Tõnis Saadoja

The Estonian word siis (‘then’) is derived from the word see (‘it’), and in linguistic terms it is the allative form of the word selle (‘its’). The allative has not survived as a distinct grammatical case in Estonian, but it answers the questions “where to?” or “in which direction?” In other words, siis was originally selle poole (‘towards it’). As the language evolved, the word first acquired a meaning specifically linked to time. See oli siis, kui&#8230; refers to something that happened at a certain point (lit. “it was when&#8230;”). However, the phrase see tuleb siis, kui&#8230; means something that will happen in the future (lit. “it will come when&#8230;”). From then on, the word siis developed a more abstract meaning of one thing following another, or one thing being inferred from another. In any case, this marks a change of viewpoint from here in the present to somewhere else, such as backwards or forwards in time; or one&#8217;s thoughts moving from premise to conclusion. This change of viewpoint is not coincidental: siis does not represent a random moment in the past or future like kunagi (lit. “at one time”), nor does it refer to a random thought. It becomes rooted in the viewpoint of the person saying the word. Siis requires a point of reference that can be used to move on elsewhere. And yet, it remains apart: it is not ‘here’. It is fixed to the current moment, flying by as a memory or longing on a predetermined orbit. Nüüd (‘now’) serves as the centre of gravity for siis, which is the centrifugal force affecting nüüd: it holds them in mutual tension.
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Tõnis Saadoja&#8217;s exhibition Siis at the Tütar gallery consists of two series of paintings whose past instalments have formed part of previous exhibitions. These include Maastik kulgeb läbi maja (‘Landscape passes through house’, with Paul Kuimet and Eero Epner at Tartu Art Museum) and Kõrgus merepinnast (‘Height above sea level’, at Kumu Art Museum). The paintings in the Mäletamise mudel (‘Model of recollecting’) series depict urban landscapes “caught in a box”. Some of them no longer exist in reality, making them images of the past, or more precisely visual memory, where the most important thing is soft but bright summer afternoon or evening light. This light, originating from memory, has once more been brought out on analogue film, where light is not the result of a digital camera’s ‘calculations’, but something that touches upon the sensitive and sensed surface itself. This analogue image has had light pass through it again, and been projected into a cardboard box placed on a dark mirror, contrasting the metaphysical effect of the latter with the non-metaphysical effect of the former. Finally, the resulting image is painted on canvas again through the eyes of the artist: the blink of an eye, the moment the lens opens (siis) is spread out in time, both as an impression of light that goes on with its life and the continuous return in one’s memory, but also as the process of painting, and then once more assembled on the surface of the painting. It is an ‘archive of moments of light’ that casts its glow into darkness; an attempt to prove the imperishability of light memory amidst fleeting light.
The other series consists of attempts to use old painting and canvas processing techniques when depicting the sky and clouds, and also constitutes a kind of project of remembering and recalling – in this case, more directly regarding art history. Unlike the first series, however, time is handled quite differently here, perhaps even in an un-Saadoja-like way: in just one, sometimes two sessions. In these paintings, siis is located unequivocally within them. They are much more clearly traces of the time of the painting process, as a photo is a trace of the moment it was taken. Their siis is now well within the reach of nüüd. In this way, their intimacy is also more clear. On the other hand, they can also be more easily generalised: their other siis is more abstract, located in history rather than memory (in an abstracted, cultural siis), because they relate to a widespread motif in painting tradition. If ‘Model of recollecting’ is a deep dive through successive surface layers of subjective memory, then the sky etudes are more objective: they contain siis in both the physical and more intellectual sense. 
More generally, it can be said that Saadoja has found a new angle from which to replay the persistent motifs of his creative work: nostalgic thinking, a focus on depicting light, searching for the metaphysical meaning behind ‘meaningless’ details, the ‘elementary particles’ of urban spaces, relating different methods of representation (photography and different painting techniques), valuing painting as a process, and remembrance, on both the perceptual psychology and technical levels.
Accompanying text: Aare Pilv 
Graphic design: Ott Metusala
The exhibition is supported by the Cultural Endowment of Estonia and Tallinn.

