PRESS RELEASE
LIINA SIIB and JAANA KOKKO will open their exhibition Our Personal Archives in Hobusepea gallery at 5pm on September 17, 2014. Artist talk will be held in Hobusepea gallery at 6pm on Monday, September 22, 2014.
„It was in September 2012 when we started to have a dialogue about doing art. We both had been going through our photo archives lately and we raised questions like where lies the interest in personal histories?
Very soon we found a common point in our artistic practices. By going through the archives we both found out that the topics that we had been interested in for the last 10 to 15 years did not much change. They rather stayed the same. The archive material was kind of different variations from the subjects like womanhood, family, identity, justice, normativity, space – and of course contemporary society.“
Jaana Kokko’s starting point for the film Haven is a black and white photograph that she took in the Fishing harbour, Kalasadam, Tallinn, in 1999. In the photo a woman called Nina is her model in an former Soviet-time factory. Today the same area is empty, the buildings had been taken down, it's inhabitants has left and the space is waiting to be build with luxury apartments. Haven (2014, 30 min.) deals with a woman's life in the contemporary society with a historical point of view of an ideal woman. Form of the film could be a documentary essay.
In the installation Right-hand writing for left-handers by Liina Siib an archive appears as a fiction or a dream in the form of an educational space. Her personal relationship with the collection of images develops into a subjective pedagogy, reframing the images in the context of her own education. Formally, the images are distributed between various study materials, like schoolbooks etc according to the classroom rhetoric. The choice of the images has its roots in the notion of heterotopia, as a space for reflection. In a way, even a schoolbook can be considered as a kind of a mirror.
Thanks to: Kaire Rannik, Tiit Rammul, Getter Kuusmaa, Alar Priimann, Virko Kuusk, Overall Eesti Ltd, UBS Repro, Rene Haljasmäe, Maire Tänna, Marve Riisalu, Redhat, Ragnar Voolaine, Mihkel Muulmann, the Department of Photography at the Estonian Academy of Arts, Ludmilla Akulina, Helgi Asi, Diana Paschkovich, Eleonora Shljanda, Valeria Videvik, Mai Sööt.
Exhibition will be open until September 29, 2014.
Supported by the Cultural Endowment of Estonia, Kone Foundation, AVEK, VISEK.
Exhibitions in Hobusepea gallery are supported by the Cultural Endowment of Estonia and Estonian Ministry of Culture.