New Furniture, 2025

Oak, framed photo print, laminated image print

“New Furniture”, exhibited at the graduate show of the Estonian Academy of Arts, TASE ’25, is a site-specific installation composed of four elements: a framed photograph of a book, a 3D-rendered image, deinstalled laminate MDF skirting boards, and newly installed handmade oak skirting boards with a decorative profile. The work reflects three parallel processes of transformation. The first appears in the book — a home economics and craft manual titled 1000 Things You Can Build Yourself (author W. Hirte; Urania-Verlag, Berlin, 1946). One of its instructions describes how to modify a traditionally styled chest of drawers to meet the aesthetic demands of the modern citizen — primarily by removing decorative elements. The second transformation is visualised through a 3D-rendered architectural sketch of a new building planned to replace the 50-year-old modernist structure that currently houses the exhibition. The third transformation occurs within the exhibition space itself: the original low-profile laminate MDF skirting boards have been replaced with solid oak ones, handmade and finished with a complex decorative groove. These subtle interventions frame spatial design as an ideological act. The installation invites the viewer to consider the underlying assumptions of modernist ideals — and to reflect on the fact that objects from the modernist era have, over time, become the new antiquity.