Sometimes Life Makes Itself Felt

“He lived on the sixth floor of a large prefab in the centre of the Mustamäe housing development amid other similar houses, sharing his building with several hundred other people. He didn’t know those people, with the exception of a few whose more intersting or individual appearance he had remembered from the street in front of the house, from the yard, or from the lift. All the people he knew by sight knew him, too, but they didn’t show it in any way, and Eero responded similarly. There was one very sympathetic old man whom Eero had kept on greeting very stubbornly at first, he didn’t know why; but the old man was superstitious and didn’t greet him back, so Eero soon gave up – why frighten such a nice grandpa by bidding him good day?”

– Mati Unt, The Autumn Ball

The grain of sand, around which the pearl of the exhibition with the working title Sometimes Life Makes Itself Felt slowly forms, is a feeling of loneliness.

The Lasnamäe Pavilion is located in Estonia’s most densely populated area, where lively social life thrives on the streets, park benches, gardens and in queues at stores, just like in many other places around the world. Yet behind countless windows, there are many solitary souls. This solitude can have numerous reasons – both psychological and physical, social and economic. The exhibition gathers harsh and poetic stories of voluntary and involuntary seclusion, its causes and remedies. How to overcome loneliness? Can loneliness be voluntary? What do people do to dispel this feeling?

Sometimes Life Makes Itself Felt is part of Tallinn Art Hall’s ongoing exhibition series, which pays special attention both to the possibility of being good and to ecological responsibility in conditions of certain destruction. The series is an institutional attempt to find an ethically suitable platform for dealing with burning issues. Therefore, we have excluded all single-use materials from the standard “toolkit” of a contemporary art exhibition, using as few materials as possible – and only things found on site. The most recent exhibition in the series was Hold Me Tender, which took place in the Lasnamäe Pavilion in the summer of 2023.