Culture.ee’s weekly recommendations: 1–7 Apr 2019

Textile artists group exhibition Binding matter observes the nature and meaning of materials. Balancing on the borders of textile, design and art, the participating artists discover the connections, features and meanings between different fibers and substances. The exhibition focuses on experiments and combinations of materials, through which modern materially overloaded world is being critically rethought.

Participating artists: Ingrid Helena Pajo, Katarina Kruus, Ann Müürsepp, Frank Abner, Triin Talts and Liina Leo. They’ve been brought together by studies at the Estonian Academy of Arts textile and product design departments, whilst sharing a common interest in environmentally friendly and sustainable art.

Erinn M. Cox: “We are all born with a knowing pain in our soul, and this innate understanding is loneliness: a deep ache for an other to fill the cavity we cannot otherwise fill, a sincere desperation that wholly longs for someone to alleviate the paralyzing fear of dying alone. When the other, it seems, is and has always been absent, the suffocation of loneliness becomes far more than a feeling – it becomes a relentless pursuit for a chosen other with a bittersweet and intoxicating need that is exciting and devastating. And it is this longing, this intense and unforgiving emotion, that will slowly and decidedly kill us.”

Erinn M. Cox is a jewellery artist from the United States, currently residing in Tallinn, Estonia. She holds a BFA in sculpture and photography from Florida State University, an MFA in sculpture and installation from the Memphis College of Art and is currently pursuing a MA degree in Jewellery at the Estonian Academy of Arts.

The exhibition Gene-ius takes us far into the past, deep within, and hopefully forward. Genes are a part of our inner space which you cannot negotiate.

Genes determine our appearance and also partly what our health will be like during our lives. The journey of investigating our genes is full of wonderful discoveries and is also useful!

Step inside a cell and see what you can find there. Keep track of a volunteer donor’s 22nd chromosome. Find out if you may have an increased risk of falling ill with type 2 diabetes or if you like the taste of Brussels sprouts. Let the waves of the DNA sequencing ball ocean wash over your head!

On Tuesday, 2 April at 6 pm Aki Kaurismäki’s film On the Other Side of Hope (Toivon toisella puolella; 2017) will be screened at SuperNova cinema.

The film screening is held for educational purposes – brief commentary before and discussion after the film.

English subtitles.

Free entrance!

Director: Victor Fleming

Cast: Clark Gable, Vivien Leigh, Thomas Mitchell, Leslie Howard

On the eve of the American Civil War, rich, beautiful and self-centered Scarlett O’Hara has everything she could want – except Ashley Wilkes. But as the war devastates the South, Scarlett discovers the strength within herself to protect her family and rebuild her life.

Length: 3 h 58 min

In English, no subtitles.

On April 4–7 comedy film festival Wilkom takes place in Viljandi, bringing the best comedy film of last year and several special programs.

During the three days, eight new films will be screened in the main program of Wilkom and there will also be a special program of the French legend Pierre Richard.

France is strongly represented at this year’s festival. Sink or Swim talks about a synchronized swimming team made up of middle-aged men and the bloody crime action Rebels addresses your sense of humour in the same way as Quentin Tarantino. The program of Wilkom also includes the Spanish basketball comedy Champions, that won the Spanish National Goya Best Film Award in February, and the gem of American black comedy, Boots Riley’s Sorry to Bother You.

On the 4th of April at 6 p.m., there will be a book presentation and performance by Netti Nüganen at Tartu Art Museum as part of the exhibition i’m vomiting i’m crying i’m vomiting i’m crying you are my sister you are my sister.

The performance is put together from different characters appearing in her videos. Engaging with rhythm and timing, Nüganen will translate the videos exhibited in the halls into live acts, questioning the necessity of a living body and impropriety of the exhibition space – where to locate oneself? Displacing usual performing elements of the storyline, the artist creates an uncanny atmosphere.

The exhibition is accompanied by a publication featuring poetry and prose by Estland and Nüganen and photo documentation of the exhibition by Marta Vaarik. The publication is designed by Brit Pavelson.

The presentation of Boris Groys’s book The Total Art of Stalinism and an open lecture by Vitaly Komar, a conceptual artist living in New York.

The Total Art of Stalinism, published for the first time as an Estonian-language book by the Tallinn University Press, is the best-known work of the Eastern European art theorist Boris Groys (1947). When it first appeared in 1988 in German under the name Gesamtkunstwerk Stalin, the essay was held to be ‘too controversial’ in the East as well as in the West to be ‘taken seriously’. However, as it tends to be with groundbreaking texts, the true value of the work is starting to reveal only now, 30 years after its first publication, when the Soviet project is becoming part of history. The book presented at the exhibition Sots Art and Fashion has also remained one of the most seminal takes on Moscow Sots Art.

Vitaly Komar (1943), like his creative partner Alexander Melamid, is a Moscow-born conceptual artist who emigrated to New York in 1978. Komar is one of the founders of the Sots Art movement of the 1970s, a form of Soviet Nonconformist Art that combined elements of Socialist Realism and Western Pop Art in a conceptual framework. His work uses the iconography and propaganda symbols of Soviet Russia to deconstruct the established myth. In 2004 the artists’ duo separated and both are working independently now.

We are over the moon to announce that Xiu Xiu will be performing a live show in Tallinn on Friday the 5th of April at Sveta Baar.

Accompanying them will be the majestic Mart Avi, our mysterious local contemporary artist who has just released his critically acclaimed album.

XIU XIU
https://xiuxiu.bandcamp.com/
Xiu Xiu began in 2002 to try to make music for people opposed to and opposed by the horror and disquiet of life.

Xiu Xiu is Shayna Dunkelman, Angela Seo and Jamie Stewart. Each member, a respected and extraordinary artist in their right, together have never played with more intensity, dedication, and doomy love/hate.

The group draws upon musical traditions of British post-punk, 20th century classical, industrial noise, experimental and traditional percussion music, 50s rock and roll, field recordings, queer dance-pop, and kosmische.

MART AVI
https://martavi.bandcamp.com/
A true child of post-genre, Avi hooks up neo-glam aesthetics with unmapped sound territories for an age yet to come, playing around with his persona, real, imagined, on or offline.

Performers: Pavlo Balakin (bass), Sten Lassmann (piano)

Programme: Tchaikovsky, Rubinstein, Glinka, Sviridov

Russian romance reflects a lot of emotional nuances, fast shifting moods, and reveals the Russian soul in its full sensuousness. Each romance tells a touching story: encounters and divisions, honor and glory, delicacy and sincerity, love and passion, doubts and regrets. The music is complemented by the work of Russian poets, which is read in both Estonian and its original language.