Exhibition Views 2018

December 19, 2018-May 12, 2019, Kumu Art Museum 
Agathe Veeber’s oeuvre is filled with expressiveness, melancholy, spirituality and the static peace of still lifes, and it demonstrates a special affinity for landscapes and animals. In 1933, she entered Pallas, the higher art school in Tartu, to study with Ado Vabbe and Nikolai Triik, and graduated in 1938 as a graphic artist. Veeber’s artistic style crystallised in the 1930s and 1940s in the form of urban views and engravings with sacral themes. After the bombing raid in March 1944, the artist went to Vienna to study graphic art, and after World War II she ended up in refugee camps in Germany. There too she sought opportunities to deal with graphic art and participated in the surprisingly lively art scene in the refugee camps. After settling in the US in 1949, Agathe Veeber quickly achieved success. She was accepted as a member of the Society of American Graphic Artists (SAGA), which enabled her to participate in their annual exhibitions. Her works, especially her woodcuts and intaglio prints, with images of angels, were widely praised. While living in New York, her ties to the Pallas school were not severed; in fact, she perfected the style she had developed in Estonia and participated in the exile Estonian art scene.

Curator: Anne Untera
Designer: Villu Plink
Graphic designer: Külli Kaats

November 2, 2018-April 14, 2019, Kumu Art Museum 
The X-Files is an exhibition that delves into the deeper layers of the decade and tries to shed light on works that have been overshadowed, have been forgotten or have even disappeared from the cultural memory. It attempts to view some of the works by disregarding the main narrative of 90s art, which has already been relatively well-developed, attempts to recover phenomenal works from a decade that was quite indifferent to the preservation of these works, and searches for definite beginnings in the local art field in regard to general trends and individual authorial positions. The exhibition also tries to accurately depict the societal metamorphoses that characterised this explosive decade, as they are reflected in the art found outside of canonical works.

Curators: Eha Komissarov and Anders Härm

October 12, 2018-February 3, 2019, Kumu Art Museum 
Exhibition, which is the result of cooperation between the three Baltic states, was initially on display at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, and its head curator is Rodolphe Rapetti, the outstanding French researcher of Symbolism.
Exhibition reveals the specific features of early 20th-century Baltic Symbolism. The local young artists set out to discover the contemporary art movements in Europe, but also had aspirations to help create their own national identities. Their art often intertwines the international artistic idiom with local folk art and symbols of oral heritage. The idea of creative freedom was brought from Western Europe, along with the belief in the ability of art to express the spiritual levels hidden in people.

Curators: Rodolphe Rapetti ((Directorate of Museums of France) and Liis Pählapuu (Art Museum of Estonia)
Designer and graphic desiner: Tuuli Aule

September 14, 2018-February 23, 2019, Kumu Art Museum 
Kaarel Kurismaa is one of the founders of Estonian sound and kinetic art. He is also the only artist to have kept their traditions alive since the 1970s. He is one of the most extraordinary creative figures in Estonian art history, an artist with a synergistic platform who playfully combines very different expressive means, from movement and light to sound and physical shapes, both in small and extremely large objects.

Curators: Ragne Soosalu and Annika Räik
Designer: Mari Kurismaa

August 24, 2018-March 24, 2019, Kumu Art Museum 
The exhibition of landscape paintings by Konrad Mägi (1878–1925) displays more than forty paintings from the artist’s various creative periods, with a focus on his dramatic pieces of intense colours and sensitivity to nature.

Curator: Eero Epner
Designer: Tõnis Saadoja
Graphic designer: Kätlin Tischler

July 6-October 14, 2018, Kumu Art Museum 
The exhibition is an international development of the curator project The Archaeology of the Screen. The Estonian Example, which took place in the autumn of 2017 at the Bozar art centre in Brussels and was curated by Eha Komissarov. In Brussels, the display was based on the image of Estonia as an innovative e-state, involving artists who see it as their role to transfer reality to virtual and social space. At Kumu, the line-up is complemented by an international group of artists who interpret from a new angle such topics as digital security, relations between the screen and historical technology, and the criticism of visual culture.

