A Situation
Curator: Andreas Nilsson
From 14 June the international group exhibition “A Situation” will be open at the Tallinn City Gallery. The group exhibition addresses questions on the social act in everyday life, the idea of the world as a stage, and the importance of participatory imagination.
Participating artists: Julia Bondesson (SE), Merike Estna (EE), Luca Frei (CH), Jaakko Pallasvuo (FI), Filip Vest (DK). Curated by Andreas Nilsson.
The exhibition will open on Thursday, 13 June at 6pm and will remain open until 18 August.
“A Situation” is arranged as an open set with no real back or front stage, where the artworks – spanning sculpture, video, performance, painting and installation – can be partly read as different acts of a play with no clear narrative or connection. They explore the social relationship between bodies, between bodies and objects, and between performer and audience. The exhibition opening presents a new performance by Julia Bondesson, and also a performative activation of a new work by Merike Estna. Another example of work in the exhibition is the participatory play and installation A House for Three Voices by Filip Vest, which invites the spectators to take on the role of performers.
“A gallery space differs from a theatre space in how it often lacks the architectural border dividing performers and spectators, thus creating another type of intimate relationship, encouraging interaction and negotiation between bodies and objects within a limited space,” says curator Andreas Nilsson. “Since some of the presented artworks are not constant in their own forms, it also affects how they are perceived depending on when the viewer enters the gallery space. This type of exhibition format may challenge the presentation in itself – where does it start and end; and is it complete without the live elements?”
“A Situation” is the third in a series of exhibitions, curated by Andreas Nilsson, discussing temporality, the relationship between the ephemeral and the permanent, and the space in between performance based art and visual art. The previous exhibitions in the series were The Visitors, presented as the second edition of Kilometre of Sculpture in the town of Võru, Estonia, 2015, and Groundhog Day, that took place at SIC in Helsinki, 2017–2018.
Andreas Nilsson is a curator and writer. He is assistant curator at Moderna Museet Malmö, and has in recent years worked extensively with artists and institutions in the Baltic Sea Region. In several exhibitions he has explored the space in between visual arts and performance arts.
We would like to thank: Estonian Cultural Endowment, Estonian Ministry of Culture, Estonian Artists’ Association, Veinisõber, AkzoNobel, Nordic Culture Point, Danish Arts Foundation, Iaspis