethnography-museum/","date":"2022-04-09T18:15:42","excerpt":"At first glance, Jaanus Samma’s works resemble souvenirs with ethnographic motifs and some even evoke pure nationalist kitsch. This is, of course, a treacherous trap, set for the unsuspecting viewer. The artist seems to approach folk heritage and the past in the most conservative way possible; however, on closer inspection it becomes evident that the […]
\n","content":"\nAt first glance, Jaanus Samma’s works resemble souvenirs with ethnographic motifs and some even evoke pure nationalist kitsch. This is, of course, a treacherous trap, set for the unsuspecting viewer. The artist seems to approach folk heritage and the past in the most conservative way possible; however, on closer inspection it becomes evident that the national ornament has, in fact, been stripped of pathos and solemnity – under the layer of ethnographic beauty bubbles an explosive mix of provocative questions. Jaanus Samma’s works have been discussed as homonationalist acts1 Toomistu, T. 15 May 2021. Homonatsionalismi kriipiv visioon. Available at: https://www.sirp.ee/s1-artiklid/c6-kunst/homonatsionalismi-kriipiv-visioon/, where the queer subject and their desires seem to have been secretly written into the national narrative and history. Indeed, Samma works with archives, historic museology and history and almost produces sugar-coated ‘monsters’ to be incorporated into the heteronormative narrative of national history. Yet, these meek additions have the capacity to blow apart the heteronormative power matrix and the glossy images of nationalism.
\n\n\n\nAt his recent exhibition (in collaboration with Carlos Motta) Otherness, Desire, the Vernacular2Otherness, Desire, the Vernacular. In collaboration with Carlos Motta. 19 November 2021 – 16 January 2022. Curated by Denis Maksimov. Temnikova & Kasela Gallery, Tallinn, Samma exhibited a traditional woven wedding tapestry titled Personal Mythology. The tapestry was created using traditional materials and in the most ‘authentic’ way possible – it was woven on anachronistically narrow looms and also includes errors in the pattern. The tapestry was a masterful imitation of a 19th century north Estonian tapestry, used during ritual wedding rides. Alongside traditional trees of life, tankards, churches and the traditional kaheksakand patterns, we also see symbols from the artist’s previous work. Among other things, the tapestry includes jockstraps, outhouses, a toilet pull, New Year’s Boys in costumes made of reed, directly and retrospectively referring to Samma’s earlier work. Instead of the heterosexual married couples usually depicted on wedding blankets, Samma is displaying decorative figures of men without shirts, also present in his earlier project Applied Art for a Gay Club. So, the form of a wedding tapestry is cunningly used to display secret symbols from the artist’s personal mythology that supposedly undermine heteronormativity in a non-violent manner.
\n\n\n\nAt the exhibition Pattern, Samma exhibited 19th century coifs (tanu), on loan from the Estonian National Museum, side by side with drawings and embroidery inspired by the headwear. With these works, Samma continues exploring the hidden cruising culture and fetishes in gay communities, also present in his previous projects. Here, the focus is on men’s underwear and jockstraps, provocatively decorated with perfectly executed national floral embroidery. The coif signalled the wearer to be a married woman – Estonian peasant women had to wear these daily as a symbol of that status. Furthermore, as part of a wedding ritual, the freshly married woman was slapped on the head or in the face with the coif and told, ‘…forget sleep and remember your husband!’ The beautifully embroidered coif was a sign that the woman was no longer single, and moreover, it was also meant to remind her of her position within that union at all times.
\n\n\n\nThese embroidered patterns, created by illiterate women are the only letters we have of them. We could say that these patterns are essentially and specifically ‘Estonian’, but obviously, international fashions have not left the work of these women untouched either. These baroque floral patterns, originally from north Estonia, acquired strong nationalist associations only later on, at the beginning of the 20th century, when the Estonian National Museum acquired the most aesthetic and ‘authentically Estonian’ examples of garments for their collections and these became known as folk dress. The founders of the museum hoped that based on the items they collected, local artists and applied artists could develop an idiosyncratic Estonian national style. With a layover as a tool for the Estonian authoritarian regime of the 1930s, these patterns also made it into art of the Stalinist era and are still represented in conservative nationalist applied art in full glory today.