Curators: Eha Komissarov and Triin Tulgiste
Designers: Jaana Jüris and Neeme Külm
Graphic designers: Aadam Kaarma and Sandra Kossorotova

June 8-September 16, 2018, Kumu Art Museum 
In 2018, the Art Museum of Estonia, in collaboration with the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC, is organising a large-scale exhibition on Michel Sittow (ca 1469–1525), a painter from Estonia who became a sought-after and highly renowned artist in the royal courts of Europe at the turn of the 15th and 16th centuries.
The acclaimed master had been forgotten for centuries when documents found in the Tallinn city archives identified this historical individual a few decades ago. Now, nearly 500 years after his death, his first solo exhibition is being organised.

Curators: Greta Koppel (Art Museum of Estonia) and John Oliver Hand (National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.)
Design: Tõnis Saadoja
Graphic design: Tuuli Aule, Külli Kaats, Kätlin Tischler, RAKETT

May 16-December 9, 2018, Kumu Art Museum 
In the second half of the 1930s, two young and up-and-coming sculptors – Linda Sõber (1911–2004) and Endel Kübarsepp (1913–1972) – attracted lots of attention on the Estonian cultural scene. They left Estonia as refugees in 1944 and, until recently, information about their subsequent lives and activities had been fragmentary. Linda Sõber and Endel Kübarsepp became two of the most acclaimed and promising young sculptors at the very start of their professional careers in the second half of the 1930s. Their works were repeatedly reported on in the press and can be found in art museums. Endel Kübarsepp also participated actively in exhibitions organised by exile artists during the post-war years in Germany. At the end of the 1940s, the two sculptors went their separate ways. Linda Sõber continued her life in Italy and Endel Kübarsepp in the U.S. During the decades of Soviet occupation, the work of both sculptors was ignored, primarily for ideological reasons. However, today, their oeuvre is considered to be among the Estonian sculptural classics of the 1930s.

Curators: Juta Kivimäe and Ulrika Jõemägi
Designers: Isabel Aaso-Zahradnikova and Villu Plink
Graphic designer: Külli Kaats

May 11-September 16, 2018, Kumu Art Museum 
The artists look at the objects in the museum environment through the prism of alchemy, a pre-scientific practice which nevertheless significantly advanced the progress of science. In its operation, a museum creates a hierarchy in which works of art and the objects used to display or preserve these works take on different roles. With its impact on the wider cultural understanding, this practice brings about a clear understanding of what and on what grounds we value and highlight.

Curator: Kati Ilves
Graphic design: Ronald Pihlapson

April 26-July 27, 2018, Kumu Art Museum 
The wider objective of the international project “Forgotten Heritage – European Avant-Garde Art Online” is to show people manifestations of European avant-garde art that have been mostly ignored in historical treatments until now. The main outlet of the project is the publicly available digital database Forgotten Heritage, which contains reproductions and contextual descriptions of the works of avant-garde artists active in Europe after the year 1945, and primarily in the 1960s and 70s. The database currently includes works by Polish, Croatian, Estonian and Belgian artists. The material in the database comes from the artists’ private archives and the collections of Polish, Croatian, Estonian and Belgian memory institutions, and the descriptions have been written by art historians from those countries. The abundant material allows one to draw parallels and make comparisons about the development of avant-garde art in different European countries.

