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 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?
First, 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.
Introducing queer to Estonia
In 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.
Treumund 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.
Seeking a collective past
Anna-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.
Treumund’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 people
2007. Silver gelatin print. The series accompanied Kristina Paju’s master’s thesis Silence in Fashion Photography
Photographer: Anna-Stina Treumund. Stylist: Kristina Paju. Art Museum of Estonia
During 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.
Treumund 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!
