Features

Eda Tuulberg is an art historian and programme manager-curator at the Kumu Art Museum, Tallinn. She has curated exhibitions and published articles on both Soviet-era and contemporary art, focusing primarily on feminist art history. Tuulberg is a doctoral student at the Estonian Academy of Arts, where she is researching representations of parenthood in Soviet-era art. Currently, she is preparing a large-scale research-based exhibition titled Who’s Afraid of Motherhood?, focusing on contemporary art from Eastern and Central Europe, set to open at Kumu Art Museum in autumn 2026, as well as a solo exhibition of work by painter Olga Terri planned for 2028. Tuulberg has two children.

Eda Tuulberg

Edith Karlson. Doomsday. 2017. Foto_ Stanislav Stepasko

Becoming

On the ambivalence of parenthood

Joonas Pulkkinen is a Finnish freelance art worker, curator, critic and journalist. He has a long-standing interest in the contemporaneity and politics of contemporary art biennials and in questions of subjectivity within art practices.

Joonas Pulkkinen

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Curator’s care – self-deception or concrete acts?

Marion C. Bouvier is a writer, editor, and curator based between Tromsø (northern Norway) and Hamburg (Germany). Besides writing art criticism, Bouvier is the co-founder and director of the Open Out festival, a queer art festival that has been held in Tromsø every year since 2018. She also co-runs MONDO Books, an independent publishing house and book platform focused on the circumpolar North.

Marion C. Bouvier

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In the Traces of Britta Marakatt-Labba

Rebeka 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.

Rebeka Põldsam

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Practices in Dialogue

Anna-Stina Treumund, what would you do today?

Vanina 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.

Vanina Saracino

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Breath of the deep sea: Kristina Õllek

Katrin Kivimaa is an independent art historian, cultural critic, and translator. In addition to publishing current criticism, she writes and holds lectures on various topics, including feminist art history, modern and contemporary Estonian art, feminist curating, and others. From 2006 to 2023, she worked as a senior researcher and professor at the Institute of Art History and Visual Culture in the Estonian Academy of Arts.

Katrin Kivimaa

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Uncertain Territories

Women, animals and other creatures: The soft feminism of Terje Ojaver

Sten Ojavee is a curator based in Tallinn, working at the Estonian Centre for Contemporary Art since 2017. His curatorial interests lie in fashion and clothing, with an emphasis on cultural sociology. Most recently, he co-curated the 11th Sequences Festival, titled Can’t See (2023) in Iceland.

Sten Ojavee

Tiina Tammetalu, Untitled. 1995. Third annual exhibition of the Soros Center of Contemporary Arts, Estonia. Biotopia copy2

Eastern European spectacle in a distorting mirror

Johanna Rannula is the director of the Narva Art Residency NART since 2021. Previously, she has been a manager of exhibitions at Tallinn City Museum and also worked briefly as an artist.

Johanna Rannula

Ellie Pritchard workshop at the community garden. Photo byJelizaveta Gross Station Narva, 2024

Artist residency within sight and sound of Europe’s border

Maarin Ektermann is an educator, critic and curator, who works at the Estonian Academy of Arts.

Maarin Ektermann

Mary-Ann Talvistu is a curator and educator, who has collaborated with various art and cultural organisations.

Mary-Ann Talvistu

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Looking for Localities

Dialogues between contemporary art and heritage

Ann Mirjam Vaikla is a curator and scenographer based in Tallinn. Since 2023, she has served as the curator of contemporary art at Kumu Art Museum. In her curatorial and artistic practice, she focuses on the intertwinement of climate justice, more-than-human worlds, and processes of decolonisation.

Ann Mirjam Vaikla

Hanna Laura Kaljo is a curator and writer currently based in the Stockholm archipelago. Her research-led work is concerned with the arts through the notions of embodiment, movement, and belonging, particularly in the context of environmental change.

Hanna Laura Kaljo

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Kalaaleq-Danish artist Pia Arke: the speech of body and land

Juss Heinsalu is an artist focusing on material-led practices. He is also an associate professor and head of the Craft Studies MA programme at the Estonian Academy of Arts.

