PRESS RELEASE

The two installations by HELI SARAPUU (b.1975) constituting the Dedication to Father exhibition, seem to ring different bells. Still the two bodies of work have much in common. Both "The Dream" and "The Prayer" touch deeply personal and simultaneously social issues - each of them deals with psychological topics, such as dreams and wishes; and, as well - they both vibrate in the discourse of quite real, even fatal forces and relationships which determine our lives in both - on a daily level and in the longer perspective.

"The Dream" - as intended by the artist - is a playful conceptual sculpture which is targeted at uniting and integrating the audiences´ own dreams - forming thus a certain incarnation of the "collective (un)conciousness". This work-in-progress challenges during the display: evey visitor is welcome to write any of his/ her dream or memory-flash on a piece of paper - a bit later it finds a way as a facsimile representation on one of the pillows in the installation. Simultaneously it functions as an indication of our encouragedness to hide / or share the certain locuses of our psychic territories with the others. Here the artist invites her visitors to be a part of the creation of an imaginary territory for dreams and memoires. Sarapuu´s idea of a "dreamland" is certainly informed of that of the institutionalized and commercial Christmas-disease where the success of our dreams-come-true is mostly measured in terms of cash. Differently from this - in the current exhibition the dreams, often in poorly conceptual form, constitute a Value by themselves.

"The Prayer" tells us a story of people whose daily lives are spent in Estonia or about those whose fate has been deeply rooted in this kind of society. Facing Estonia, one still has to consider the fact that despite of its imagological attributes - such as a slogan of "Estonia - Positively Transforming" a.o. - one also has to deal with a community of deeply supressed emotions and naive perfectionist behaviour which turns out to be nothing more than just a cover-up of grim realities. An omnipresent very complicated history has not favoured us expressing any human feelings in this country - but vice versa - the often tragic personal experiences have remained unresolved: uncountable pains and mournings are essentially accumulated in any Estonian psyche. The deeply broken Estonian community is in fact located between the dark memoires of the past - and the Present - alarmingly fulfilled with suicides, divorces and the children who have never been given birth. One can only guess if today´s loss of identity proceeds - undirectly or directly - from the Past. Does this have anything to do with our massive loss of family members during the World Wars? Or is it more connected with our Grandparents´ endless forced "travels" to the Siberian deportation camps in the 1940s? Does it all come from the rough splitting and splentering up of our families between different political forces? Implicitly any of us has a locus for those dramatic memoires in the psyche. The less we make them explicit - the more we transmit those concealed, "incorrect" and "prohibited" feelings - in monsterous forms - to our own children.
Until the December 15