\n\n\n\nLooking from a distance, Jaanus Samma’s dignified flower motif wreath drawings would fit well in both the castle of Konstantin Päts, the authoritarian president of Estonia, as well as a Stalinist palace of culture; however, taking a closer look, we see that this is not sincere national kitsch after all. What meanings emerge when patterns stolen from the coifs of married women come to decorate jockstraps as part of the hidden heritage of gay culture? Is this a homonationalist incursion into the heritage of Estonian national ethnography or the grief of the queer subject recently declared incapable of marriage3In November 2021, the Legal Affairs Committee of the Estonian Parliament released a statement regarding the current Family Law in Estonia, saying that it is not discriminatory as it does not prohibit marriage to anyone who is capable of marriage. The capability, however, is defined by the Family Law, which states that marriage is concluded between a man and a woman. With this statement, the Legal Affairs Committee essentially declared anyone in a non-heterosexual relationship incapable of marriage. (– Ed.), and dipped in glamour?
\n","featuredImageId":"cG9zdDoyNjE=","featuredImage":{"node":{"id":"cG9zdDoyNjE=","sourceUrl":"https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/jaanussamma_fotod.png","mediaItemUrl":"https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/jaanussamma_fotod.png","srcLQIP":"https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/jaanussamma_fotod-45x45.png","srcSet":"https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/jaanussamma_fotod-1351x1350.png 1351w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/jaanussamma_fotod-300x300.png 300w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/jaanussamma_fotod-1024x1024.png 1024w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/jaanussamma_fotod-150x150.png 150w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/jaanussamma_fotod-768x767.png 768w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/jaanussamma_fotod-45x45.png 45w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/jaanussamma_fotod-789x788.png 789w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/jaanussamma_fotod-1014x1013.png 1014w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/jaanussamma_fotod-1126x1125.png 1126w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/jaanussamma_fotod.png 1443w","altText":"","caption":null,"title":"jaanussamma_fotod","mediaDetails":{"width":1443,"height":1442}}},"categories":{"nodes":[{"slug":"features","name":"Features"}]},"terms":{"nodes":[{"name":"The Eyes of My Other","slug":"the-eyes-of-my-other","description":"April 2022","id":"dGVybTo0","issueFields":{"issueColor":"#bdffab","accentColor":"#000000","productUrl":"https://shop.ashadecolder.com/products/the-eyes-of-my-other"}}]},"articleAuthors":{"articleAuthors":{"nodes":[{"id":"cG9zdDo2OA==","content":"\nAndreas Kalkun received his PhD degree in Estonian and Comparative Folklore at the University of Tartu and is currently working as a senior researcher at the Archival Library of the Estonian Literary Museum. His main area of study is the religion and the songs of the Seto women but he has also researched the history of folkloristics, the heritage of obscenities, and the LGBT history in Estonia.
\n","title":"Andreas Kalkun"}]},"contributors":null}},{"id":"cG9zdDoxMjI=","title":"Market Values","slug":"market-values","uri":"/market-values/","date":"2022-04-09T17:22:23","excerpt":"Market Values is a search for an aesthetic expression that is situated in a space between the post-Soviet legacy, rich folk craft traditions, inborn admiration for modernism and an uncritical adoration of Scandinavian minimalism. Working on this project has been a long brewing process, reminding me of making what my family calls ümbermajatee or outside-the-house- […]
\n","content":"\nMarket Values is a search for an aesthetic expression that is situated in a space between the post-Soviet legacy, rich folk craft traditions, inborn admiration for modernism and an uncritical adoration of Scandinavian minimalism. Working on this project has been a long brewing process, reminding me of making what my family calls ümbermajatee or outside-the-house- tea. This tea has no set formula, it is made by simply pouring hot water on any aromatic weed you can find outside your house in the summer. Ümbermajatee is utterly seasonal and coincidental but also strongly situated in its surroundings. The tea is a bit different every day. It does not subscribe to any recipe or specific historical background; it is not credited to anyone in particular and is created by simply observing what is mulling around me. Offline and outside. The following pages are posters made in 2020 that have been reformatted for magazine pages in 2022. You can find more at www.marketvalues.ee or find me online @pafkabrit.
