State of Affairs
Location: 5th floor, Gallery of Contemporary Art
The exhibition “State of Affairs” assembles the most notable artists’ works in Estonian contemporary art and its immediate sphere.
A crisis is running rampant around us; the government is probing the limits of its actual existence; values are being reassessed; radical measures are being implemented; resources are being cut and taxes increased – nothing is as before. Without meddling in day-to-day politics, it is also time for the current state of affairs on the modern art front to be reviewed and for works that are appropriate for the times to be taken out of repositories and artists’ back rooms, and to be lifted onto a virtual pedestal in the exhibition hall. At the “State of Affairs” exhibition, the museum is placing local works with classic potential on display, importing Estonian art that has successfully circulated abroad and presenting works representing imported positions that are not currently widely circulated in our artistic reality – the keywords are critical, social and political. We call upon the public to leave their prejudices behind and to come to the exhibition hall in order to think along, communicate and relate – it is possible that an unknown artist’s position may provide a better commentary on the current state of affairs than the Prime Minister.
The social axis of the exhibition gathers artists who directly or indirectly function at the street level. The freedom poster was an anonymous action that occurred in Tallinn’s cityscape in early spring 2008, at the same time as the discussion of the organization and results of the design competition for the War of Independence monument that was raging in the media. In connection with the increasing relevance of the given question, Kumu has decided to re-present the documentation of this civic initiative and to give visitors the opportunity to continue the discussion. The question of freedom, of its actual and symbolic limits, continues to be on the agenda. In 2006, KIWA participated in the euroPart exhibition in Vienna, with a poster project that was critical of the European Union and global capitalism. Along with Roy Strider and Toomas Thetloff, the co-authors, a topical repetition of this project will be staged at the Kumu exhibition. The poster format is mixed with graffiti by Jasper Zoova and the project documentation of his “Manifesto of Retrofuturism” project will be used by Kumu to symbolically mark the 100th anniversary of the publication of the first manifesto of futurism.
The KIWA spatial installation “High on Nothing” deals with the philosophical world of non-existence, emptiness and voids, and is familiar to the active art public from the exhibition that took place at the ArtDepoo gallery in 2008. The author has meanwhile supplemented the exhibition materials that were acquired by the AME, because the search for non-existence is an endless process. Along with print portraits of geniuses like Arvo Pärt and Jacques Derrida created using the ASCII system, we see black squares and red stars that dissipate to the rhythm of a printer cassette emptying, while a watering-can duet representing the Non-Existent Bands Festival brand floods us with zero-level meta-sound. It is possible that this project, which conceptualizes non-existence will provide the most honest picture of the current state of affairs.
One of the newest works by prodigal son Villu Jaanisoo – an Estonian sculptor working primarily on the international scene – is a large-scale sound installation entitled “Wave”, which establishes itself though the powerful material presence of its equipment and the elusive nature of its sound. “Wave” is a work that opened the exhibition program of Kalhama & Piippo, an influential private modern art gallery, in Helsinki last winter.
One of the Estonian artists who is most active on the international scene is certainly Marko Mäetamm, whose appearances during the last few years in solo and group exhibitions, as well as festivals, around the world are difficult to keep track of. Mäetamm’s meteoric rise was kicked off by the 2007 Venice Biennale, where his exposition at the Estonian pavilion attracted a great deal of attention. The Kumu exhibition includes his new post-Biennale work, which continues to focus on subjects related to the author’s private sphere and family through dislocated fantasies that play with violence and anxiety, works that sometimes take grotesque routes to solutions, while also being humorous. An account statement of Mäetamm’s assets summarizes the state of affairs with the provocative belief that “All We Have Is Love”.
The State of Affairs also presents another project connected with the Venice Biennale that enjoyed success internationally and was also awarded the top prize by the Estonian Cultural Endowment’s Fine and Applied Arts Foundation. The location-specific “Gas Pipeline” installation in Giradini Park at the 11th Venice Biennale of Architecture – an life-size gas pipeline running between the Russian and German pavilions that raised burning questions at a forum of the world’s architectural elite about the associations between politics, infrastructure and economics, as well as the contemporary spatial environment. At Kumu, one can see the documentation for the project that was installed in Venice. The topic of the NordStream gas pipeline between Russia and Germany, which the given work of course comments on, is very topical again, and along with the topical discourse, one can examine the more theoretical treatment that appeared in the project catalog and analyze the state of affairs in this light. In some sense, the exhibition is emotionally summarized by one of the AME’s most recent acquisitions – Jaan Toomik‘s video “Father and Son 2” (2007).