Tõnis Saadoja “Then”

Johannes Luik

In his varied oeuvre, Johannes Luik has to date focused primarily on the space between exhibits, meaning that individual works are not perceived as isolated objects, but as elements of a larger ensemble. This time, however, he presents the works as objects that the audience can relate to one by one.
The works featured here are largely from earlier projects, with an emphasis on some of the lines of exploration developed from exhibition to exhibition. In one such line, Luik plays with immediate connections between material, content and form. Traditionally, they have been viewed in pairs – 1) material and form, and 2) content and form. While in the first pair, form means a structure, a principle, an idea that subordinates material, in the second it is more a physical shape or frame that submits to the content. Luik&#8217;s works, however, often include haunting and charming direct connections between the two.
Sometimes he makes the material itself the content of the work: something that is supposed to surrender to the form has begun to subdue it. For example, he places some materials at the centre of his work in their raw form. In doing so, he focuses on materials of little value such as OSB board, the texture of which he depicts in embroideries and pencil drawings. Not only is the form here being subjugated by the material, the material in question is of low value.
In other works, however, the form (in the sense of the frame that embellishes the work) takes over the content to such an extent that the latter is reduced to an almost non-existent slit. To achieve this, Luik prefers modern simple frames to more decorative ones. However, instead of the gilded or precious wood frames that have historically displayed the owner&#8217;s wealth, he once again makes them from cheap and raw materials, creating a disquieting tension between ornamentation and roughness.
One important change that allows Luik to make immediate connections between material, content and form is shifting the focus from the end result to the process of formation. In his works to date, he has stressed the importance of a raw or intermediate state of material to achieve this. Thus, OSB board or masking tape are primarily associated with a renovation mood, while bubble wrap is associated with moving objects from one place to another. Consequently, the emphasis has been on the pre-change event or precursor. It has the potential to resonate with analogous layers within ourselves that emerge when everything seems to be ahead and taking shape.
In this exhibition, Luik has also begun experimenting with the so-called aftermath. It is a material that has lost its function and form. Some of this material can be reused, while other types are already hopelessly unsuitable for human use. The latter can be found, for example, in burnt houses and other destroyed structures. The aftermath also has a human layer: it corresponds to a situation in which we feel like a human wreck— a shadow of a person on the verge of collapse, whose life and long-term plans have been destroyed, with no new ones on the horizon.
The keyword that manages to stitch together the precursor and the aftermath in this exhibition is the titular wait. Here, the hopeful wait for an imminent form and meaning is juxtaposed with a bleak, hopeless wait that can only derive meaning from the former form.
Accompanying text: Eik Hermann 
Graphic design: Ott Metusala 
Photographic documentation: Stanislav Stepaško and Kaarel Antonov
The exhibition is supported by the Cultural Endowment of Estonia.

Johannes Luik “Residue: The House Is on Fire and I Am Waiting”