\n\n\n\nBrit Pavelson is a graphic designer based in Tallinn, Estonia. Her work is currently driven by decorative practices in graphic design, for their healing power, sustainability potential and vessels for intuitive storytelling.
\n","title":"Brit Pavelson"}]},"contributors":null}},{"id":"cG9zdDoxMTI=","title":"From Family Photo Albums to the White Cube – Interview with Diana Tamane","slug":"from-family-photo-albums-to-the-white-cube-interview-with-diana-tamane","uri":"/from-family-photo-albums-to-the-white-cube-interview-with-diana-tamane/","date":"2022-04-09T15:01:26","excerpt":"Diana Tamane is an artist from Riga, Latvia, currently based in Tartu, Estonia. In her practice, she explores the line between the intimate and the artistic, using photos, drawings and videos from her family archives or images created in dialogue with her family members. Her recent exhibitions include Antibiography at the Centre d’Art Maristany, Spain, […]
\n","content":"\nDiana Tamane is an artist from Riga, Latvia, currently based in Tartu, Estonia. In her practice, she explores the line between the intimate and the artistic, using photos, drawings and videos from her family archives or images created in dialogue with her family members. Her recent exhibitions include Antibiography at the Centre d’Art Maristany, Spain, Allied at the Kyiv Biennial 2021, and Flower Smugglers as part of the Frame of Sopot Photography Festival, Poland. Her artist book Flower Smuggler received the Author’s Book Award at Recontres d’Arles and was shortlisted for the Aperture First Photobook Awards in 2020. Perhaps this work is a good example of her practice – Tamane used photographs her grandmother had taken of the flowers she had either grown in her garden or had been gifted and combined these with a story of her grandmother being denied passage across the Latvian-Russian border with flowers she wanted to bring to her grandfather’s grave in an area annexed from Latvia by the USSR in 1945. Through combining the personal with the political, Tamane has a unique way of shining light on geopolitical realities through the lived experiences of ordinary people, her close ones. We meet on my 31st birthday and one day after her 36th birthday, over a table of tulips and cake in her home in Tartu, to discuss how she feels about her art being read as feminist, women’s power, and the turning point from trauma to healing that has provoked a change in her artistic position.
\n\n\n\nHow is the cake?
It’s really good, thank you! So, there is even a birthday cake this year. Now the day is complete.
You were telling me about how you didn’t speak Estonian when you came to Tartu Art School, so you felt like your works needed to speak for themselves. How did it happen that you are still living here 15 years later?
I started studying in an art school in Latvia when I was 12. There, I took academic drawing, painting and sculpture, but in the last year we also had a photography class. I fell in love with the process of developing in the dark room. I would stay late and lose track of time. After I graduated from high school, Tartu Art College seemed like a good option, as there was nowhere to study photography in Latvia. After moving to Tartu, I travelled a lot and lived in different countries. For a year I went to Portugal as an Erasmus student, then moved to Barcelona to do an internship. After I graduated from Tartu, I moved to Brussels for my master’s degree and continued at HISK’s (Hoger Instituut Voor Schone Kunsten – Vlaanderen) art residency programme for two years in Ghent. I was planning to stay in Belgium because it was going well. I had received several awards and grants, but at some point, I realised they don’t really need me there. There are so many artists in Belgium already. For some reason, I never allowed myself to consider going back to Estonia. Then one day I realised I could, and I felt such relief, so I packed my stuff and left. Here it’s different, there is space to evolve and it feels like home at the moment.
How come you felt you could go back to Estonia, and not to Latvia?
It’s like I had two lives. Before I was 20 and after. I cannot imagine that I would go back to Latvia. When I arrived in Tartu, I immediately felt in sync with the city, like its rhythm and my own were moving at the same pace.
