Curator's foreword

As I write this, it is the height of summer. I’m enjoying the warmth of the sun while rubbing my mosquito bites against the bedsheet. Every time summer reaches its peak, I find myself longing for winter. The cold and darkness seem more comforting than the sweltering temperatures and glaring light. Summer expands space, making the world feel vast and open for exploration, while winter contracts it, creating a sense of spatial intimacy. Similarly, day and night play their roles: day illuminates possibilities and limitations to the horizon, while night brings out the details and the close-up.
Artists Ann Pajuväli, Saskia Fischer and Sirje Runge come together in the exhibition A Place Between Night and Day to collaboratively create a space-time where fertile in-betweenness prevails. This space and time derive their power from their indefinability and the hidden possibilities within various directions. At times, modernist, poetic or queer feminist perspectives collide; at other times, they intersect and explore the cultural and social values related to urban spaces, visions oscillating between the past and the future, and personal memories of wandering through the city.

Space and Presence

The common thread in the works of Pajuväli, Fischer and Runge is their frequent focus on spatial elements. Pajuväli’s scenes explore abstract personal space, home, Väike-Õismäe, and the nocturnal city. Fischer’s work is driven by the power structures embedded in urban environments. Over her artistic career, Runge has depicted ruins, modernist cities, architectonic forms and abstract spaces.
One of the driving concepts behind the exhibition is feminist geography, which examines how the experiences of marginalised groups – based on gender, sexuality or other identity aspects – are manifested in space and how space reinforces these experiences. Feminist geographers have articulated the bodily experiences of many oppressed individuals, underscoring how urban environments often fail to meet their daily needs and desires. They illustrate, through issues such as inadequate public transportation, the constraints of micro-apartments in city centers, the isolation inherent in suburban areas, the scarcity of public restrooms, street planning and even snow removal policies, that our surroundings are frequently designed with male norms in mind. As a result, the city can become an obstacle course for everyone else.
Although only Fischer’s works in the exhibition are directly influenced by feminist geography, the interpretation of space and ways of navigating it are also significant in the works of Pajuväli and Runge. Pajuväli’s poetic and Runge’s modernist approaches to space offer a counterpoint to the queer-feminist perspective, highlighting the latent potential of various viewpoints. The interplay of these perspectives prompts reflection on questions such as: Do I have the “right” body to move through a particular space? Which spaces is my body accustomed to, and where do I feel (un)comfortable? What insights does my body enable me to achieve?

Time and Transience

As we trace the exhibition’s timeline backward, the gaps and interruptions – which have increasingly become a key aspect of the curatorial approach – take on greater significance. They form a fragmented map for navigating between the exhibition’s ideas.
Both Fischer’s urban space piece Pansies and Runge’s painting series Proposal for the Design of Areas in Central Tallinn draw inspiration from the voids experienced in urban environments. It is particularly poignant that one work from Runge’s 1975 series is missing – the sixth panel, titled Flower-City, which illustrated the concept of a cityscape in the shape of a flower. Runge’s paintings inherently address concepts of time and space, with the transience of time being woven into them in various ways. This absence has thus become a fertile ground for initiating a polylogue between the artists’ works.
However, the loss, theft or other forms of disappearance of artworks is not solely about historical material. Initially, I invited Pajuväli to participate in the exhibition with her 2020 work Over the Edge, Around the Pond – a large-scale print of a digital drawing inspired by the master plan of Õismäe, framed by concrete blocks. The work has since assumed a much more mundane function: the concrete blocks are now used as borders for a flower bed in the garden of the artist’s sister, and the print has become wrapping paper for gifts. This void has inspired Pajuväli’s new video work, Forget-Me-Not, which delves into personal experiences of space and time rooted in Väike-Õismäe.

Digging through these ruins, I sometimes feel as though I have exchanged the curator’s mantle for that of an archaeobotanist. Although the reality is, of course, far more complex, one might imagine an archaeobotanist in a cartoonish generalisation as a researcher who searches for old seeds at an archaeological dig to grow ancient plants by planting and watering them. As the curator of this exhibition, I, too, have explored the existing and lost works, as well as unrealised ideas of Pajuväli, Fischer and Runge, in search of seeds that, when nurtured, may hopefully bloom into new creations.