Eero Alev

Eero Alev’s nostalgic paintings draw inspiration from ever-innocent children and nature, capturing them with the cultivated means of painting and paying attention to the melancholy of colour, the finality of shadows and breaking of the sun. Alev&#8217;s paintings are like summaries of summer at the end of August. They look back on fragments of the past, rushing to grab hold of bits of memories before they disappear into the void and assembling them into a jigsaw puzzle with missing pieces filled with fields of colour.
The core of Alev’s current exhibition consists of paintings in varying formats that merge moments from the author’s biography. Instead of documentary accuracy, Alev is intrigued by suggestion and radiance, preferring speculation over assertions and the endless ambiguity of perception over concreteness. He has abandoned the idea of telling a complete story, choosing instead to piece together a mosaic of memory fragments that remains perpetually imperfect and unfinished, allowing room for the poetic means of painting.
Many of Alev’s paintings are set in coastal regions, the transitional zone between land and sea that has captivated artists through history. They feature views from the Tabasalu cliffs near the artist&#8217;s home, his childhood summer home in Käsmu, or Hiiumaa Island where his family spends their holidays. Instead of panoramic views, Alev focuses on individual nuances: boulders, waves and shadows on the sand or benches on which no one sits any longer. In the vagueness of memory, the concrete textures of different surfaces – the hardness of rocks, the softness of sand, the waves of water – enter into a dialogue. Something has happened in these places, but it is not what has happened, but its silent witnesses that can be clung to.
Space plays an important role in this series of paintings. A track known from the Ludo board runs across several paintings with its flat circular dots passing through Hiiumaa’s junipers. The paper dolls made by children are sketch-like, but Alev has paid special attention to the shadows cast by the dolls on the canvas. The illusion of depth, games with distance and the open fan hovering in the dark void constantly create spaces that simultaneously absorb the viewer&#8217;s gaze and give it context.
Alev paints with a brush, occasionally wiping the canvas with a tissue to achieve a different background texture. He is not one of those artists who enjoys the brushwork coming to the fore, dancing around or going wild. The brush is a tool for creating illusions, the main function of which is to apply paint to canvas. Alev&#8217;s colouring is mature: he prefers more sombre fields of colour to warm tones, and he has rejected bright red in favour of shades of brown, which give his paintings a nostalgic atmosphere. The literary plot of the paintings is hidden in various details, but Alev aims to convey their mood and thus their ultimate meanings through colour. It is colour that brings together the jumbled playground of fragments.
Alev often uses photography as the basis of his work. However, he does not embark on special photography expeditions, preferring instead to sift through semi-random photographs taken several years ago like a disorganised memory bank, where he finds the random, the unnoticeable, the almost meaningless. It is the act of painting that gives a poetic dimension to this lack of meaning by seeking it in nature as contemporary artists often do. The breaking of the sun on a rock serving as a playground for children and its transformation into a shadow on the sand expresses longing – for something that was, is and will perhaps come again.
Eero Epner
Graphic design: Ott Metusala 
Exhibition opening gallery: Kaarel Antonov 
Photographic documentation: Roman-Sten Tõnissoo &amp; Adele-Kristelle Lehtorg
The exhibition is supported by the Cultural Endowment of Estonia.

Eero Alev “Broken Sun”

Denisa Štefanigová

Denisa Štefanigova (1995) is a Czech painter, currently living and working in Brno, who has ties to the Estonian art community established during her MA-studies at the Estonian Academy of Art. In the past, she has showcased her works in two solo exhibitions in Prague and at the Art Academy gallery in Tallinn, as well as participated in numerous group shows. The current exhibition, To Observe the Clouds, is displaying her recent paintings, which depict hybrid creatures and fantasy animals in an expressive-dynamic painting style. The viewer is presented with an imaginative, unconscious or dreamlike world where these creatures, having taken shape within an intuitive and dynamic creative process, emerge as the artist&#8217;s imaginary companions.
The influence of surrealism and its creative methods of working with unconscious and dream states is quite evident in Štefanigova&#8217;s art. This influence also evokes culturally specific historical roots: after all, Prague and Czech art have a special place in the history of international surrealist art since the 1930s when Prague became the second most important center of the surrealist movement after Paris. As a timely coincidence, the ongoing exhibition of historical Czech and Estonian surrealist artists at the Estonian National Museum in Tartu provides an interesting art historical context for the show at the Tütar Gallery. The principle of hybridity, often seen in the works of historical surrealists, takes a central place in Štefanigova&#8217;s art. It does not appear only in imaginative fantasy imagery but also in formal or technical solutions of her paintings: at times she may cut up her earlier paintings and sew pieces of old canvas into a collage or abandon the traditional painting format, a &#8220;window to nature&#8221;.
The wider meaning of her works, however, is closely related to the problems of our world today. Upcycling the old canvases into new works of art; eliminating the boundaries between craft and so-called high art; the merging of humans and other living beings &#8211; all these elements speak of the author&#8217;s ecological sensitivity and social nerve. That is why critics have associated Štefanigova with current discourses of ecofeminism and posthumanism. The artist herself does not necessarily consider these traditions of thought to be the starting point of her creative process, but their principles and ideas are not alien to her. She, too, wishes to overcome existing hierarchies and fixed boundaries between different species, sexualities or social identities. The hybrid imagery of her artworks and the painting technique, emphasizing fluidity over clear-cut borderlines, symbolize a mode of seeing and interpreting the world, where the principles of autonomous self and the dominance of the human over the non-human (other living beings, nature) gives way to the ethics of coexistence and interdependence.
&#8220;In my view, posthuman ethics urges us to endure the principle of not-One at the in-depth structures of our subjectivity by acknowledging the ties that bind us to the multiple ‘others’ in a vital web of complex interrelations. This ethical principle breaks up the fantasy of unity, totality and one-ness&#8230;What I want to emphasize instead, in a more affirmative vein, is the priority of the relation and the awareness that one is the effect of irrepressible flows of encounters, interactions, affectivity and desire, which one is not in charge of.” (Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman, 2013)
Katrin Kivimaa
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Exhibition design: Johannes Luik 
Graphic design: Kert Viiart 
Installation: Johannes Luik, Tanel Asmer, Erkki Kadarik 
Photography: Joosep Kivimäe
The exhibition is supported by the Cultural Endowment of Estonia, DSV Estonia and Embassy of The Czech Republic

