On Friday, 17 October at 5:00 p.m., the group exhibition What I’d Come to See Had Already Gone will open at Vabaduse Gallery and in the framework of Tallinn Photomonth 2025 contemporary art biennial’s satellite programme. The artists participating at the exhibition are Aap Tepper, Birgit Püve and Serge Ecker, and the exhibition is curated by Fanny Wenquin.
The title of the exhibition, drawn from Roy Scranton’s book We’re Doomed. Now What? Essays on War and Climate Change (2018), expresses a quest with an uncertain destination. The boundaries between past, present and future seem to blur throughout an experience marked by the transformative passage of time and memory. Through various lens-based media, both real and imaginary landscapes emerge, characterized or animated, depending on the artist, by shadows and lights, dust and fog, cracks and fingerprints. The liminal spaces feel inhabited by intangible presences. The mostly newly- created works also invite reflection on how photography seizes moments that vanish, both as a revelation and as a proof of their past existence, like theorised by Roland Barthes in Camera Lucida (1980).
The exhibition was first held at the Rüki Gallery in Viljandi (April 5–May 18, 2025). It has been made possible thanks to the support of the Estonian Cultural Endowment and Kultur | lx – Arts Council Luxembourg.
The exhibition What I’d Come to See Had Already Gone at Vabaduse Gallery will remain open until 12 November, 2025.
Aap Tepper (b. 1991, EE) is a visual artist based in Tallinn, Estonia. He is known for works that explore the tangents between memory, space and photographic representation. Using personal images and pictures found on social media or in archives, his works derive their form primarily through site-specific installations. Since 2016, Tepper has served as Senior Specialist at the Film Archive of the National Archives, where he conducts experiments on the position of artist-in-archive, resulting in critical gestures that address the representation of archived images. Tepper is a graduate of the Estonian Academy of Arts MA programme in photography (2016) and is one of the founders and leaders of the Rundum platform launched in 2013.
Birgit Püve (b. 1978, EE) is a visual artist with a degree in Social Sciences from the University of Tartu (MA, 2017). Her artistic approach is characterized by the exploration of memory and identity through the photographic medium, but also through video, sound and text. Among her notable projects, the series Estonian Documents (2014–ongoing) explores the identity and psychology of Estonians, while Varjuapaik (2016) examines the relationship of residents of Vao refugee accomodation centre with their new, unfamiliar environment. Her works have been presented in solo exhibitions in Estonia, Poland, Russia, Germany and the United Kingdom and published among others in The Guardian, The Washington Post and The New York Times. She has won several awards, including the Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize and received the Artproof Grant 2024 at Foto Tallinn.
Serge Ecker (b. 1982, LU) is a Luxembourg-based artist whose post-digital practice bridges digital and analog photography to explore memory, vulnerability, and the fragile dialogue between nature and technology. With murmurare, Ecker returns to his first artistic medium – photography. The series reflects on personal and collective anxieties, exposing the vanity of technological perfection and the transient essence of life. Through re-materialised landscapes, his images embody both absence and presence, reconciling past and present in a quiet gesture of resistance and reflection. Ecker’s work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Luxembourg Pavilion at the 15th Venice Architecture Biennale, Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein, Kunstraum Vienna, Technopolis Athens, Abbaye de Neumünster, Centre d’Art Dominique Lang, and Casino Luxembourg.
Fanny Weinquin (b. 1985, LU) is a curator whose practice bridges heritage, contemporary art, and societal issues. Trained as an art historian at Free University of Brussels, she began her career at the Royal Institute for Cultural Heritage of Belgium before expanding her scope as Collection Manager at the Museums of the City of Luxembourg since 2011 and, more recently, as Associate Curator at Villa Vauban, alongside her independent curatorial practice since 2018. Her exhibitions intertwine memory, conservation, and our evolving relationship with the living world. She also teaches at the Mudam Akademie. Having grown up between Luxembourg and Belgium, and based in Estonia for two years, she cultivates artistic exchanges between these regions, as seen in Veil of Nature, part of Tartu 2024.
Photo: Tepper, Aap. From the series „Long Exposures“. 2023