On Friday, 10 April at 5:00 pm, Anna Škodenko and Maria Valdma-Härm will open their joint exhibition “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” in the large gallery of the Tartu Art House.
The exhibition is focused on the human internal struggle to remain upright (both literally and figuratively) amid overwhelming circumstances, in which endless moral wandering exhausts, yet enforced stillness is equally impossible. In this way, we reflect our emotional landscape to the viewer through spatial experience. Wandering endlessly in a vicious circle is accompanied by self-discovery and the possibility of noticing within oneself feelings that previously remained unrecognised and ignored.
At night, when dawn feels too far away, we perceive a moment in which everything seems futile, fictive and empty. When the day has been smothered by self-containment and the last dim, faintly murky light has disappeared into unfathomable depth—as if century-old air had congealed into a single mass—we are forced to retreat into our own thoughts and dreams.
It is nearly impossible to convey this experience, and one can never be entirely certain of the effectiveness of sharing such emotions: there is no common language for it, and at times not even enough mental space to share with the Other.
“In collaboration we have created a perceptual environment that seeks to trace the motionless choreography of disappearance, between the personal and the universal. Working with deliberately selected, symbolically charged materials, we engage in the simultaneous creation and deconstruction of our own imaginaries. Our focus lies on what remains of states of being, and on our inevitable vanishing. We perceive the world and the global political condition through wounds and healing, abrasions and guilt,” the artists explain.
Anna Škodenko (b. 1986) 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 programme at Glasgow School of Arts (2017). She has been awarded the Eduard Wiiralt Prize (2016) and Köler Prize Grand Prix (2018). In her work, she operates on the border between the poetic and the mundane, using various media—drawing, painting, text, sound and objects—to explore change, memory and situations in which the familiar disappears.
Maria Valdma Härm (b. 1973) is a renowned Estonian jewellery artist. She graduated from the Estonian Academy of Arts (MA, Jewellery Art, 2000) and has been active on the international art scene since 1994. Her work has been exhibited across Estonia and Europe, as well as in Brazil, China, Korea and the United States. She was a member of the group F.F.F.F. from 1996–2005 and is a two-time recipient of the Cultural Endowment of Estonia’s Annual Prize (2002, 2021), among other accolades, including the Young Estonian Jewellery Award (2016). Her pieces are held in the collections of the Estonian Museum of Applied Art and Design, Estonian Art Museum and in private collections internationally.
The exhibition will be open until 10 May.
Additional information: Maret Tamme, Producer of the Tartu Art House, produtsent@kunstimaja.ee
5800 3882
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