Looking at some of your works, I started thinking about the misogynist attitude that prioritises the “official” history, often written by men – an example of this is monuments of men on horses, whereas small personal details like family photos or diaries remain less visible. For example, looking at the photo series Family Portrait depicting your mother’s lineage, or the work Blood Pressure showing your great grandmother’s notes documenting her blood pressure readings on the backs of the photos from her personal album. Many of these items might look insignificant, but they are important to someone. Do you find yourself conflicted about crossing the boundary between a photograph as your grandmother’s personal item and exhibiting it as a piece of art?
Daily rituals take a lot of time and have great importance in our lives. They can be considered insignificant by some, but it’s what really carries us. As an artist you are like a magician. It is here [points as if at an object] but it doesn’t mean anything. As an artist, I take it, bring it, let’s say into a white cube – and it is like baptizing it, the object becomes sacred.
Regarding personal rituals, did your birthday yesterday have any special meaning for you?
I started the day in the way I wish more days would start – slowly, with warm lemon water, meditation, reading, and afterwards I went to a 5Rhythm dance class. In the evening, my friend came over for dinner. I would love it if this year was about slowing down, connecting to things and people who bring me joy.
I want to do things differently, to be a better friend to myself. Sometimes we know what we should do, but it hasn’t yet settled into our system, into our body. But now I feel some things are settling down for me. I mean I can still push myself sometimes, but I really have started to feel that always running somewhere is violence against myself.
A lot of your work is auto-biographical or auto-ethnographic; it includes conversations with your family or observes your father in the garden. Among other things, these are feminist methods. Some of your work is probably read as feminist art. How do you feel about that?
I prefer not to be put into a box, any box. Of course, I am feminist, but that’s not the place I make my work from. My fear is that when we say it’s a feminist work then people don’t see that there are so many other layers. But I am interested in women’s experiences and want to tell stories about women in a way that would support them. I’ve sometimes had an issue with the feminist vibe – in my eyes it creates a division between men and women. But it is time to take responsibility and acknowledge that both men as well as women have contributed to the patriarchal system. Of course, there are the sad statistics that every fourth woman has experienced physical or sexual abuse and we carry these traumas in our bodies. Most of us have trauma, personal or collective. We can stick with it, but we can also choose to let it go. It’s time for women to appreciate themselves. We can do a lot, we can give birth, we can have careers, be artists, healers, truck drivers like my mother, and I think women’s choices need to be honoured. A woman should also be supported if she chooses to be around the kitchen and raise children.
That statement is also feminist.
Yeah, it is.
We wanted to talk about women. What are your latest revelations regarding being a woman?
In recent years, I’ve realised that honouring the cycle is important. The daily cycles, seasons of the year and the menstrual cycle – through these we connect to nature and to ourselves. Based on what I have experienced and what I have also heard from my female friends, issues around menstruation were never discussed with us by our mothers or were talked about in a negative way. But I think it’s a gateway to our power and a place of wisdom. It used to be something that I never paid attention to. Now I have a different approach. It’s like you have these four phases [menstruation, follicular phase, ovulation, luteal phase – P.K.] connected to the seasons, there are phases when we must rest and when we are more productive and I try to respect that. There are times we are invited to go inwards and times when we are more communicative and open. It is very interesting for me to navigate all that, how at some point I am overwhelmed by a range of emotions, everything comes to the surface, it can feel dark and deep, but then I look at what my body wants to tell me: what needs my attention, what needs change. Maybe not every woman feels this, but I personally feel those phases strongly.
You have exhibitions coming up at the Contemporary Art Museum of Estonia (EKKM) in Tallinn and at Tartu Art Museum and Kogo gallery in Tartu. You mentioned that you feel like you are at a turning point as an artist. Could you tell me more about that?
In a way, my upcoming exhibitions at EKKM and Kogo gallery summarise my practice of the last decade. The EKKM exhibition Typology of Touch summarises the works related to the female lineage of my family, which have been completed during the last 12 years. At Kogo gallery, I will show my latest project Under the Same Sky. It’s an installation and a documentary film about three generations of women – the grandmother Tamara, who was born in Ukraine; the mother Irina, born in the Latvian SSR; and the daughter Sonya, who is half-Korean and grew up in Spain. For the last 17 years, the family has been living in the tourist city of Fuengirola in Costa del Sol, Spain.
