Curatorial Introduction

The 21st edition of the Spring Exhibition celebrates Estonia’s thriving artistic community through three exhibitions across Tallinn Art Hall’s venues, amplifying the city’s position as a cultural hub for fresh and exciting ventures. During an extremely challenging period, the Spring Show offerings are seeking to accelerate regional recognition across the art scenes in this country, whilst delivering bespoke and conceptually rigorous exhibitions to the public that unveil unique art offerings from artists from a variety of backgrounds working across mediums, themes and geographies. 

We wish to thank the jury members who selected this year’s diverse group of artists for their expertise, energy and passion in picking a strong group of artworks that celebrates Estonia’s unique cultural landscape. From across the cultural sphere, artists have addressed salient topics for local audiences, including art professionals, students and those who are interested in contemporary art in general: gender and the body, performativity and provocative live expressions, spirituality and cosmic perspectives, ecological awareness, the integration of political and aesthetic vision, redefining abstraction, urbanism and gentrification, and, of course, the ongoing pandemic crisis. 

In recent years, the design of the main exhibition has aimed to provide equal exhibiting conditions for all artists. This edition of the Spring Exhibition takes a further step in this direction, eliminating the more visually noisy surfaces of the space from consideration. 

In the Main Hall, the selected works are loosely grouped together along the aforementioned thematic lines, with the curators and exhibition designer collaboratively orchestrating the rhythm, density and placement of the works. This has allowed the artworks to support each other as well as create surprising dialogues between generations and approaches to the artistic practice, with the many providing context for the few. 

In the City Gallery, the exhibition Outside/In curated by Corina L. Apostol brings together artists that share the experience of working across borders, be they temporal, geographic, societal or bodily ones. Meanwhile, in the Art Hall Gallery, curator Siim Preiman has selected artists who together address the human bodily experience in the broadest sense in the exhibition From Head to Toe.

We hope that the current selection will open new horizons for what constitutes the vibrant field of art in Estonia today while remaining accessible to both an expert audience and to those who may be curious about or interested in contemporary art in general.