This urban landscape is a visually and historically charged area where layers of different eras, as well as important landmarks of Tallinn, meet. Kaubamaja Department Store and Viru Centre – two symbols of commercial architecture from different eras. A new skyscraper being built on the site of the former Estonian Academy of Arts. The controversial statue Dusk located on the terrace of the Viru Centre. A constant flow of people, both underground and at ground level. You are standing in a monumental environment, not just in terms of scale but also in terms of meaning and visual intensity.
The exhibition approaches photography across disciplines: all artworks are based in photography, yet their modes of expression range from installations and digital collages to sculptural objects. We invite you to explore how photography can operate not only as a visual image but as a sculptural element that shapes space and intervenes in our experience of it.
Artists:
The Bold and the Beautiful, 2025
Series of banners on fence
Fence around the construction site at 1 Tartu mnt
Elo Vahtrik (b.1999) is a Tallinn-based artist who works mainly with photography and installation. Vahtrik is interested in anomalies and representation, as well as power structures and logics behind social functioning. She often uses kitsch and irony to approach the forementioned themes. She has graduated from the photography department of the Estonian Academy of Arts where she is currently ensuing a Master’s degree in contemporary art. Since 2022, Vahtrik belongs to the Young Contemporary Art Association of Estonia (ENKKL). Together with Kertu Rannula, she runs and coordinates starter-KIT, a publication on contemporary Estonian photography. In 2023, she was awarded the Wiiralt scholarship.
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Eva Stenram manipulates found mid-century erotic photographs, subverting their original function to scrutinise the idea of absence and the objectification and fragmentation of the body. In her ongoing series Drape (2011 –…), Stenram conceals explicit nudity by digitally altering her source material, creating a rupture within each scene. Transforming the relationship between model and environment by transposing foreground and background, Stenram heightens the element of fantasy in her images.
Stenram is a Swedish-British visual artist who lives in Berlin. She studied in London at the Royal College of Art (MA, Photography) and the Slade School of Fine Art (BA, Fine Art).
Her art practice revolves around photography and post-production, investigating the codes, desires and ideologies at play within the construction of the photographic image. Stenram’s work has been exhibited worldwide as part of important group exhibitions, including a touring exhibition. She has been awarded several prizes for her work, and in 2019, she was selected as one of the 100 Heroines of contemporary global photography by the Royal Photographic Society.
Drape I, 2025
PVC adhesive on plywood
Window of the building at 3 Gonsiori Street.
Eva Stenram alters vintage erotic photographs to explore themes of absence, objectification and fragmentation of the body. In her ongoing series Drape (2011–…), she digitally swaps the foreground and background of the images, inverting each scene and intensifying its fantasy by concealing explicit nudity. The gaze shifts away from the body, yet what lies behind the drape continues to fuel the viewer’s imagination.
Drape XVII, 2025
PVC banner
Rooftoop of the building at 3 Gonsiori Street
Eva Stenram alters vintage erotic photographs to explore themes of absence, objectification and fragmentation of the body. In her ongoing series Drape (2011–…), she digitally swaps the foreground and background of the images, inverting each scene and intensifying its fantasy by concealing explicit nudity. The gaze shifts away from the body, yet what lies behind the drape continues to fuel the viewer’s imagination.
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Giovanna Petrocchi is an Italian photographer based between London and Rome. She graduated from the London College of Communication with a BA in Photography and completed her MA in Visual Arts at Camberwell College of Arts, London. In 2017, she won the Lens Culture Emerging Talent Award, and in 2019, she was selected as a winner of The Photographers’ Gallery New Talent award and mentoring programme. She has been recently nominated by CAMERA Centro Italiano per la Fotografia to be part of the FUTURES photography talents (2020).
Petrocchi’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally in group and solo exhibitions. By combining personal photographs with found imagery and hand-made collages with 3d printing processes, Petrocchi creates imaginary landscapes inspired by surrealist paintings, virtual realities and ancient cultures. Drawing from museum displays and catalogues, the resulting view of historical narrative in her work is deliberately distorted. Objects become unrecognisable and meanings fragmented; presented as floating entities they no longer belong to neither a specific time nor museum. A recurrent feature in Petrocchi’s practice is the juxtaposition of futuristic and primordial scenarios and the combination of historical and fictional elements.
Shifting Stories, 2023 –…
Vinyl prints, wallpaper; laser-cut aluminium and steel shapes
Display window of the building at 2 Gonsiori Street
Shifting Stories (2023–…) is an ongoing series, consisting of archival material, digital collages, 3D-printed objects and aluminium cut-outs.
It is an attempt to view artefacts as migrating entities with the capacity to shift the narratives and meanings that humans have ascribed to them over time. It is also a way of approaching the archive as something ephemeral rather than an absolute.
