Contributors

Adam Cullen is a poet and translator of Estonian prose, poetry, drama, and children’s literature into English. Originally from Minnesota, he is a member of the Estonian Writers’ Union and has resided in Estonia since 2007.

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.

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 & Wirth in New York City.

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.

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 Colors (Not a Cult, 2022).

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

Anti Saar is a writer and translator based in Tartu. Mostly, he writes for children and translates from French, with a focus on fiction, philosophy and humanities. Currently, he’s in the process of translating the third volume of Marcel Proust’s novel In Search of Lost Time into Estonian.

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.

Brigit Arop is a freelance curator based in Tallinn, Estonia. Among other things she is co-running the Infinite Life Gallery and the self-organised dumpster diving group Üle Prahi collective.

Brit 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.

Cecilia Alemani is an Italian curator based in New York City.  Since 2011, she has been the Donald R. Mullen, Jr. Director & Chief Curator of High Line Art, the public art program presented by the High Line in New York City. From 2020 to 2022, she served as artistic director of the 59th Venice Biennale, where she curated the acclaimed exhibition The Milk of Dreams.

Concordia Klar (1938–2004) was an Estonian printmaker. She graduated from the Estonian State Art Institute in 1963 and soon became interested in surrealist ideas. Klar’s visionary imagery often combines nature motifs and human figures – her series of women with musical instruments embodies harmony between the two. A lesser known fact is that Klar also wrote poetry and for this issue of A Shade Colder two of her poems from the 1970s have been translated to English for the first time. 

Eda Tuulberg is an art historian based in Tallinn, Estonia. She is a curator at the Kumu Art Museum and doctoral student at the Estonian Academy of Arts. Her field of research is Soviet and contemporary art, with a focus on the work of women artists and the problematics of gender issues. She is currently working on a research and curatorial project exploring the legacy of late Soviet Estonian women printmakers.

Edith Karlson is a freelance artist who has persevered in this position for 30 years. She plans to stay the course.

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).

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

Elo Vahtrik is an artist based in Mustamäe. Vahtrik’s work explores the plasticity and relations between body and perception.

Gregor Kulla is a composer, performance artist, writer and model. They are the creative producer of the international contemporary music festival AFEKT and they also teach at the University of Tartu Viljandi Culture Academy.

Hanna 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.

Heneliis Notton currently works as a dramaturg at the performing arts centre Kanuti Gildi SAAL. In September 2023, she will start her MA studies in Queer Performance at Rose Bruford College in London.

Ieva Rojūtė is a visual artist based in Vilnius, Lithuania. She works with installation, text and drawing. Her large-scale installations intertwine hand-painted verbal narratives with abstract elements. Fragments of overheard conversations and stories merge with her own personal and artistic experience into a broad range of topics, including social constructions such as family, daily use of language, and small yet overwhelming human concerns, fears, dreams and failures.

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.  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.

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.

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.

Johanna Hedva is a Korean American writer, artist, and musician, who was raised in Los Angeles by a family of witches, and now lives in LA and Berlin.

Johanna Ulfsak is a designer and artist mainly working with traditional textile techniques. She also likes to make nice projects and to have fun on Photoshop. She is a long-time friend of Edith Karlson.

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

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.

Keiu Krikmann is the managing editor of A Shade Colder.

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.

Lilian Hiob is a curator and gallerist. She is manager at Temnikova & Kasela gallery. Lilian is also the founder of Hoib gallery, an independent exhibition space located in her basement. Together with Siim Preiman she hosts Vitamin K, a radio show dedicated to contemporary art on IDA radio.

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.

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.

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.

Maria Arusoo is an Estonian curator and dramaturg. She is interested in performative practices and socially engaged art. Since 2013, Arusoo has been working as the Director of the Estonian Centre for Contemporary Art and the Commissioner of the Estonian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. She is also part of the curatorial team for the 2023 Sequences real time art festival that takes place in Reykjavik.

Marika Agu is currently working as curator and archivist at the Estonian Centre for Contemporary Art. She has cultivated projects from a range of topics, such as archives, material culture and writing within contemporary art context.

Max Hannus is a curator and writer working in the intersections of sexual/romantic relationships and art making. Their practice is autobiographic, and they’re always searching for (queer) love. They work with different forms of writing: mundane, unpretentious, blunt – always looking for sincerity.

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.

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.

nvk (nick von kleist) is an artist, poet, performer and producer who investigates the archive and its debris as repertoire to be rehearsed, fractured and reconfigured, repeatedly. nvk explores ways that the virtual and personal can inspire new conceptions of context, time, access and equity. nvk has recently published a metamorphic book of poetry, “w-a-t-e-r-s-l-i-d-e-s” with Risiko Press (Antwerp), appearing as sound with Ignota Press, and a performance with Montez Press Radio (NY). nvk has ongoing performance-based collaborations with Michelangelo Miccolis, Kris Lemsalu, Autumn Knight, Cally Spooner, Nikima Jagudajev, and Dora García.

Pire Sova is an artist and stage designer. Sova’s posthumanist art practice focuses on facets of identity such as community, collective creativity, and gender. She is the founder of the participatory performance series and fluid collective Persona.

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.

Rebecca Jagoe is an autistic artist, writer and editor based in Wales. Working across objects, drawing, textiles, printed texts, performance, and workshops, their practice variously explores the ideological construction of monstrosity and madness in Western culture; the relationship between clothing, illness, and gender; and human intimacy with other-than-humans. They are currently on the Freelands Fellowship at g39 in Cardiff, where they are researching the traces of animistic thought found in late Medieval European languages.

Shola von Reinhold is a Scottish writer. Their debut novel, LOTE (2020), was published by Jacaranda Books and won the Republic of Consciousness Prize and the James Tait Memorial Prize.

Sonya Isupova is a Ukrainian designer and visual artist based in Geneva. Her work is situated between reality and virtuality, and she works with illustration, 3D and physical installation.

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.

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.

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.

Vaim Sarv is a folk musician and experimental vocalist. Her rituals combine free improvisation with noise and ancient Finno-Ugric folk song. Using portable, consumer-grade electronics and extended vocal technique, he worships spaces with unconventional acoustics and queer senses of place.

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.