Denisa Štefanigová “To Observe the Clouds”

Kärt Hammer

Large white paintings on chairs, by the wall, near the window. “White is the same kind of black like black, just white,” says Kärt Hammer. A framed skull with jewellery attached to horns. White underpants with sequins. Drawings. Drawers full of drawings. A diary on the shelf: a drawing on each day’s page. Photos on the wall. Next to them, an A4 sheet of paper with quotes in English. They’re mostly about God, people and love. A book on the bookshelf. Some sentences have been highlighted in yellow. I secretly take some photos. “A God-shaped hole is best filled by music, as it alleviates our existential loneliness better than anything else,” is highlighted with a thick yellow line. And then this:
No God high up in the sky 
No devil at the bottom of the sea 
Cannot do what you have done 
By forcing me down on my knees
Kärt Hammer’s exhibitions are set up at places that have some unique feeling for her. Usually, this feeling reaches us as a scream. Streamlined, framed, glazed, cleaned – but as a scream. This scream didn’t appear recently, it’s not trying to force itself through like water behind a dam, it’s there all the time. “I draw every day,” Hammer once said. Incessantly. Obsessively. Naked bodies with their cracks and slits, drawn quickly enough to prevent details from taking over. And these bodies surrounded, as always, by emptiness.
Hammer’s works look for the meaningful at the intersection of the low and the high, the sequinned underpants and the invisible God. There is some kind of longing, an attempt to reach something, but it only allows itself to be collected in fragments. Her paintings and drawings bear sentences instead of texts, words instead of sentences, letters instead of words, carcases instead of bodies – wretched little prices that appear from nothingness, just for a fleeting moment. The God Hammer is looking for is not this God. Maybe she’s not looking for God at all, for a non-believer, it would mean biting off more than she can chew, so maybe she’s marking the non-existence of God instead. The signs that suggest he could be here – but he isn’t. Numerous little crucifixes. God, God, God scribbled on the drawings, like the prayer of a madwoman. A massive rosary, which wouldn’t look out of place around a rapper’s neck, not necessarily marking something’s existence, but rather non-existence.
Hammer’s white paintings aren’t really talking about divine innocence. These flowing expanses of colour are more like the silently spreading screams that cover the painting like snow covers the ground. Or like the vomit of someone whose insides don’t give in when shaken, but dig around inside a person even when it seems there’s nothing more to take. A dark bile from the soul, with some word fragments scribbled over them, but new waves coming and coming.
And then the everyday objects of the world. Sofas, cabinets, mattresses and next to them abstract objects like things, materiality itself – and photos, an illusion of materiality. Everywhere, there is softness, this safe cradle that we expect from God and the possibility of which excites us so much that has based our erotic desires on softness – the easiest way for us to fill the void that God doesn’t visit anymore.
Hammer doesn’t hide the fact that she’s the protagonist of her exhibition. Her presence is visible, discernible, almost tangible. Everything here is at her service. Her kingdom come, her will be done. Stubbornly, she stays in the saddle of her work, like a cowgirl riding into the sunset, cracking the whip and increasing the speed as it becomes increasingly clearer: there is nowhere to go. Is it logical? “Since when has belief in God had anything to do with logic?” as Nick Cave asks.
Eero Epner, February 2024
About the artist: 
Kärt Hammer (1988) is an interdisciplinary artist, whose creative self-expression focuses mainly on abstract painting and drawing, but whose work also extends to installations, photography and fashion. Hammer’s method is intuitive. Through pure aesthetics, the artist is looking for intensities that are aesthetic and psychological at the same time.
Assistance in creating the exhibition came from: 
Jewellery: Patrick Soome 
Text: Eero Epner 
Graphic design: Taavet Kohal 
Installation support: Erkki Kadarik 
Photographic documentation: Roman-Sten Tõnissoo
Tütar gallery and artist Kärt Hammer express gratitude to: 
Velle Hammer, Mare Hammer, Eero Hammer, Patrick Soome, Rea Lest, Taavet Kohal, Kristel Jänes, Madis Laur, Henri Hütt, Henry Kasch ja Kanuti Gildi Saal, Andres Ojasu.
The exhibition is supported by the Cultural Endowment of Estonia, TRAGE, Balen OÜ, Kommipomm and Mirai Baltics.