Once associated with historical truth and scientific methodology, archives have been redefined by the rise of online catalogs, revealing their atemporal and inherently biased nature. With this work, the artist seeks to present a dynamic archive assembled from a variety of databases and documents, allowing viewers to form new and unfamiliar – and above all subjective – associations. In this way, the archive sheds its traditional connotations, while the displayed sculptures and “documents” point to objects that may or may not truly exist.
Unlike book pages or vitrine cabinets in museum collections, the artefacts created by the artist – drawn from both past and present – are arranged like a mood board or an investigation wall, where objects and prints converse with one another revealing unexpected connections and playing at the boundary between fiction and authenticity.
The silhouettes of the laser-cut sculptures echo the artefacts in the collages and vice versa, creating a visual dialogue between historical documents and their speculative interpretations.
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Mare Tralla (b. 1967, Tallinn) is queer-feminist artist and activist. Her professional art career started in Estonia in the early 90s, where she was one of the very few conducting a feminist revolution in the field of contemporary art. Drawing from her personal history and everyday experience her practice was in direct critical response to how the transition period of East-European societies affected women. In her art practice she employs and combines a variety of media: video, photography, performance, interactive media, painting and various traditional crafts. As an activist she has been involved with Act Up, London, Catwalk4Power, No Pride in War coalition and LGSMigrants. Her recent performative projects deal with queer experiences, gender issues, HIV stigma, and investigate sustainability and economics. Currently Mare Tralla lives and works in Edinburgh.
I See You!, 2025
Site-specific installation besides the sculpture „Hämarik“ (Dusk)
Besides the sculpture „Hämarik“ (Dusk), in the outdoor area of Viru Keskus Department Store
I See You! is the most powerful acknowledgement of someone, indicating that they are seen, together with their truth, their hurt, their love, their queerness, their beauty, their honesty, their desires, their oppression, their secrets, their shadows, their sacrifices, their generosity, their humanity, their fragility and their suffering. At the same time, I See You! is also a warning that someone’s indifference, intolerance, hatred, disgust, abuse of power, violence, complicity and silence have been noticed, will be remembered and will be resisted.
The eyes that see are always open!
I see you, Dusk!
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Mia Dudek is a visual artist from the industrial town of Sosnowiec in South-Poland, currently living and working in Lisbon. After studying photography at the London College of Communications (BA, 2012) and at the Royal College of Art (MA, 2016), she expanded her practice to installation and sculpture – in which she is currently completing a PhD at the University of Lisbon.
In her practice, the artist continuously probes the relationship between the body and the architectural fabric. Dudek has spent the last decade creating a tender, personal register of big bloc architecture and its interiors. They are most often rendered as photography prints but also take the form of seductive sculptural and installative works. Juxtaposing elements such as raw concrete and hard metals with soft expanding foams and organic materials like latex and resin, Dudek’s homely installations are evocative – and at times suggestive – of the day-to-day activities of their supposed inhabitants: soaking in the bathtub, tanning on the balcony or killing time by the carpet hanger – a design staple in the residential areas in Central and Eastern Europe. Dudek’s work has been featured in a number of exhibitions around Europe as well as in various publications.
Seepage, 2025
PVC banner
The facade of the building at 13 Gonsiori Street
A bathtub draped with fabric and marked by stains, becomes a womb-like chamber where fluids and residues escape containment. Intimacy collides with absence as the domestic space of cleansing turns into a site of overflow and collapse. What lingers is fragile and humid: sediments of the body’s passage, traces that resist final form.
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Sigrid Viir (1979) is a photo and installation artist who lives and works in Tallinn. She has studied cultural theory at the Estonian Institute of Humanities and graduated from the department of photography at the Estonian Academy of Arts. She has actively participated in exhibitions in Estonia and abroad.
“As an artist I am interested in analyzing the daily aspects of human existence and the related tangle of social norms and assumptions. Through photography and installation, I examine the sifting boundary between the totality of work and personal leisure, and how different frameworks manifest in the roles individuals occupy – particularly those expected of women. Humour, absurdity, and the peculiarities of visual language are central tools in my practice.”
The Extent of Results, 2025
Installation-based photo series in 4 acts with 4 intermissions, printed on outdoor media materials, in various formats and sizes, completed over the course of one summer
A. Laikmaa pedestrian tunnel
Act One – Promises
Arriving from all directions
Morning
A cacophonous, honeyed hocus pocus
For the sake of the bigger picture
Act Two – Possibilities
Unfortunately it must be admitted that…
Afternoon
The surface begins to wobble slightly, but numbers bring things into line
The bigger picture for the chosen ones
Act Three – Excuses (sometimes also misdeeds)
Choreographic masterpieces that lull into sleep
Roundabout sayings
Evening
Repetition
Act Four – Results
The extent of things has been fixed, beautifully optimised
Sugar-coated
Buried beneath a carpet of flowers
Night
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Roberta Lima is an Austrian Brazilian artist based in Helsinki. Lima uses different media to create installations that explore alternative narratives of body and space, while taking a look at the intersections between nature and technology, mythology and gender nonconformity.
