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In his work, Taavi Villak treats letters like malleable clay. Despite the seemingly traditional typography of the characters, they are not designed for conventional reading. With the works exhibited at the Triennial, Villak draws attention to the ways in which letters – or communication tools in general – can be manipulated to serve specific intentions, while also expressing his fascination with how they can fail us entirely and cease to fulfil their primary function.

Creating prints using intaglio technique requires the image to be rendered in reverse on the printing plate before it can be transferred to paper. Because of this technical aspect, Villak treats letters more as visual elements than carriers of verbal meaning. He writes:

By writing down a few words in succession, lines begin to form. Mix up the order, 

and errors appear –

or sometimes it’s simply no longer good to say them out loud.

But I know that in the sequence of my words, I’m sharing a message; sometimes, it just needs to be heard.

It took at least a century to develop the understanding and language to explain why someone feels the way they do.
Even longer still,
to learn not always to speak, but to listen.
And that’s what makes communication such a messy salad.