Taavi Talve. I was in Timbuktu

From Thursday, 17 February, the exhibition by Taavi Talve, I Was in Timbuktu, will be open at Tallinn City Gallery. The exhibition discusses images projected into an unexplored corner of the world and colonial conquest. One such story is told by Werner Legère in his novel I Was in Timbuktu, which appeared in Estonian in 1959 as part of the Adventure Stories from Land and Sea (Seiklusjutte maalt ja merelt) book series and sparked the imagination of many young readers, who later began to question the actual existence of Timbuktu.

The curator of the exhibition is Indrek Grigor. You are welcome to the opening of the exhibition at Tallinn City Gallery on Wednesday, 16 February at 6 pm.

Three inevitable elements always seem to be present in works by Taavi Talve: architecture, quotes and human destiny. The most abstract of these is architecture, one of the strangest forms of which has been rendering a spatial dimension to words and punctuation marks. An example of this was the giant quotation marks hanging from the ceiling at the exhibition ONTHETITLE (2013). The quote, on the other hand, is the most specific component. A found object, an artefact surrounded by the work as a display case. Perhaps the funniest example of this was the untitled installation with Indrek Köster (as the artist group Johnson & Johnson) at the 2010 Artishok Biennale. Hijacking the logic of the Biennale, it did not let visitors read the texts written by ten critics, reviewing the same work that blocked access to them.

Considering Talve’s relatively uncompromising conceptual language, human destiny can be considered the most surprising component of the three. An excellent example of this among his more recent works is Blind Spot, where Talve explored the story of the Estonian dancer Epp Kotkas. Who was she and how did she end up in the U.S., in the troupe of Yvonne Rainer? Throughout the archival work, Kotkas remained a fiction, one who it was ultimately impossible even to give a face to.

In I Was in Timbuktu, the game seems to be reversed: the emphasis is on Timbuktu as a city, which we are held back from acknowledging as a real place because of a myth that promises to be more permanent than the desert town itself. Whoever succumbs to the urge and takes on a journey to the city despite all the promised hardships seems to return empty-handed. The stories of those who visited Timbuktu focus on the challenging journey that turned out to be even more difficult than expected. The city, on the other hand, did not live up to expectations at all. However, looking back, no one can say exactly what they expected and what this expectation was based on.