Humour has been a tool for detecting the zeitgeist and exploring power relations for hundreds of years. Some artists have become masters of performing their trickster and sinister entertainer’s role so skilfully that their work makes you laugh and shiver simultaneously. By bringing together works by several artists known as explorers of irony and humorous mischief, the Octopus Rococo project sends up, gives social commentary and creates poetical metaphors to address what it is to be human in the contemporary world.
The exhibition is part of Kogo Gallery’s this year’s programme Performing Existence. The gallery’s programme is designed to capture a certain vibe that embodies the emotional undertone of the events and questions topical in that particular moment and which define the contemporary zeitgeist. This year we are also in dialogue with the European Capital of Culture Tartu 2024 which carries a title Arts of Survival. The gallery’s previous exhibition programmes have been titled Ecology–Economy (2021), Past is the Present (2022), Queer It Up (2023).
Read more about the exhibition: https://www.kogogallery.ee/en/exhibitions/octopus-rococo/
The exhibition is funded by the Cultural Endowment of Estonia and the City of Tartu.
Special thanks to VV Foundation and Valmiermuiža.
Kogo Gallery
https://www.kogogallery.ee/en/
