Culture.ee’s weekly recommendations: 18–24 Feb 2019

On February 18 at 6 p.m. an exciting and moving film Okja (2017) will be screened at the dome hall of the National Library.

South Korean director Bong Joon-ho’s feature film Okja is a film on a great friendship between a young girl Mija and a wonderful animal called Okja. But what happens with Okja when he is kidnapped by a big corporation who has their own plans?

Free admission! Anyone can bring their own snacks.

“Invisible Animals invite” is an event series that include film nights, discussions, panel discussions, practical tasks and other exciting things. The discussions are about global issues relating to farm animal breeding and its impact on nature, animals, society and people. In addition, interesting topics include exciting alternatives in food industry regarding the replacement of animal food products with the development of delicious and healthy future technology.

BAFTA-winning artist, composer, musician and producer Ólafur Arnalds has expanded his current worldwide tour, his first in over three years.

After a sold-out European run this spring that included the prestigious Royal Albert Hall in London, Ólafur announced a new album, re:member, that was released on August 24 via Mercury KX. The first two singles from the album, title track re:member and unfold, have excited and delighted fans across the globe. And now Ólafur and his team of fellow craftsmen and musicians are back on the road with an all-new live show.

The tour features a uniquely wired string quartet, a live drummer/percussionist and Ólafur’s playground of pianos and synthesizers.

Angela ‘Goo’ Ramírez is currently interested in exploring the consciousness of our own memory, called metamemory, through the materialization of the effort of remembering.

Sometimes we remember [remembered] is an exhibition exploring the metamemory of the exhibition Sometimes we remember. By withdrawing to the past, time – the essential material for memory – reveals how we creatively transform our own memories through selection, oblivion and imagination to fit our current needs.

Angela ‘Goo’ has a background in spatial and urban design and pedagogy. She has worked as a researcher for the Tecnologico de Monterrey University and curated architecture exhibitions in the City Museum in Queretaro, Mexico. She is currently studying the MA Program of Contemporary Art at the Estonian Academy of Arts.

Mati Karmin (b 1959), who first started participating in exhibitions in 1987, is one of the great names in the history of Estonian sculpture. In 1986, he was awarded the annual Youth Prize and in 1992 the Kristjan Raud art award.

Mati Karmin LX will include Karmin’s earlier works from the collections of the Tartu Art Museum and the Art Museum of Estonia. In addition to mythological and religious characters, they also represent cultural figures and artists who are contemporaries of the author. They highlight his experimental and playful use of form and a deeply cognitive Nordic style, which are often spiced up by sharp wit. Besides the masterpieces from museum and private collections, Karmin has made a central conceptual work for the exhibition that partially grew out of his popular exhibition My Father in the Gallery Sammas (1994) and expands his last exhibition project, Believed, in the Vabaduse Gallery (2018).

Liina Siib excavates the multiple dreams and ideals that haunt the present. Her work pays acute attention to the minor narratives, which usually persist in the shadows of the attention economy or crevices of accelerated lived experience. Bringing together new productions and a selection of older works by Siib, the exhibition Politics of Paradise mediates intergenerational conversations between individual lives and complex gendered histories of privilege and power.

Recently Siib has looked at 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 against new installations focused on the tragic yet deviant historical local female characters. They continue Siib’s long-term artistic investigations into the entangled political and habitual claims to space, voice and meaning.

The drummer Ahto Abner, the double bass player Mingo Rajandi and the electronic musician Ekke Västrik make their debut as a trio.

When is free improvisation really free improvisation? Freedom requires responsibility and enough appetite for adventure, the courage to go with a stranger on the dark street (transferred to the music, of course), and to peek through ajar doors. Ahto, Mingo, and Ekke take an explorational journey to a free, unknown, and possibly dangerous sound continent.

Improtest is a concert series that brings improvisational music from local and foreign authors to the local audience. The concerts have been taking place since 2005 once a month. 

Welcome to Longyearbyen, the only settlement in the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard.

Situated 483 kilometres from the North Pole, where polar bears outnumber humans, and bearing the distinction of being the northernmost town in the world, Longyearbyen is a community with an unforgiving climate, dreary isolation and an uncertain economic future. Like many small towns, Longyearbyen was once a bustling industrial hub that is now struggling to find innovative ways to sustain itself.

Introduction by Rein Sikk.

Tõnu Kõrvits
The History of Abandoned Lighthouses (premiere)

Johannes Brahms
Violin Concerto in D major
Serenade No. 1 in D major

Antje Weithaas (violin)
Estonian National Symphony Orchestra
Conductor Olari Elts

One of Brahms’ best-known and most beloved works, Violin Concerto, as well as one of the composer’s best-kept secrets, Serenade No. 1, which is rarely heard on stages, will be performed. According to Olari Elts, the latter is the most intimate and chamber-like orchestral work of Brahms.

Programme of ancient and modern Metsatöll, greatest hits and new pieces.

Folk-metal group Metsatöll
Estonian National Male Choir and Tiit Kikas (drone music instrument, laser harp)
The world first ever Drone Music Instrument (Nemo Vunk, Drone shop: Glen Pilvre)
Light design – EjaT

On the eve of the 101st anniversary of the Republic of Estonia, Estonia’s best electronic music producers and DJs will gather to the two halls in the capital’s most popular venue, the Cultural Hub, to perform at the Made in Estonia indoor festival.