But these days I am making more intuitive work. For example, I make drawings which are partly based on meditation and breathwork – I synchronise my breath with my drawing, I am interested in the use of the psychosomatic method in art.
I used to be interested in some sort of tension. Now I feel another kind of energy and perhaps I can start a new chapter. I would like to be more present, and to communicate more joy for life. I remember a long time ago a friend of mine said something about Louise Bourgeois: “You know it’s sad that she held on to her pain until the end”. It’s important to let go of things that do not serve us, to be transformed as humans and see where it brings us as artists.
Would you say that your previous work was created from a place of trauma?
I like what curator Martin Germann said about family in relation to my work: “It is a room or matrix we will never leave, and if we escape it, we inevitably escape in relation to it.” It’s a way of dealing with certain issues and finding a way to communicate. For me this became my language for speaking to them, it opened communication between us.
So, you feel that art is your language to speak not only to the art audience but to your family as well?
Yes, it’s like a thread that facilitates connection. It’s my love language.
Piret Karro is a cultural critic and curator based in Tallinn. Her academic background lies in Gender Studies and Semiotics, and she is currently the Head of Exhibitions at Vabamu museum.
\n","title":"Piret Karro"},{"id":"cG9zdDo2NA==","content":"\nHanna Samoson explores the boundaries of art and tries to perceive the unknown. Being in constant motion as an intuitive creator, her work is characterized by quick and spontaneous decisions. Since the beginning of 2022, he has been searching for her dream along the 2222 islands belonging to Estonia.
\n","title":"Hanna Samoson"}]},"contributors":null}},{"id":"cG9zdDoxMzQ=","title":"Searching for a label: The New East","slug":"searching-for-a-label-the-new-east","uri":"/searching-for-a-label-the-new-east/","date":"2022-04-09T17:36:05","excerpt":"The New East is a term used to mediate the contemporary culture of the ex-Soviet and Eastern bloc countries for Western audiences. Since its rise in the early 2010s, the label has received both adoration and criticism. It refers to and identifies a visual narrative which is sought after by visitors from outside the region […]
\n","content":"\nThe New East is a term used to mediate the contemporary culture of the ex-Soviet and Eastern bloc countries for Western audiences. Since its rise in the early 2010s, the label has received both adoration and criticism. It refers to and identifies a visual narrative which is sought after by visitors from outside the region but often also presented by local artists, musicians, designers and other creative minds.
\n\n\n\nWe asked six artists, curators and writers from Estonia and the Baltics how they view the term New East today, more than 30 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Do people relate to this label, which evokes an outsider’s gaze but also has been embraced by some in the region? Are there any particular traits that unite the visual culture of the former Soviet countries?
\n\n\n\nAndres Kurg is a senior researcher at the Estonian Academy of Arts in Tallinn, Estonia. His research looks at architecture in the Soviet Union from the 1960s to 1980s.
The term New East first brings to mind previous similar terms, like New Europe or Emerging Europe, that appeared in the early 2000s around the enlargement of the European Union and aimed to represent the culture and politics of the new member states. At the time there was a heightened interest in the built heritage of the late Socialist period that found its way into many coffee-table books and popular exhibitions, where it was shown as bizarre and otherworldly, like “spaceships” left behind by “aliens”, deeming these structures to be exceptions to the modernist norm originating from the West. Although the New East is applied to a broader territory (including Russia, Central Asia and the Caucasus), there are similarities in the ways in which these countries and their cultural output is represented under the label. There still seems to be a strong emphasis on the ruins of the so-called Second World, on socialist modernism that is thus exoticized as a quirky divergence from the core modernism originating from France or Germany. And as an exotic other, the New East is at the same time a projection of the promises of indulgence and pleasure denied back home.