Kärt Hammer “DIRTY WHITE”

Maryliis Teinfeldt-Grins

Maryliis Teinfeldt-Grins&#8217; solo show “Who Remembers Last, Who Remembers Better?” at Tütar gallery opens on Thursday, January 18. The focal point of the exhibition is a five-meter-long rag rug created as a collaborative effort by Kadrina community, telling the story of a vanished village and hill in Lääne-Virumaa in 1977.
Koplimetsa is a historical village in Kadrina parish, established in 1877. The village disappeared in 1977 when farms were replaced by collectives, and people were resettled from farm buildings to apartments. Concurrently, changes were made to the local landscape, most notably the removal of a four-kilometer-long esker wall, Niinemäe. The gravel obtained from the hill was used for nearby military objects and the construction of the Tapa-Loobu road. This episode is not unusual in Estonian history; there are many such villages that have disappeared. The lost Koplimetsa serves as an example to narrate the story of Estonia and, more broadly, our entire region.
Maryliis Teinfeldt-Grins herself hails from this vanished village and spent her childhood immersed in its landscape. Despite growing up in Koplimetsa, the artist was not aware of the rich history of the place. Upon discovering that even the older locals, as the last memory keepers, did not pass down the traditions, the artist embarked on a research journey to restore the memory of what her homeland was like before an external power reshaped it for its needs.
The central piece of the exhibition, a five-meter-wide rug woven in the rag rug technique, was completed over a month and a half in the Kadrina community center, as a collaborative effort between the artist and hundreds of volunteers. According to the artist, the rag rug technique is suitable for conveying the story of Koplimetsa and Niinemäe because, just like there is much forgotten in historical memory, the original design seems to fade away when weaving in the rag rug technique.
Maryliis Teinfeldt-Grins (1993) is a textile and installation artist who addresses memory in her work, focusing on the rural landscapes of Lääne-Virumaa, mainly practicing embroidery and tapestry, as well as dialectal poetry. She studied textile at Tartu Art College Pallas and Latvian Academy of Art, as well as contemporary art at Estonian Academy of Arts. Teinfeldt-Grins is a laureate of Eduard Wiiralt Scholarship awarded by Estonian Ministry of Culture and Adamson-Eric Scholarship awarded by Adamson-Eric Museum. In 2019, Teinfeldt-Grins received the Textile Artist of the Year award from Estonian Textile Artists’ Union.
Maryliis Teinfeldt-Grins’ exhibition will stay open until February 25 and is free to the public. The gallery is located at Vesilennuki 24 in the Noblessner Port area, opening hours are Thursday to Friday from 1 pm to 7 pm and Saturday to Sunday from 2 pm to 6 pm.
Artist expresses gratitude to: Ahto-Lembit Lehtmets, Kevin, Maarika, and Enely Teinfeldt, Francesco Rosso, Zane Shumeiko, Johanna Mauer, Ille Ambos.
The exhibition is supported by Estonian Cultural Endowment, Estonian Centre of Folk Culture, Kadrina Community Center, UAB Teksrena, and Elpec Ehitus.

