2019 exhibition programme

Tallinn Art Hall is pleased to announce its 2019 programme, including exhibitions at adjoining spaces, Art Hall Gallery and City Gallery.

Tallinn Art Hall

Liina Siib: Politics of Paradise
February 16–April 14, 2019
Curator: Taru Elfving

Liina Siib’s work explores the many ideals that haunt the present. It pays acute attention to minor narratives concealed in the shadows of our tense economic situation and accelerated way of life. Bringing together new and old works, the exhibition mediates intergenerational conversations between individual lives and complex gendered histories of privilege and power.

Most recently Siib has examined the ongoing regional economic migration through the eyes of Estonian women working in Finland. This contemporary polyphony of personal stories, desires and realities is reflected in new installations based on tragic yet deviant historical local female characters. They continue Siib’s artistic investigations into the entangled political and habitual claims to space, voice and meaning.

Spring Exhibition
April 27–June 9, 2019

Since opening in 1934, Tallinn Art Hall has presented exhibitions surveying Estonian art. Over time, the organisers, locations and frequency of these exhibitions has changed, but the tradition of organising at least one annual exhibition of its kind has remained. Since 2000 the Estonian Artists’ Association exhibition has been held annually. In 2006, catalogues of the exhibitions began being published, and in 2011, the exhibition was labelled the Spring Exhibition. 

Organised in collaboration with the Estonian Artists’ Association, the Spring Exhibition is a manifestation of diversity; a place where artists’ personalities, conceptual attitudes and visual styles meet. Structured as an open call, the exhibition showcases works selected by a jury.

This year’s 19th annual exhibition will take place at Tallinn Art Hall, City Gallery and Art Hall Gallery, and the works that have been submitted will be for sale. A catalogue of works in the exhibition will also be published. 

The Art of Being Good
June 22–September 1, 2019
Curator: Siim Preiman

When living in a world that is consigned to destruction, all decisions we make seem extremely difficult: should we only eat sustainably sourced meat, or become vegans? Must we only buy coffee in reusable cups, or cycle to work instead of drive? Despite all these fine distinctions, a study in the newspaper then tells you that you have in fact increased your ecological footprint...

The Art of Being Good treats the artist as a socially sensitive agent—an imaginer of new worlds. The artists’ practices provide examples of how to cope with a world on the brink of crisis. This international group show includes (self)therapeutic practices, instructions for sustainable creation, activist documentary and investigative works, as well as cunning interventions into commercialised space.

Mercury Part of Tallinn Photomonth 2019
September 14–November 17, 2019
Curators: Post Brothers and Simon Dybbroe Møller

This exhibition considers how we look at the world around us. How we perceive history and the material world we currently live in through the lens of technological development. More specifically, how obsolete technologies shape our relationship to now. Mercury explores images, objects and routines that are closely related to photography. 

Photography as a material process has been short-lived, one could mark its historical endpoints as ranging from the toxic mercury of photo plates to the computer-generated shapeshifting of the T-1000 in the film Terminator 2. Early photography was a conditional object, a sculpture. Photography today has been freed from this baggage of accountability and physicality. It has itself become like mercury. Liquid, protean, mutable, and fast flowing. Magically reflective, moving at the slightest touch. 

Evelyn Raudsepp’s curatorial project  
November 27–30, 2019

Evelyn Raudsepp is a curator who works at the intersection of performance and visual art. She artfully named the area of convergence between the two fields “kunstihall” (in Estonian a homonym meaning both “art hall” and “art grey”). Raudsepp first discussed kunstihall—created by combining a black box with a white cube—in 2016 at the Artishok Biennale, which she curated at the NO99 Theatre. Artists invited were given the assignment of staging a one-night art situation. A series of performances called Whitefield brought performance artists into art venues, with three artists performing dances based on the topics of three exhibits in Tallinn. 

This series of performances continues the same theme. The curator has invited four pairs of artists—with one performance and one visual artist in each pair—to collaborate on a performative work at Tallinn Art Hall. The project, which is being produced in collaboration with the Sõltumatu Tantsu Lava, places human bodies into artificial environments and tests the measure of theatricality in the processes that surround people. 

Disarming Language: disability, communication, rupture
December 14, 2019–March 1, 2020
An exhibition and programme curated by Christine Sun Kim and Niels Van Tomme

The “Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities” (2006) is an international human rights treaty of the United Nations which aims to protect the rights of people with disabilities through language and law. Building upon the treaty, this exhibition and programme looks at ways in which unusual conceptions of language and communication are informed and enhanced by disability. The project, by bringing together artists, graphic designers, writers and activists, establishes a number of critical vantage points that imagine disability beyond a stigmatised “condition.” Its purpose lies in imagining new conceptual and experiential frameworks that use language and communication in innovative ways—through, with, and beyond disability—advancing a radically more inclusive point of view past limiting ableist perspectives and possibilities.

Art Hall Gallery

Noora Nio-Juss: Covered 
February 15–April 21, 2019
Curator: Tamara Luuk

Britta Benno: Dystopic Tallinn 
June 20–August 11, 2019
Curator: Siim Preiman

Kate Lyddon and Angela Maasalu: Maiden, Mother and Old Hag (working title) 
August 16–October 13, 2019
Curator: Tamara Luuk

Vello Vinn: ∞ & ○ 
October 18–December 15, 2019
Curator: Andreas Trossek

City Gallery

Taavi Suisalu: Light Between the Oceans
February 1–March 31, 2019
Curator: Siim Preiman

A Situation 
June 14–August 18, 2019
Curator: Andreas Nilsson

Jüri Arrak: Green Fire 
August 23–October 20, 2019
Curator: Tamara Luuk

Jane Remm: Views on a Landscape
October 25–December 15, 2019
Curator: Siim Preiman

General information: info@kunstihoone.ee
International press enquiries: Alexia Menikou