Curator's foreword

Once He Whistled a Wind Note There

A five-year-old child has yet to form firm boundaries between reality and fantasy. Experience unfolds like an unbroken reel of images. Everything happens in the now, and what matters is the feeling – immediate, real, and closest to the self. One would like to believe that a certain permeability between the real and the imagined, the hard and the soft, the wise and the sensitive, remains within us throughout life. Yet one is often favoured over the other, the latter concealed behind the former. Determination is a currency in wide circulation; sensitivity lingers behind closed doors. There are those who, even in adulthood, never develop such boundaries – people for whom events, emotions, and dreams form a continuous, uninterrupted flow of experience.

Art serves many purposes. Under certain circumstances, it can become a language without words – a connector beyond logic. Once, while visiting Sandra’s studio in the Sculpture Department’s building on Raja Street with a group of students, someone suddenly exclaimed, “I finally get it – none of it matters!” All the mental effort and rumination of words had proven fruitless, but then a feeling opened the door to real experience. Sandra’s creative process is, quite literally, tactile and sensory. Materials arrive by chance or fall into her lap; paper tears, copper bends, plastic melts, and gradually, her hands shape them into form. Sometimes the material resists: a sheet of metal cuts into a finger, or molten plastic scorches the skin.

Such a creative process is, in the truest sense, organic. From a rich, amorphous mass, countless forms emerge, stretch out, and dissolve once more. Two elements find themselves side by side – and suddenly, a story begins. Textures, scents, colours, and shapes are deeply entwined with feelings and memories. The smell of my grandfather’s garage is not the same as yours – but still, we both know exactly what that means, where it takes us in our minds, and what emotions it stirs. The aim isn’t necessarily to communicate the artist’s own feeling or experience, but rather to explore whether the same combinations of materials and methods can speak meaningfully to many.

A couple of years ago, I found myself staring at Tõnis at Vent Space – while he, in turn, was staring at a crab. The wandering voiceover in his video spoke, among other things, about the market’s attempts to monetise even the last “useless” fragment of human time: our sleep. I learned that Tõnis and I are both insomniacs, which means we understand just how precious sleep is – even in its most fragile, dream-saturated form. I also discovered that his interests span both technology and phenomenology; his work hovers at an imagined intersection between depiction and imagination. How can time be expressed in the space between documentation and image? How can one represent objects and phenomena that themselves are acts of showing or pointing?

This exhibition isn’t about sleep or wind – but it was made by three sleepless airheads. When you are sleep-deprived, you experience things differently. Days bleed into nights, and events begin to unfold across multiple dimensions. By day you are a sleepwalker, by night moonstruck. Really, it’s the same state – just with different names. And yet, a distinction must be made – because without that, how can any choice be made at all? This is an exhibition in search of impartial clarity, though even that pursuit demands a series of hierarchical decisions. To have something on the inside, something must be left out. Or perhaps it is the other way around: to put something on display, something must remain within.

As you look around and move through the space, it is worth considering not only what is visible, but also its potential counterpoints. What might be the hard reverse side of the soft? Figuratively, the exhibition traces a gradual shift – from outside to inside, from the public to the private. Room by room, the artworks shed their skin, moving from surface toward essence, from seeming to being, reaching for the core. The exhibition unfolds like a stairway to the sky – or a seedbed. It begins at street level, rises above rooftops, ascends into the clouds, drifts among signals and probes, and finally gazes back down from above. From that height, everything appears as a kind of glowing, resonant debris. Simply electricity – thinner here, denser there.