\n\n\n\nThe question then would be how to gain control over the representations of the New East or, perhaps more realistically, add new analytical renditions to the existing clichéd ones? I guess more than bringing out new and “exotic” material on Eastern Europe, we need to theorise it from our own point of view and show the interconnections and entanglements of modernities that have been kept separate; to deprovincialize the New East. That does not mean writing Eastern Europe “into” an existing global narrative, but realising that in coming into contact with the socialist heritage and the contemporary culture of the New East, the Western narrative and its corresponding hierarchies are themselves bound to change.
\n\n\n\nKatja Novitskova is an artist born in Tallinn and currently based in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Her works explore the touching points between visual culture and science fiction. She represented Estonia at the 57th Venice biennale in 2017.
Perhaps I have been a bit out of touch (or more like lumped into another category), but I have never really consciously thought about the New East as an umbrella term before. And definitely not in reference to myself or my artistic work. I can sort of understand where it might be coming from – based on examples, such as Demna Gvasalia, Cxema and Tommy Cash, we can see that it’s about a generation of people who grew up through the dark, poor and free (in our memory) 1990s and whose aesthetic and cultural sensibilities were radically shaped by the consequences of the collapse of the Soviet Union.
\n\n\n\nDue to the arrival of market economies in the region, this generation has been able to learn to speak a new global language, which it then used to shoot out from the local cultural spheres onto the stage of international exchange. From the outside perspective there is perhaps an uncanny peculiarity and commonality to this cultural output that has become a distinct trend that also fuels itself. But what is interesting to me are the parallels that one can spot between the rise of let’s say Gvasalia and someone like Virgil Abloh, the first being a child immigrant from Georgia to Germany and the second, a child of immigrants from Ghana to the USA – these are parallels that go beyond regional specifics. I try to see what I do more in this vein, how it extends outwards from my background and allows me to work on contemporary issues in dialogue with the wider world. I think the part of the New East that is about generational truth and experience has already grown roots into contemporary culture, but the part that is a temporary trend has or is about to lose relevance (and that’s ok).
\n\n\n\nHansel Tai is a Chinese-born artist and jeweller based in Tallinn, Estonia. His work focuses on queer culture in the post-internet era.
I think one of the most interesting aspects of the term New East is that it was a cliché coined by the West – outsiders gazing in. Personally, I cannot imagine anyone wanting to embrace this term. It seems inherently limiting and evokes inferiority, doesn’t it? As though describing something new, but already delineating its brilliance as merely regional.
\n\n\n\nOne cannot help but think how the New East compares to the Old West or the New West? In many ways the “New” in “New East” was never clearly defined. But there was indeed a cultural big bang after the collapse of the USSR and Eastern Europe’s newfound freedom attracted Western media rushing into the liberated lands in order to observe them under a closer lens.
\n\n\n\nToday, Generation Z across the world uses the same iPhone models, and on their iPhones the same Netflix shows are being streamed. In many ways, we are merging into a global hotpot (quite literally, because of climate change). In order to claim your distinct identity in this sea of sameness, you need to look towards your heritage, go deeper, back in time.
\n\n\n\nIn this sense, the term New East is a reminder of diversity, celebrating differences, it does not erase but reclaims. I think people often forget that a movement and a cultural aesthetic always consists of individuals, and shaping it is the task of every young person today. Maybe a New New East appears (can I coin this)? For me, this new development perfectly reflects the art scenes in Estonia. One of the best examples is the fashion culture. The Estonian Gen Zs are not afraid to confront and mutate the Soviet aesthetic into something else. And there is much to express!
\n\n\n\nInga Lāce is the C-MAP Central and Eastern Europe Fellow at The Museum of Modern Art, New York and a curator at the Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art.
I think we are poignantly reminded of the lived experience of being in the East every time the periodic cycle of geopolitical calamities starts again somewhere in the region. Just in the past couple of years, we’ve witnessed an uprising and the subsequent violent crackdown in Belarus. In addition, in the summer of 2021, borders were particularly under assault: the Lukashenko incited hybrid war – a refugee crisis – at the Latvian, Lithuanian and Polish borders with Belarus. Then, military tension at the Ukrainian and Russian border, and in early 2022, the unexpected uprising in Kazakhstan that destabilised a much larger area neighbouring China.