Maryliis Teinfeldt-Grins “Who Remembers Last? Who Remembers Better?”

Urmas Lüüs

Urmas Lüüs’ solo exhibition “Man! God Has Created You Out of Nothing, and This is Too Often Felt in Your Case” will open at Tütar Gallery in Tallinn. Having once again produced a large-scale, almost total installation in the vein of Kabakov, bearing a title borrowed from Arvo Valton and recreating the atmosphere inspired by the Catholic cemeteries seen in French villages, Lüüs poses a question that appears again and again in classical art, which has assumed new relevance in our time: “How do you ask the dust?” (John Fante)
Urmas Lüüs is known for his expressive contemporary art, in which various creative identities intersect and overlap. A blacksmith by trade, he has dabbled in performing arts, jewellery, noise music and installations, and taught and written about art. I have a feeling that Lüüs, as an artist, or more broadly as a creator, has always taken delight in situations where he comes off as a bit of an outsider, as though eyeing someone else’s backyard.
Art critics and curators have often associated Urmas Lüüs’ work with neo-materialism. This trend is reflected in the belief that an artistic text is sustained primarily by embodied labour, by the energy inherent in the personal, poetic manipulation of material. Realisation, therefore, is anything but secondary, because thinking itself proceeds through manual search. As such, neo-materialist art seems to irk the neo-platonic idea-centric imagination typical of mainstream post-conceptualism, whereby it makes no difference whether an artist realises their project themselves or hires diligent craftsmen from a remote Chinese manufactory. At the broadest level, however, it implies a conscious rejection of the dominant operating models of both the industrial production society and the service-based information society, without becoming obsessed with nostalgia and craftsmanship. Lüüs uses traditional techniques, from embroidery to blacksmithing, but often in unusual, skewed contexts, so as to open up unique registers of manual thinking.
It’s more than refreshing to see contemporary art offer the opportunity to take the Bible off the shelf and trace the lines of Ecclesiastes to deliver a sermon: “Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless, a chasing after the wind.” Humour aside, the jauntily pessimistic effect of Lüüs’ new installation is an escape route from the ever more insistent demand to choose sides everywhere and to take to the barricades to make ourselves heard. This conviction, which increasingly oppresses contemporary cultural consciousness through intensifying political crises and which is accompanied by the further exacerbation of the “crisis of subtlety” (Hasso Krull), can in fact only be relativised in the impermeable private space of poetry, without imposing a clear moral on anyone. To paraphrase the artist himself: “plurality is acceptable because evil does not invalidate bad and bad does not negate good.”
As Lutheran heirs to the ‘Danse Macabre’, it is easy for us to embrace the thoroughly democratic message of Notke’s painting, declaring all men equal before death—kings and beggars alike. In the world of kitsch Catholic votive offerings that has fascinated Lüüs in this case, things seem more complicated. The smaller works displayed in the installation appear to be characterised by sacramentality – the invisible and spiritual is present through the visible and material, which in turn is made sacred by its presence. In view of this, it seems fair to ask: who dares to claim that “no man brings souvenirs from beyond the grave”? (Gennadi S. Klein)
I would like to conclude with Anders Härm’s words about Lüüs’ (and Hans-Otto Ojaste’s) previous exhibition: “In a total installation, you must surrender yourself completely, leaving you no choice but to see the exhibition yourself.” Which was, of course, the point all along.
Accompanying Text: Hanno Soans 
Design: Juss Heinsalu 
Graphic Design: Cristopher Siniväli 
Technical Solution: Hans-Otto Ojaste 
Installation Support: Erkki Kadarik 
Installation Views: Joosep Kivimäe
The exhibition is supported by the Cultural Endowment of Estonia, City of Tallinn and Koch Brewery

