Beauty is the failure to align what is never still in time. – Samantha Bankston
Are we free to talk about freedom? – Jean-Luc Nancy
Right before… presents a selection of text-based works and spatial installations revolving around the themes of silences, loss and contemporary taboo, while considering questions of the fragile and the fragmentary. An entanglement in light and text, the installations contain forgotten parts of neon signs recently produced in Tallinn, then left alone unused, abandoned by the clients, hidden away in boxes and never exposed before, becoming light in remnant space.
I hold onto this one line by Virginia Woolf: ‘’I want to write a novel about Silence,” he said; “the things people don’t say. But the difficulty is immense.” for decades, being fascinated by the idea, not knowing how one is supposed to proceed or work with it. Difficult indeed: the collective unknown itself. Where does one even start? Posing anyone the question will obviously bring in no results at all, there simply will be no answers. Over the years, I found myself thinking of our given freedom today in which half the world makes a cold hard choice to go increasingly conservative at an alarming speed, thinking of Spinozas and Meister Eckharts being expelled from their communities, and wondering what is a contemporary taboo? Given it is near impossible to talk about things not said, with a text based installation involving several people in mind, I started to work with the idea of what we think is not talked about today, and invited several people, both friends and strangers in the pub, philosophers and writers to respond to the question: What are the taboos of today’s world from your perspective? What is not talked about within our current freedom, in the shadow of dominating ideologies, neoliberalism?
Tarvo Varres (b. 1970), artist based in Tallinn, Estonia. Revolving around the themes of non-self and non-linear time, his works in photography, video and installations are exploring the everyday, space and memory or nature and light, while considering questions of the fragmentary, contradictory and the unknown. He is treating text and language as a limit, bordering the real and the imaginary, in more recent, text-based installations. Varres started exhibiting institutionally in 1991 with the group exhibition Guide to Intronomadism in Tallinn Art Hall; is the recipient of the Young Photographer Award (1992), Annual Award by the Cultural Endowment of Estonia as member of Group T (1996), and was Köler Prize 2018 nominee. He has taught contemporary art and photography as a guest tutor at the Estonian Academy of Arts, in Tallinn and in Tartu Art College. His works are included in the collection of contemporary art in the Art Museum of Estonia. He is currently researching the notion of limit-experience in fiction and philosophy, Blanchot and Nagarjuna, developing the concept of Fragile Metaphysics in collaboration with american philosopher Samantha Bankston.
The exhibition is supported by the Cultural Endowment of Estonia and Estonian Artists Union.
Special thanks to Samantha Bankston