Curators: Alice Jaanus, Lyza Jarvis, Katrin Käis, Hannariin Lamp, Antero Kevin Leedu, Marliese Malmström, Heneliis Notton, Mirjam Orav, Ringo Roots and Marika Sharova
Design: Agnieszka Lasota (Poland)
Graphic design: Tuuli Aule

April 20-August 26, 2018, Kumu Art Museum 
On 22 July 1968, a joint Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian exhibition called The Present Day and Graphic Form opened at the Tallinn Art Hall. Instead of the planned biennial, the printmaking exhibition of the three Baltic countries subsequently became the Tallinn Print Triennial (TPT), also becoming a significant art event in the Baltics. Today, it is difficult to imagine the daring, vision and organisational ability required of the organising committee to enable them to carry out this large exhibition in the ideological, economic and art policy context of the Soviet Union. The TPT became known throughout the USSR; the best works were of international importance, thereby creating a name for Estonia as an art country.

Curators: Eha Komissarov and Elnara Taidre
Exhibition design: Raul Kalvo and Helen Oja
Graphic design: Laura Pappa and Elisabeth Klement

March 16-August 5, 2018, Kumu Art Museum 
In the year of the 100th anniversary of the Republic of Estonia, the exhibition examines the role of artists influencing historical memory and identity.
The exhibition shows how images have, over time, helped to shape the understanding of significant memory places in Estonian history: events, people and symbols. Besides pictures depicting the past, there are works dealing with mythology and heritage, as history is often intertwined with folk poetry and culture.

Curators: Linda Kaljundi and Tiina-Mall Kreem
Designer: Liina Siib
Graphic designer: Andres Tali

23.02.18–10.06.2018, Kumu Art Museum
The exhibition takes the visitor into the world of living machines, patterns imprisoned in synthetic materials, and two-dimensional sculptures of genetically modified life forms, with the daring typical to the dystopian realm.
Katja Novitskova’s oeuvre is located at the crossroads of visual culture, digital technologies and speculative fiction: she is interested in how the rapidly developing planet is increasingly more dependent on various data flows, which intermediate, preserve and alter the environment that surrounds us in visual form. The display is an immersive environment interpreting and looking back at the current day from the future, where the world as we know it is no longer recognisable.
Originally from Tallinn, Katja Novitskova first became an artist in Berlin and Amsterdam. She is not only the most outstanding artist linked to the Post-Internet movement in Estonia, but also one of the key artists at its origins worldwide. Novitskova has earned a lot of international acclaim: she has had personal exhibitions in New York (2016) and Shanghai (2017), her works have been included in group exhibitions at the MoMA in New York (2015) and at the Lyon and Berlin Biennials (2015 and 2016). In 2017, the Estonian president Kersti Kaljulaid recognised Novitskova by presenting her the Young Cultural Figure Award.
“If only you could see what I’ve seen with your eyes,” says the replicant Roy Batty to the maker of his eyes in the sci-fi film Blade Runner (1982) by Ridley Scott. Katja Novitskova and the curator Kati Ilves borrowed the quote for the title of the exhibition in the Estonian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2017, referring to the complexity of seeing in the contemporary data maze. For the show in Kumu, the artist and the curator have progressed from the project that the Centre for Contemporary Arts Estonia produced for the Estonian Pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale by including a number of works that have not been presented before, plus some pieces created specifically for this exhibition.

Curator: Kati Ilves

February 8-May 13, 2018, Kumu Art Museum 
Leonhard Lapin, one of the most important avant-garde artists of the postwar generation, first emerged on the fine art scene in the 1960s with a group of young innovative artists called SOUP ’69. A unique style, Soviet Pop, which employed the principles of American Pop Art, developed in the rather limited local circumstances.

Curator: Sirje Helme
Designer: Mari Kurismaa
Graphic designer: Tuuli Aule

January 17-May 6, 2018, Kumu Art Museum 
The aim of this exhibition is not to give an exhaustive overview of the diversity of the exhibition posters in the era in question, but to create a dynamic space with the help of colourful artworks in order to stress the tension between the poster as a quickly perishable mass medium used outdoors and the autonomous work of art displayed in an art hall.

Curator: Madli Mihkelson
Designer: Paco Ulman