Struggle in the City
Location: 5th floor, Gallery of Contemporary Art
Although the subject of the summer project of Kumu is not of highest priority, as far as directing the audience and choosing the works to show are concerned, the participating artists have urban environments in common, as well as ways of interacting with it. The city is a challenging and limiting environment for art, it manifests a certain routine, simultaneously forcing to relate, cope and act. Various approaches have been collected for the exposition, there are projects created specially for Kumu, art works from museum collections, and outstanding works of current art life. At the exhibition, a place is considered a symbolic measurement, the selection of works includes different activities and situations characteristic of urban life.
The exposition opens with urbanistic art right here, right now, with project Slice of Time of writing, of the street, of street art, its authors being Anton, Uku and Rémi. Slice of Time is characterised by a hybrid structure combining the street level, design, art, graffiti and technology. The multitude of media is brought into order by Anton’s leading idea of writing, brought to physical form with a monumental wallpaper that initiates the audience into the secrets of typography. Graphic designers describe themselves as mediators of complex information structures, analysers and compilers of communication processes, construing the strategies of organisations and stimulating new interpretations to the tokens of society. According to Anton’s considerably more metaphysical approach, the idea of graphic design is not contributing to a rise in economy or sweating the labels. A wall dedicated to typographic experiments comments on the conceptual process of creating a letter, mediating the poetry of writing and the pleasure of inventing new images. The ability to consider the slice of time a social space where the elite graphic design gives place to officially unacknowledged manners of writing. We consider Anton’s project to be a manifestation of the pointlessness of specialising that besets the artist. For though the character format of a graphic designer might be different from the graffiti artist’s, by no means do they rule one another out. The Slice of Time smoothly transforms from graphic design to dealing with the issues and icons of street art, passing the baton to pertinent specialists. The project scatters the negative attitude that sees street art as an act of vandalism, unites different roles of artists, demonstrates the creative thinking of a designer, but most of all arranges for greater audiences the hierarchies on the scale of “high” professional art and “low” street culture. A motorcycle has the same symbolic place in the exhibition hall as the banks and stencils slipped into public space, controlled by the watchful eye of security cameras.
Kaido Ole‘s installation Meeting (2007) takes us from the concrete campus that smells of asphalt and dust right to the artery of the city, to the steril conference hall of an office building. The spectator has an opportunity to imagine oneself holding a meeting with Ole’s heroes, with the imaginary employees of an office in ideal space (although photographed by Ole in the specific meeting rooms of a specific block).
The oldest layer of the city handled at the exhibition are the Soviet-built bedroom suburbs and the romantic approach to these through multiple filters – Kaarel Nurga‘s series Autumn Ball is a record of the shooting of the cult movie, familiar to those interested in photography from Flicker. In the exhibition hall, the works seek for an answer to the question whether there is a point to producing a motionless picture in addition to an existing movie in a world where anyone can make movies with the help of a computer and a cheap video camera.
Maarit Murka, known as a painter, has photographed her paintings in extreme spacial situations (Photophobia, 2007). In the environment of an abandoned prison, the paintings transform into a part of an installation to which secondary materials have been added by Murka. These records of space communicate a feminine relationship, focusing on the sublime, mysterious and enigmatic. There is also a wish to render the anguish and mediate the grotesque experience, awakened in the author by abandoned environments.
Raoul Kurvitz‘s Pentatonic Color System II (1994-1999) is one of the first works of electronic art in the history of Estonian art, conjoining sound, light and {sõna puudu vist?}, originally displayed at the annual exhibition of the Soros Centre, Unexistent Art. The program loops circles, spirals, squares, reversed pentagons and other figures. The program consists of a bipartite cycle of colours and figures, combined with a 9-part musical soundtrack by Ariel Lagle.
Reet Aus, Ville Hyvönen, HULA and the students of Tartu Art College have united their forces in the project Outasight, dealing with the issues of overpopulation and overconsumption. What becomes of our clothes once we have thrown them away? What becomes of the environment if human kind carries on as it has thus far?
This summer, all of us might take some time off in the corner hall on the fourth floor of Kumu, look out the window and critically analyse our lifestyles.
Artists:
Anton, Uku, Rémi, Kaido Ole, Urmas Muru, Maarit Murka, Kaarel Nurk, Raoul Kurvitz, Ariel Lagle, Reet Aus, Ville Hyvönen, Marit Ahven, HULA, students of the Textile and Photography departments of Estonian Academy of Arts and Tartu Art College
Curator: Eha Komissarov
We thank:
G4S, 3Step IT, Tallinn University of Technology, Estonian Academy of Arts
