Tallinn Print Triennial is pleased to announce its 18th edition entitled Warm. Checking Temperature in Three Acts. The triennial, curated by Róna Kopeczky, primarily gives thought to the radical political, cultural political and social turns that affect Central and Eastern Europe, and it also inscribes these changes in a global perspective through the lens of universal absurdity. The project gives voice to contemporary artists based in, or originating from, the Central and Eastern European region who reflect boldly and critically on burning issues such as the rise of right-wing phobist politics, globally misplaced priorities, the collapse of democracies, the shrinking of freedom – in both life and art – and the general sense of conditioned fear and hostility prevailing today.
The title reflects more precisely on the mechanisms through which positive notions shift and slide in our interpretation towards the negative realm and become associated with different or contradictory meaning depending on the new contexts or situations they are used in. More concretely, how the originally positive signification of “warm” – an agreeable feeling, the sense of a fairly or comfortably high temperature, and a behaviour showing enthusiasm, affection, or kindness – has become a warning sign of political turmoil, social irritation, symptoms of climate change and global pandemic, and therefore a signal of both natural and social global instability. In meeting this misleading shift of signification, Warm aims to be a contemporary reflection on the fundamentally absurd global condition and on the dissonances of the human condition.
Inviting artists from the regional contemporary art scene with existing works and new commissions, Warm comprises three intertwined cycles entitled The Nation Loves It, Pickle Politics and The Science of Freedom, which reference artists and artworks included in the exhibition. The three chapters articulate around the spectacle of absurdity with the intention to dissect and appropriate it. They also playfully propose humour, derision and laughter as an antidote or an imagined alternative that builds on visionary defiance and poetic escapism.
Róna Kopeczky (1983) is a curator and art historian based in Budapest. She worked as a curator for international art in Ludwig Museum Budapest between 2006 and 2015, where she mostly focussed on the site- and situation-specific practices of young and mid-career artists from the Central Eastern European region. In February 2015, she joined acb Gallery in Budapest as artistic director. She participated in the organisation of the first OFF-Biennale Budapest from the beginning of 2015 and was a member of the curatorial team for its second edition held in autumn 2017. Róna Kopeczky is the co-founder of Easttopics, a platform and hub dedicated to the contemporary art of Central Eastern Europe that is based in Budapest. She holds a PhD in Art History from Paris-Sorbonne University.
