Immobile (Shadow) / Untitled (Second)

In her two installations Paulina Pukytė traces particular shadows of the past. She creates a permanent shadow of a high-rise apartment block in the vicinity of the Tallinn Art Hall Pavilion in Lasnamäe. “Perhaps the invisible source of light that makes the fake shadow is the infamous dawn of a new tomorrow that never broke – the Soviet promise of better future that never came?” writes the artist.

Her second installation involves a rack with “damaged” and “repaired” second-hand clothes offered for sale for the passers-by. The wrongly repaired clothes pose questions about what is repair after collective historical trauma, is full and seamless repair possible and whether repair could go wrong. Do we try to change ourselves to fit the ill-fitting “clothes” or do we try to change the clothes? Pukytė’s work explores the uneasiness and uncertainty vis-a-vis our history, as well as questions about choice, manipulation and complicity, the relationships between past and present, reality and illusion.