At Voice Distance, workshop with Nele Suisalu and Anna Škodenko
You are kindly invited to participate in Nele Suisalu’s workshop At Voice Distance on 20 January from 16:00 to 18:00, inspired by Anna Škodenko’s solo exhibition At Arm’s Length in Tallinn City Gallery (Harju 13). Please confirm your attendance by filling in this registration form.
The workshop is free and will be held in Estonian, Russian and English as needed.
The workshop opens the subject of the exhibition to participants as a bodily experience through their own voice. As humans, we habitually use our voice in everyday communication without even paying attention to it: voice mainly travels between people directly or in a mediated way to convey information and express a connection. However, as soon as we direct investigative attention to our voice, something changes in our state and perception, and also in the way we relate to ourselves and our surroundings. The workshop introduces the basics of voice work and allows participants to playfully relate to the space and the exhibition through their voice. As a result, a collective soundscape of personal experiences is created, inspired by paintings. Previous experience in voice work is not needed to participate in the workshop.
Anna Škodenko’s solo exhibition At Arm’s Length is open in Tallinn City Gallery until 21 January 2024. Depicting fragments and stratifications of reality, the artist shows the complex and at the same time fragmented nature of our surrounding world, where the whole falls through our fingers and it seems impossible to grasp anything. However, the fascinating painting exhibition serves as a confirmation that what is impossible in life becomes possible in art. The curator of the exhibition is Tamara Luuk.
At the heart of Nele Suisalu’s (1981) work are themes related to body and mind (sensory, kinesthetic and transcendental experience of reality). Her artistic practice is based on the synchronisation of contemporary dance, somatic body awareness and improvisational voice work. Suisalu asks how the collective ability to co-regulate the nervous system can be triggered in the maze of problems of the modern world. In addition to her artistic activities, she provides private counseling and guides voice, body awareness and meditation groups. Her recent projects include the solo work Allow yourself to(…) at the exhibition Let the field of your attention … soften and spread out at Kai Art Center (curator Hanna Laura Kaljo, 2019), the work Myrtle Sisters: To Health at the exhibition What Makes Another World Possible at Tallinn Art Hall (in collaboration with Joanna Kalm, curator Corina L. Apostol, 2021), and performing in the dance production Resisting Extinction (directed by Olive Bieringa and Otto Ramstad, 2023).
Anna Škodenko (1986) is a multidisciplinary artist whose work is characterised by a lyrical and analytical approach to her medium and visual image. The format of her work depends on the conceptual frame, which she creates through textual writing and which is conditioned by a specific place, context and theme. Škodenko graduated from the painting department at the Estonian Academy of Arts (2009), complemented her studies at Chelsea College of Art in England and later in the Institute of Contemporary Art in Moscow, and graduated from the master’s program at Glasgow School of Arts (2017). She has been awarded with the Eduard Wiiralt Prize (2016) and Köler Prize Grand Prix (2018). In 2019 Škodenko participated in a residency at WIELS Contemporary Art Centre, Brussels.