Urmas Lüüs “Man! God Has Created You Out of Nothing, and This is Too Often Felt in Your Case”

Kristina Õllek

Standing in the sea, with rolling waves caressing our feet, carrying sand back and forth between the shoreline and the murky waters, we are standing in the deep past. A past that wasn’t divided into years, days, hours and minutes by calendars and clocks, but flowed in an endless multitemporal current. A past that witnessed abundant and long-gone life forms and materials that have become the fuel for the present and the catastrophes of the future.
Through photographic works and installations combining limestone, sea salt, clay and bioplastics, Õllek has created a bridge between the present moment and the biodiverse equatorial and tropical past of the local seabed. She has exposed the geological time of the Baltic Sea – the stories of which are narrated by crinoids, tabulata, trilobites, brachiopods, cephalopods, cyanobacteria and other fossilised ghosts of the ancient marine life. While we mostly associate cyanobacteria with the toxic blue-green algae that keeps us from having a swim in bodies of water, these bacteria have witnessed the billions of years of evolution and progress while remaining almost unchanged themselves. 
The sea remembers.
Õllek is thinking with the sea: its past, present and future, marine life, bacteria and minerals, to tell the story of how cyanobacteria, while so integral to the oxygen cycle, have transformed into suffocating toxicity through intensive agriculture, fertiliser runoff and pollution, as well as due to the slow water exchange in the Baltic Sea and rising sea temperatures. This all leads to hypoxic zones where oxygen is depleted and biodiversity is lost. The slow violence, almost invisible to the eye, which first affects the weakest life forms, has escalated to the point where it can no longer be ignored. 
The sea is suffocating.
The underlying research on marine ecology and anthropocentric influences, both in the context of the North Sea and the Baltic Sea, is rooted in Õllek’s interest in the relationship between new technologies and extractivist thinking, including the controversial issue of deep-sea mining. The sea echoes humanity’s desires and fears: standing in the sea, we are simultaneously standing in the deep past of tropical waters once teeming with life and in the deep future of waters asphyxiated by toxic capitalism.
Annika Toots, September 2023

Kristina Õllek “Waters of Hypoxic & Once Tropic”

At the exhibition “In the Shadow of Crumbling Silhouettes”, Anna Mari Liivrand continues creating her own unique space, which offers the author and the viewer the change to withdraw from the merciless speed of the modern life, take time out to think and experience an unusual introspection. The artist, who is interested in rituals, leads the visitor to her exhibition that is not emphatically solemn like a religious service, but mundanely discreet and charmingly direct, at the same time capturing our world and the various aspects of life in a very natural way, and showing us their hidden, sometimes contradictory harmony.
The ritual aspect of Anna Mari Liivrand’s work relies heavily on the inherent ornamentality of her work, which structures and guides the visual and symbolic narrative, and in turn, the viewer’s experience of it. Liivrand uses both abstract geometric forms and more realistic motifs borrowed from nature and material culture – recognisable, yet still symbolic – as parts of the ornaments. She takes a hubrid approach to them, interweaving the logic of the organic and non-organic worlds, where a sculptural plant is juxtaposed with a sculpture in the shape of a plant. The way in which Liivrand deals with art media, materials and techniques is also hybrid: sometimes, components that are rather heterogeneous are subordinated to the creation of a single holistic image.
Unlike a traditional ornament built on recurring elements, however, the structures created by Liivrand evolve in a non-repetitive manner, their regularity is more complex and meaningful than historical decorative patterns. In contrast to the context in which traditional ornaments originated – the cyclical world view of archaic society – this branching is well suited to a way of thinking that spreads in different directions and synthesises fragments into a whole from fragments, as if in a rhizome of the modern world.
Like a traditional ornament, however, Anna Mari Liivrand’s compositions are symbolically charged, combining both universal and personal symbols: daisies that mutated as a result of the Fukushima nuclear catastrophe; poisonous plants, such as cow parsnip, lily of the valley, true lover&#8217;’s knot, deceptively seductive in their beauty; vaults resembling ruins and fragments of a metal fence surrounding a grave; wishing ribbons and motifs from Estonian folk poetry craft that have been left unfinished as patterns; toad spawn braided into strings that look like rosaries and tears running like the resin of pines. All these symbols speak at once of fading and rebirth, melancholy and hope. Flowers turning into berries and the frog spawn that gives birth to an amphibious animal are associated with transformation and metamorphosis, the final fruit of which is not yet fully clear. This new fabric is still evolving, acting as an intriguing ornament within an ornament – an independent structure within a larger ornament.
The exhibition of Anna Mari Liivrand comes across as a quiet space full of potential that does not impose itself, whereby the uncertainty of the outcome does not cause anxiety, but a bright anticipation of something intangible.
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Elnara Taidre, July 2023

