Katrin Koskaru “Take Cover! Take Cover!”

Koskaru’s large-scale painting installation focuses on war and the landscapes of war. Old ruins and new shadows, the spaces between the bars and the joints of a wall. People and losses, silences and roentgen rays. The nuclear bomb. Even the title of the exhibition comes from a training video made during the Second World War. The exhibition is like a narrative flowing across the walls that contemplates the contemporary weaponry and searches for humanity and reality in the increasingly expansive and powerful industrial complex producing military equipment.

The artist adds: “I have a notebook where I record my thoughts, passages of text and even dreams. They don’t form a cohesive story or express a grand idea. But some words are repeated that keep haunting me and that I want to use in my works. These words include: invisible, trace, wound, landscape, deafening noise, deafening silence, radioactivity, smog, bird, shadow, radiation from the sun, infrared radiation, white, reflection.”

Katrin Koskaru (b 1977) has studied textile in the Tartu Art College and painting in the Estonian Academy of Arts and the Royal College of Art, London. Her abstract oeuvre contains elements from both of these media. Koskaru’s personal exhibitions have mostly taken place outside Estonia, but her works have repeatedly been shown in the Kumu Art Museum and the Tallinn Art Hall. This is her first exhibition in Tartu.