\n\n\n\nWhile the term New East seems well suited to describing largely fashion, design, and pop-music related trends, I would say that terms like these often lack a critical quality and fail to account for the history of the post-socialist and post-Soviet areas. Whichever terms are used, it is important to consider the diverse and dynamic history of the region in order to understand the present. The omission of that complexity leads to the right-wing nationalist tendencies, disguised as patriotism.
\n\n\n\nI think that trauma heals slowly and that is also an active process. Looking for new wor(l)ds to talk about our experience, conduct research and interpret the region’s history from a contemporary position is still relevant and will be for years to come. So, there are numerous pressing themes, such as environmental (art) histories and colonialism that need to be analysed from a particular regional position that notably differs from that of the West and prioritises a transnational perspective. We are already seeing exhibitions by artists from a generation whose lives and careers were not marked by the shock of transitioning from the Soviet to the post-Soviet era, which allows them to bring in new perspectives, both aesthetically and content-wise.
\n\n\n\nEha Komissarov is a curator at Kumu Art Museum, the largest branch of the Art Museum of Estonia, where she has been working since the 1970s. In the 1990s, Eha Komissarov became the leading contemporary art curator in the newly independent Estonia.
As a practicing curator of a former Soviet republic, I love the formulation New East. However, its use is not unproblematic – when we talk about art history more specifically, the term New East is often used to refer exclusively to Soviet artists and art discourses. I think that the former Soviet republics in the Baltic region should not be included in this, we should be considered from a different perspective. Our attitude during the Soviet period was clearly anti-Soviet and our gaze was turned towards the West. Even though we did this in a blind and idealising manner, by now we see that it might have worked to our advantage. Today, we see that the former Soviet republics that did not have cultural connections with the West (in addition to art I also mean jazz, rock, pop culture, fashion, lifestyle) are struggling to form a unified front against Russia. During but also after the Soviet period, the Baltic states were desperately looking to differentiate themselves from other (former) Soviet regions, which led to a merging with the West from a different starting point.
\n\n\n\nDespite restrictions, in the Baltics as well as in other socialist countries of Eastern Europe, a serious effort was made to maintain a dialogue with international art movements. This was a political stance that benefitted these countries greatly later on: they adjusted fast because their crooked relationship to the West helped them escape the cultural shock that hit other Soviet republics hard.
\n\n\n\nWhen it comes to the former Soviet Union and socialist republics, it is difficult if not impossible to work the art discourse of the transitional period of the 1990s into a smooth theory that can be easily understood by everyone. We need to communicate very clearly how difficult it was to survive then, to develop and gain recognition – and what the role of art was in this. It is extremely important especially today, taking into account Russia’s political moves in recent years, that we take a stand against its chauvinist attitude and expose the kind of colonial ambitions it has always had towards the former Soviet republics and socialist countries.
\n\n\n\nHelgi Saldo is a non-binary drag performer and artist based in Tallinn, Estonia. Find them on Instagram @helgi_saldo and on IDA Radio, where they host the show Homokringel.
I think the need to define Estonians through the term New East is more of an issue for Westerners than anyone else. I define my drag practice as Eastern European body horror, so I can only roll my eyes when I see Estonia promoted as a Northern European country; I find this to be a strange reaction provoked by shame. And the same goes for the part of the West that sees us as somehow exotic and dangerous. Being a small nation is weirdly queer; I see many parallels and similarities in the way in which Estonians and queers must justify their existence or choices to larger groups. I understand the conflict is real and also why these steps are necessary, but I think we should address our history and the present according to who we are, what we need and what we have as a nation, and not worry about how the West defines us, even if our culture is closely linked to the West or we borrow from each other.
\n\n\n\nThe interviews were conducted in January 2022.
