Rather than focusing on how material fades in time and clinging to its traces, the artists bring it back with abundance, filling in the blanks as they see fit. Acting as self-appointed historians and archaeologists, they often use humour, grotesque and excess to make sense of how material is shaped both by human activity and in time by elements. Although coming from different backgrounds, all artists of the show work with textile in one way or another, a material closely tied to the human body. The core of Her Legs, an Egg, Her Toil(e) and Blankets are diverse references to the history of industrial textile production, the aesthetics of Neo-Baroque, bog bodies, queer histories, and reflections on material accumulation and decay.
Mónica Mays’ embroidered blankets in perlescent silk draw from the artist’s ongoing research into the Neo-Baroque as a complex aesthetic network, refusing to regard identity as a fixed, self-contained system. Verging towards fiction, Johanna Ulfsak’s series of frisbees are created as a humorous and imaginative interpretation of the textile industry. Inspired by the discovery of a bog body, also known as the Rabivere Woman, Heinrich Sepp presents a concept album (in collaboration with Mikk Madisson) and a costume installation (in collaboration with Sorcerer Sourcing). Netti Nüganen’s installation Myth explores the materiality of an imagined archaelogical excavation site, intertwining reality and fiction and thereby creating speculative pasts and futures. “Her Legs, an Egg, Her Toil(e) and Blankets can be viewed as a little collection of pasts that may or may not have happened. The material representations of these possibly imagined pasts, however, become vessels for storytelling and connecting these to the present moment,” curator Keiu Krikmann writes in the foreword of the exhibition booklet.
Keiu Krikmann is a writer, curator, translator and editor based in Tallinn. Currently, she is the managing editor of A Shade Colder Magazine, published by the Estonian Centre for Contemporary Art. Since 2015, she has been part of the core team of the Tallinn Applied Art Triennial. Previously, she has been the coordinator of the project space Konstanet and worked as a gallerist at the Estonian Academy of Arts. Her most recent curatorial project, Excess and Refusal was exhibited at Kim? Contemporary Art Centre, Riga in 2020 and at the Contemporary Art Museum of Estonia in 2021.