Anna Mari Liivrand “In the Shadow of Crumbling Silhouettes”

Katrin Piile

In the practice of searching, I imagine a set of eyes. Moving back and forth, left to right, they scan their surroundings. Another approach might be to lift something, or move objects around the room. Seldomly one smells (unless a hint was given that the object of search is food related), weighs or rubs. Our most reliable partner, the one we turn to at first, is still that pair of eyes.
One search that is engraved in our cultural history was written by Marcel Proust. For several decades, the Frenchman attempted to trace a time that had passed. His fragment about the madeleine is highly referenced material; the perfect quotidian example of involuntary memory, where the taste of the pastry brings him back to his childhood.
A la recherche du temps perdu (or, In Search of Lost Time) is most of all a life’s work. However memorable the description of the madeleine was, the book&#8217;s relevance is more than just that. It is a highly accurate example of the character of searching, which often lacks a finish line. Katrin Piiles artistic practice is in a similar manner an intense dedication to a search that will probably never fully resolve. At Tütar gallery, the artist aims her search towards a moment of pause, a breath of air, of peace and stillness. This is intrinsically connected to the medium of painting, with its connotation to the still life or nature morte.
But nothing is completely still: every inanimate object contains action one way or another: it has a history, is sorted, exhibited and rediscovered. Piile’s exhibition features the active process of creation. Drops and buckets give us a glimpse of the artist’s working methods. I am most intrigued by the restlessness in Katrin Piile’s artistic nature. She seeks confrontation with the medium of photorealistic painting. During this heated, passionate discussion with her own process, the artist inserts imperfections in a hyperrealistic medium. Neatly square-shaped canvasses contain images of wrinkled paper, connected to a wall with various pieces of masking tape. This thorough investigation and self-reflection creates an urgency. It makes the work approachable as well as confident.
If eyes are our trustworthy companion, Piile employs these senses vividly. Through enlarging and depicting, she invites the viewer to join her and take a pause. Another notable technique is the practice of layering and copying. She takes a picture, paints, and paints that new picture once more, from a footstep further away, or a tiny bit to the left. This becomes a pathway of translations. In this exhibition, one finds paintings of wallpaper. This material is often a depiction on its own already (leaves, roses or other patterns), but one that is often rather clumsy and mass produced. I would like to call her method paraphrasing, as nothing is identical. What happens in the space between these images? I find questions towards functional, domestic objects, their multitude of interpretations and the influence of the context on the subject.
In search of Idyll tastes like calmness with a hint of restless maneuvers. It shows us the relation between practice and exhibiting. Katrin Piile presents us with a break, a pause, a moment of rest. This moment is a result of a continuous, never ending (even refusing to!) circle of creation and dialog with a medium. And so she presents the exhibition as a still life.
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Laura De Jaeger, May 2023