Artist Talk by Leon Sahiti at Lasnamäe Pavilion: “soft subtractions: a manual for an inhuman exit”
Tallinn Art Hall and the Goethe-Institut Tallinn present an artist talk by Leon Sahiti on 6 December from 15:00 to 16:00 at the Lasnamäe Pavilion pop-up showcase. The event offers a first public introduction to elements from Sahiti’s work-in-progress “soft subtractions: a manual for an inhuman exit”, developed during his ongoing DATAS Residency.
The artist talk will be conducted in english.
The pop-up exhibition will be open from 5th until 14th of December.
Responding to the fractured nature of sovereignty in the digital age, Sahiti’s project investigates how human and non-human subjects might withdraw from platform governance, algorithmic labour, and techno-feudal infrastructures. The work approaches exit not as refusal alone, but as a speculative practice of disappearance, erasure, and procedural ungovernability.
“soft subtractions” takes the shape of an evolving, speculative instruction manual — part archive, part exorcism — mapping bureaucratic, ritual, and machinic tools for navigating systems built to track, extract, and exhaust agency. The installation combines multi-channel video displayed on LED fans, sculptural components, and printed administrative fiction resembling resignation forms, escape protocols, and procedural rites. These fragments form a continuously rewriting manual, suggesting alternate pathways out of digital dominance while exposing the psychic exhaustion of synthetic agency.
The artist talk will introduce conceptual research from the residency alongside selected installation elements, inviting the audience to engage with processes of disappearance, data-influence, and futures in which refusal becomes a technical gesture.
About the Artist
Leon Sahiti is an Albanian-Bosnian interdisciplinary artist whose multimedia practice examines digital sovereignty, data economies, surveillance infrastructures, and the dissolution of identity in platform society. His installations translate the communicative codes of internet culture into physical structures that oscillate between utopia and hypertechnical dystopia. Working with glitch logic, procedural fiction, and infrastructural critique, Sahiti reflects on the erosion of interpersonal relationships in regimes of permanent connectivity.
More: https://leonsahiti.com
About DATAS: The Data and the Sovereign
DATAS is a collaborative European cultural programme exploring how computation, automation, and digital infrastructures reshape personal and state sovereignties. Through artistic research, exhibitions, residencies, and critical discourse, DATAS challenges the normalization of data extraction, surveillance, and algorithmic governance while supporting creative practices that imagine forms of resistance and alternative futures.
Co-funded by the European Union through the Creative Europe framework and Goethe-Institut Estland.
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