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\n","title":"Kaarin Kivirähk"}]},"contributors":null}},{"id":"cG9zdDoxNzE=","title":"Your guide to Estonia and beyond 2022","slug":"your-guide-to-estonia-and-beyond-2022","uri":"/your-guide-to-estonia-and-beyond-2022/","date":"2022-04-09T18:36:23","excerpt":"TOP PICKS RECOMMENDED BEYOND When visiting Estonia, it is easy to plan a short visit to Helsinki (2-hour ferry ride from Tallinn) or Riga (4-hour bus ride from Tallinn or Tartu)
\n","content":"\nLasnamäe Pavilion (Lindakivi square), Tallinn
While Tallinn Art Hall’s historical building is being renovated, the Art Hall will open in a new location in the district of Lasnamäe in Autumn 2022. The highlights of the 2022 programme include Barricading the Ice Sheets, an exhibition by Oliver Ressler (curated by Corina L. Apostol, 27 August – 6 November) still in the historical building, and a group show Is There Hope for Lovely Creatures? (curator: Tamara Luuk, 26 November – 5 February) in the new locationn.
Kumu Art Museum, Tallinn
Until 10 October
The exhibition Art in the Comfort Zone? The 2000s in Estonian Art offers insights into the art of the noughties. The exhibition is curated by Eha Komissarov and Triin Tulgiste.
Typology of Touch, EKKM, 14 April – 5 June (Tallinn)
Half Love, Tartu Art Museum, 17 June – 16 October (Tartu)
Artist Diana Tamane presents two solo shows simultaneously at EKKM in Tallinn, and Tartu Art Museum in Tartu. 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.
Kai Art Center, Tallinn
9 April – 26 June
The exhibition presents six artists – the German ars viva prize winners for 2022, Lewis Hammond, Tamina Amadyar and Mooni Perry, and three remarkable emerging artists from the Baltic region Laura Põld, Anastasia Sosunova and Janis Dzirnieks. The curator of the exhibition is Maria Helen Känd.
Vana-Võromaa Culture House Gallery, Võru
6 May – 26 June
The exhibition deals with the relationship between Estonians and their natural environment. Using bitter humour and sustainable gestures, the show attempts to raise awareness of the impact of today’s actions on our dream future. The exhibition is curated by Siim Preiman (Tallinn Art Hall).
Narva Art Residency, Narva
7 May – 8 June
Taking place in two chapters in Vienna and Narva, the exhibition initiates dialogues between a generation of upcoming artists, while aiming to find common ground within the diverse scope of contemporary painterly expressions. The show is curated by Lilian Hiob and Julius Pristauz.
Kogo gallery, Tartu
30 June – 27 August
The show, curated by Jurriaan Benschop with artists Veronika Hilger (Munich), Milla Aska (Helsinki) and Paula Zarina-Zemane (Riga), introduces three contemporary painters.
Tallinn Botanical Garden, Tallinn
29 September – 30 October
8th Artishok Biennial, curated by Ann Mirjam Vaikla, brings together 10 international artists and 10 art critics at the botanical garden, which will become the site of and for collective learning/unlearning for the invited participants. During the opening marathon 10 commissioned artworks will be presented, each of them accompanied by newly written critical texts. The final exhibition and collection of texts offers visitors 100 different ways to interpret the artworks and their artists.
EKKM, Tallinn
27 August – 16 October
The largest solo show of Tallinn based artist Taavi Suisalu deals with the changing self-image in the era of algorithmic imagination, attention economy and rapidly developing technologies.
When visiting Estonia, it is easy to plan a short visit to Helsinki (2-hour ferry ride from Tallinn) or Riga (4-hour bus ride from Tallinn or Tartu)
\n\n\n\nHelsinki Art Museum HAM, Helsinki
2 February – 29 May
Curator Denis Maksimov has invited five Estonian artists to each respond to a work from the HAM collection by choosing an existing artwork of their own to be exhibited alongside the collection piece.
Kiasma Art Museum, Helsinki
8 April – 16 October
Extending to all floors of the Kiasma building, exhibition is a comprehensive view of the latest trends in international contemporary art. The exhibition culminates in autumn 2022 with the Lithuanian participatory opera Sun and Sea.
2 September – 9 October
Various locations in Riga
The annual art festival SURVIVAL KIT will this year be inspired by the title of a poem by Ojārs Vācietis. The poem, forever timely, directs us towards questions related to free speech, the power of the voice and the vocal, the role of the sonic in resistance, revolution and dissent, and those that wish to silence such voices.
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