Curatorial introduction of the exhibition “Thinking Pictures”
An introduction of the exhibition “Thinking Pictures” will take place in Kumu Art Museum. The introduction will be held in English by curators Jane A. Sharp (Zimmerli Art Museum) and Liisa Kaljula (Estonian Art Museum).
The focus of the research exhibition Thinking Pictures, which has been prepared in cooperation with the Zimmerli Art Museum in the United States since 2016, was supposed to be a dialogue between Baltic and Moscow artists in the 1970s and 1980s. A few weeks before the opening of the exhibition, Russia started a war against Ukraine, and the dialogue on recent history has acquired an entirely new context. The exhibition that initially opened in the Kumu Great Hall devoid of any artworks as an anti-war protest began to fill with art works from the second half of April. Every few weeks, an artwork or series of works will be added to each thematic space, which will reveal the essence of the topic or establish a dialogue with the existing works. With this solution, the museum wishes to pose questions about the most recent current events and contribute to the debate on the role of culture in this situation.
This exhibition grew out of Jane Sharp’s exhibition Thinking Pictures: Moscow Conceptual Art from the Norton and Nancy Dodge Collection. Norton Dodge (1927–2011) was an American economist and Sovietologist who first travelled to the Soviet Union in 1955 when he was a student at Harvard University. During subsequent decades, Dodge, with the help of agents, collected a large number of unofficial art works from Russia and the other Soviet Republics, and smuggled them into the United States. Today, his collection of nearly 20,000 works is housed in the Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University.
Curators: Anu Allas, Liisa Kaljula and Jane Sharp
Exhibition design: Mari Kurismaa
Graphic design: Tuuli Aule
Coordinator: Ragne Soosalu