Past & Present

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

Kaarin Kivirähk

kai kaljo

Uncertain Territories

Looking back

Triin Reidla is a cultural heritage specialist, editor and architectural historian, currently pursuing her doctoral studies at the Estonian Academy of Arts. She is lecturer and head of the architecture conservation studies module at the Estonian Academy of Arts. Her research focuses on Estonian architecture in the 1980s.

Triin Reidla

Kadaka tee 25, Ilmandu küla copy

The Many Faces of You

Bold and beautiful – Estonian private houses from the 1980s

Elnara Taidre is an art historian, critic and curator. She works as head of the graphic arts department at the Art Museum of Estonia.

Elnara Taidre

Ülo Sooster. Värvilised kadakad. 1966. Õli, vineer. 54×77,8

Ülo Sooster between Identities, Artistic Methods, and Art Media

Marge Monko is a visual artist who lives and works in Tallinn. Her lens-based and installation works are inspired by historical images and the theories of psychoanalysis, feminism, and visual culture. She works as a professor in the Department of Photography at the Estonian Academy of Arts.

Marge Monko

Marge Monko. Blonde (detail) edit

Flesh in Tension

Blonde: Lemmi, Jean, Shirley and others

Ingrid Ruudi is senior researcher and visiting associate of the Institute of Art History and Visual Culture, Estonian Academy of Arts. Her PhD dissertation was titled Spaces of the Interregnum: Transformations in Estonian Architecture and Art 1986 – 1994, and her current research focuses on the potential of intersectional feminist methodologies for analysing the built environment, including spaces of care in Late Soviet and post-Soviet Estonia.&nbsp; She has also been active as a curator, including for the Estonian pavilion at the Venice biennial and research exhibitions at the Estonian Museum of Architecture, and is editor-in-chief of the Estonian bilingual art history journal Kunstiteaduslikke Uurimusi / Studies in Art and Architecture.

Ingrid Ruudi

Building of Imastu boarding school for the mentally disabled children, 1965. copy.jpg_

The spatial politics of disability in late Soviet Estonia

Aro Velmet is a historian of twentieth century Europe at the University of Southern California and a visiting researcher at the University of Tartu. He is currently working on a book on the history of computing in the Soviet Union and independent Estonia. He is a co-curator of the permanent exhibit at the Vabamu museum in Tallinn, and author of a number of academic and journalistic articles on late Soviet history and French colonial history.

Aro Velmet

TonuTunnel.com_Maarjamäe_3

Shifting Timelines

A Strange Decolonisation – Monument Wars in the Baltics

13 Xarcadia, exhibition view, 2022, photo Roman-Sten Tõnissoo VEEBI

Unknown Creatures of Faraway Lands

Mari Vallikivi is an art historian based in Viljandi, Estonia. She has worked as the director of the Kondas Centre art museum since 2003. Estonian outsider art has been her research focus over the last 15 years.

Mari Vallikivi

Copy of Ingrid_Kivimeister_Töö_ja_puhkus

The Bumpy Road of Estonian Outsider Art

Thomas Röske has been head of the Prinzhorn Collection of the Psychiatric University Clinic in Heidelberg since 2002. He studied the history of art, musicology and psychology at Hamburg University and obtained his doctorate in 1991 with a book about Hans Prinzhorn. He now teaches art history alternately at Frankfurt University and at Heidelberg University. He has published mainly on German Modernism and Outsider Art. Since 2012, he has been the president of the European Outsider Art Association.

Thomas Röske

SONY DSC

Piecing together a lost history & Forget Me Not

Natalia Sielewicz is an art historian and curator at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw. In her exhibitions and essays, she addresses the issues of feminism, affect culture, biopolitics, and technology. Her latest curatorial exhibitions include Fedir Tetyanych. The Neverending Eye (2022), The Dark Arts. Aleksandra Waliszewska and Symbolism of the East and North (2022, co-curated together with Alison Gingeras). She is a member of Sunflower Solidarity Centre at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw and Soniakh Digest collective.

Natalia Sielewicz

Alison M. Gingeras is a curator and writer.Currently she serves as an adjunct curator at Dallas Contemporary and a guest curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Miami, and works independently. In 2021, she curated two monographic exhibitions devoted to Polish born artists of the twentieth century: My Name is Maryan at MOCA Miami and Erna Rosenstein: Once Upon a Time at Hauser &amp; Wirth in New York City.

Alison M. Gingeras

katalog s. 90_oczy w lesie

Whispers in the Landscape

Demonic spaces and offshore formations – Alexandra Waliszewska and Balto-Slavic landscapes

Dr Eglė Rindzevičiūtė is an Associate Professor of Criminology and Sociology, the Department of Criminology, Politics and Sociology, Kingston University London, the UK. Her current research interests involve the intellectual history and sociology of governance of complexity, particularly the emergence of global environmental governance and the digitality, the shifting forms of scientific expertise in public policy, as well as material culture of Cold War science and technology and its heritigisation. She is the author of The Power of Systems: How Policy Sciences Opened Up the Cold War World (Cornell University Press, 2016) and The Will to Predict: Orchestrating the Future through Science (Cornell University Press, forthcoming in 2023).

Eglė Rindzevičiūtė

BURIAL_20220117_NEW_EDIT_05.00_31_12_00.Still007

Ingrown infrastructures

Liisa Kaljula is an Estonian curator and art historian, based in Tallinn, Estonia. She has written articles, edited catalogues and curated exhibitions about the art of the late socialist and post socialist eras, such as Maria Kapajeva. The Dream Is Wonderful, Yet Unclear (2017) at Narva Art Residency, Sots Art and Fashion. Conceptual Clothes from Eastern Europe (2019) and Thinking Pictures. Conceptual Art from Moscow and the Baltics (2022), both at Kumu Art Museum. She is currently working at the Painting Collection of the Art Museum of Estonia and has recently completed her PhD at Tallinn University, dedicated to the appropriation of Soviet visual culture in Estonian art.

Liisa Kaljula

ex view_with artworks_Paco Ulman

Thirst

Curating against a backdrop of war

Linda Kaljundi is a professor of cultural history at the Estonian Academy of Arts, a research fellow at Tallinn University, and a curator mainly co-operating with the Kumu Art Museum in Tallinn. She specializes on Baltic and Nordic history, cultural memory and environment, and currently works with the entanglements between art and science in the Eastern Baltic past and present.

Linda Kaljundi

AM10558_G2060-scaled-landscape

The Eyes of My Other

Decolonise that – Estonian identity as indigenous and/or white

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

A Shade Colder

MG_4015_Meduusa_naer_EKKM_2023_photo_Paul_Kuimet

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

flo_ou

Exploring the dynamics of public and private space during politically turbulent times. Interview with Flo Kasearu

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

Eastern European spectacle in a distorting mirror

Graafikatriennaal: Algirdas Jakas.Reverse engineering. Photo: Laurynas Skeisgiela

Your guide to Estonia and beyond in 2025