Everything Is Going to Be Alright
Location: 5th floor, Gallery of Contemporary Art
Eight video installations from seven authors will be exhibited at Everything Is Going to Be Alright, including works by international superstars and well-known local artists. The exhibition offers a selection of the best examples of classical video art from the past decade, through a loose thematic focus. The exhibition title is borrowed from the young Dutch artist Guido van der Werve’s work and the common feature of all the exhibited videos is human solitude, including attempts to describe different borderline situations and to explain the most uncomfortable corners of consciousness and sub-consciousness. The overall mood of the exhibition is thoughtful but bright and it offers a powerful visual and emotional experience.
The works on display can be characterised as taking strong artistic positions, dealing with the occupation of space through the video medium, and raising existential questions. The work of the Serbian artist Marina Abramović, who currently resides in New York, is being exhibited in Kumu for the first time. Her artistic practice, primarily in the field of performance art, has become a classic of contemporary art history. The video Holding Milk. From The Series The Kitchen V (2009) was shown at Abramović’s solo exhibition in MoMA, in New York, this spring. The deeper meaning of the video is connected with the artist’s personal history, her childhood memories, through which the kitchen environment acquires a symbolic role.
The second classic author at the exhibition is the Finnish video artist Eija-Liisa Ahtila. Her three-screen installation The House (2002), which was exhibited for the first time at the 11th documenta in Kassel in 2002, tells the story of a woman whose world is falling apart: time and space, the real and the virtual, image and sound trade places and wander off. Ahtila, who is a well-known experimenter with narrative, uses audiovisual tools to convey a psychotic experience in this video installation.
Ene-Liis Semper personally embodied the breakthrough of Estonian video art in the late 1990s – early 2000s. Her Door (2002) is one of the most important recent video acquisitions of the Art Museum of Estonia, as it is one of the best-known and most significant works by Semper. The work places the viewer in a dark room, where a human silhouette can be vaguely seen through a door that’s been left ajar. The door closes, leaving the dark room full of numerous open clues and different interpretations. Kai Kaljo, another Estonian renowned video artist since the 1990s, who has also found recognition at the international level, is represented with one of her earliest video installations, And Nevertheless (1997), which is being exhibited in Kumu for the first time and focuses on the passage of time, the brevity of human life and the transient nature of the physical world.
A reading corner will be set up on the fifth floor of Kumu, where visitors can read the texts recommended by the artists participating in the exhibition.
Artists:
Marina Abramović, Eija-Liisa Ahtila, Kai Kaljo, Mike Marshall, Ene-Liis Semper, Santeri Tuori and Guido van der Werve
Curator: Maria-Kristiina Soomre
Designer: Berit Teeäär
