Neeme Külm & Alice Kask. In Vanity Alone

The artists Neeme Külm and Alice Kask have created objects for the exhibition space that are reminiscent of an intriguing mosaic of thoughts expressed out loud, in which it is difficult to determine normal, unambiguous logic. Still, the exhibition tells us an abundance of stories from history and the subconscious. The curator of the exhibition is Tamara Luuk. Soft, genderless and refusing to take sole responsibility, In Vanity Alone is like a metaphor for our time. Everything here speaks of the inevitability of coping with intense existence, which Neeme Külm, with his keen and innocent openness, has captured in its hybridity, entangled contexts, apparent arrogance of being ‘deep’ and forgiveness of profound ignorance from the outset. Like the transition of individualism and personality into eternal plurality, the verbose space threatens to spill out of the exhibition space. This is where Alice Kask intervenes. Selectively and with ease, she works on gallery corners, patches them up and closes them by painting. Calmly, as if marking her territory, she pays homage to the corners, which the gallery itself has never done. Curator Tamara Luuk: “Neeme and Alice both deal with illusion: one as a sentimental romantic striving for the ‘real’ existence, the other as a pragmatist hesitant about everything, aware of the inevitability of being ‘just like the real thing’. But neither of them jokes with art.” The objects at the exhibition, like the lines in a poem, look for equivalents to feelings without obliging the mind to convey them.