Juss Heinsalu

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The Odd Spinsters

Mētra Saberova is a Latvian queer feminist performance and moving-image artist. Mētra received her BA from the Art Academy of Latvia and completed her postgraduate studies at Central Saint Martins in London. Next to exhibiting, her interests lie in forming sustainable networks between the queer culture and activism in the Baltic region. Mētra is the co-founder and manager of the Baltic Drag King Collective (est. 2019) and part of the core team at Riga Pride since 2022.

Mētra Saberova

01_Helgi Saldo at Baltic Drag Show during Riga Pride 2022. Photo: Krista Saberova and Edgars Tabaks. jpeg copy

The Many Faces of You

The variations in the Baltic Drag scene

Keiu Krikmann is the editor of A Shade Colder.

Keiu Krikmann

Networking of the publishers of art magazines in Nordic and Baltic countries in Vilnius. The common language is obviously English. Photo by Inga Juodyte

The Shapes of Language

We are still translated people

Airi Triisberg is an independent writer, curator and educator. They are actively engaged in advocacy work to improve working conditions in the art sector, performing different roles such as journalist, labour organiser, tax critic, coach in financial education and agitator by saying “no” to unpaid labour. In the book Art Workers – Material Conditions and Labour Struggles in Contemporary Art Practice, co-published with Minna Henriksson and Erik Krikortz in 2015, they conceptualise recent practices of organising art workers in Europe.

Airi Triisberg

Zody Burke is an American multimedia artist and musician living and working in Tallinn, Estonia. She creates cyphers through sculpture and sound, through which she cartographs the complexity of identity within late capitalism, and interfaces world-building with geological time. Her material practice ranges from ceramic high-relief to experimental music, video, illustration and fibre work.

Zody Burke

Illustrations by

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Flesh in Tension

Wages for art work

Jaak Juske is a teacher and populariser of history based in Tallinn. He has written over 30 books, mainly on the history of Estonian cities.

Jaak Juske

Angela Maasalu is a visual artist living and working in London, UK.

Angela Maasalu

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Shifting Timelines

Mapping Monsters

Vaida Stepanovaite is a curator, organiser, editor, and writer whose practice is emerging in relation to the affective legacies of the European post-socialist region. Currently she is the Editor in Chief and Head of Organisation at Artnews.lt, Lithuania. Vaida is undertaking practice-based doctoral research at Goldsmiths, London, looking into how the tensions between the institutive, the radical, and the communal drive self-organised resistance in the contemporary visual art field.

Vaida Stepanovaite

Sandra Kosorotova. Can I Grow Here. 2022. Still from the video(1)

Whispers in the Landscape

More often than not, …

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Parallel formations

Kärt Ojavee is an artist, designer and a visiting professor at the Estonian Academy of Arts textile department. She experiments with new technologies and traditional textile fabricating techniques, testing the borders of both disciplines.

Kärt Ojavee

‘Healing Detox Shirt ’ Ojavee, K. (2020) _Photo by Mari Volens

Material affairs

Andrew Berardini is a writer and curator from California. He currently helps run the Private Practice Residency at MobileCoin with the painter Inga Bard and has a new book forthcoming titled <a href="https://notacult.media/books/p/colors">Colors</a> (Not a Cult, 2022).

Andrew Berardini

Flora

Thirst

The Floral Fantasias and Pop Potentials: On the Work of Malle Leis

Kaarin Kivirähk is the editor-in-chief of A Shade Colder.

Kaarin Kivirähk

Exhibition by Laura Kuusk at Kanal gallery. Photo by Laura Kuusk(1)

City profile. Catching the spirit of southern Estonia

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.

Jan Verwoert

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The Eyes of My Other

From Life. On the work of Anu Põder

Andreas 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.

Andreas Kalkun

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Sickly-Sweet Monsters at the Ethnography Museum

A Shade Colder is a platform for discussions about and around art in Estonia and beyond.