On July 2 at 18.00, Jenny Grönholm’s solo exhibition Apostles will open at Hobusepea gallery. The exhibition will remain open until July 28, 2025.
The starting point for the exhibition is a single family photo album, or more precisely, its absence, at a time when it seemed every household was expected to have a personal archive of memories. This one album contains only eleven photographs. No others remain – few were ever taken. From these rare images, the paintings for this exhibition have taken shape.
The photographs depict twelve of my thirteen aunts: all captured on their confirmation day, flowers in hand, their gazes turned toward the future.The thirteenth aunt is missing, as there is always someone of whom no trace remains.
The family did not own a camera. There is only one photograph of each child: a confirmation portrait at age fifteen, with flowers. A silent image, marking the only official moment in their young lives.
They emerge before us, not as biographies, but as memories. Silent apostles, bearers, young women caught in the most fleeting bloom of life. They are held together by a single moment in time – one photograph, one flower, one story.
Jenny Grönholm
The exhibition is supported by the Cultural Endowment of Estonia.
Exhibitions at Hobusepea gallery are supported by the Cultural Endowment of Estonia, the Estonian Ministry of Culture, and Liviko AS.
On Wednesday, July 2, at 6 p.m., Liisa Kruusmägi’s exhibition “Yokai Tea Party / 妖怪のお茶” will open at Draakon gallery. The exhibition will remain open until July 26, 2025.
Liisa Kruusmägi has been painting her thoughts and feelings, featuring people, animals, and the things around her in various environments. The bright colours of her paintings can make us breathe and rest in these anxious times.
During her residencies in Japan in 2015 and 2023, she observed her surroundings, searching for funny, new, and strange things, and painted them based on her observations. In the process, she became interested in the mysterious, weird, creepy, and sometimes humorous creatures that appear in Japanese folklore, known as Yokai. They have been brought into existence through the process of telling and passing on the strange phenomena born from people’s fears, anxieties, and mysteries as a shared experience. Kruusmägi is open to different cultures and to such creatures that are beyond human control. Additionally, she does not immediately impose a simplejudgment of good and evil on them. Yokai that enter the house through the window, that attend a tea ceremony, that eat ice cream, etc., look cute, humorous and somewhat familiar.
It is also related to the fact that when Kruusmägi walked around Japanese cities, she discovered that posters and signs almost always featured cute characters. The characters placed on the pine trees in her painting are generally small and cute. And the friendly gaze towards such things in Japan can already be seen in Sei Shonagon’s collection of essays, The Pillow Book, written in the early 11th century. What is affirmed there is childish, innocent and pure, and this attitude of admiring such incomplete and immature things still underlies Japanese culture even after more than 1,000 years. It overlaps with the approach of Kruusmägi, who does not find beauty in complete harmony and balance but instead appreciates the ephemeral and changeable nature of things.
Hirohisa Koike
After completing his postgraduate studies in Imaging Arts and Sciences at Musashino Art University, Hirohisa Koike furthered his career as an artist-researcher at the École des Beaux-Arts de Nantes in France and as a lecturer at the Estonian Academy of Arts. He is currently a Ph.D. candidate at Tallinn University. His expertise lies in photographic theory and 20th-century French philosophy. His research focuses on the contemplation of delay, mourning, and survival in photography, based on the conceptual legacy of Jacques Derrida. His notable publications include “Lein ja fotograafia: Jacques Derrida fototeooria” (Etüüde nüüdiskultuurist; 9, 2021) and “The noeme of photography: the paradigmatic shift in the photographic theory of Roland Barthes” (Kunstiteaduslikke Uurimusi / Studies on art and architecture, 28 (3-4), 7-26, 2019).
Exhibitions at Draakon gallery are supported by the Estonian Cultural Endowment, the Estonian Ministry of Culture, and Liviko AS.
Hedi Jaansoo (1989) is an artist and photographer living and working in Tallinn. She has graduated from the department of contemporary art at the Estonian Art Academy (MA, 2018), department of photography at the same academy (BA, 2014) and studied in Norway, Bergen Academy of Art and Design (2021/13). She mostly works with tiny and fragile objects, flowers, uncertainties, intuitions and sensibilities. In her latest artistic practice she combines photography, textile and clay, nonfunctional accessories, unfinished thoughts and shifting decisions, yearnings and conflicting desires.
Tanel Rander (1980) is an artist, curator, and writer (also goes by the pseudonyme chaneldior), whose creative work includes experimental practices based in language and psychology, and critical study of Eastern-European discourse and decolonisation. The focus of Rander’s work is the tension between subjectivity and the modifying pressure it experiences between interior and exterior. Rander has worked as a lawyer and attorney, since 2009 he is a freelance artist. In 2018 he initiated the independent exhibition space ‘Brivibas Galerija’ in Valka.
Kirke Kangro works with installation, sculpture, video and performance, the results of which are clearly characterized by purified metaphors. In her installative artwork, Kangro uses minimalist and somewhat lyrical means to analyze the spatial situations and to make paradoxical outings. Her practice focuses on the language of conceptual materials and the construction of meaning – looking for the boundaries of human imagination and expanding on the universal ideas of the environment and existence. She has curated several international exhibitions and works as a professor and a dean of the faculty of fine arts at the Estonian Academy of Arts.
Art Allmägi (1983) is a sculptor and installation artist. He has studied sculpture at the Pallas University of Applied Sciences (BA, 2008) and the Estonian Academy of Arts (MA, 2011). Allmägi's exhibition projects are characterised by a thematic seriality. In this exhibition series, the author explores creation based on collaboration. Previous exhibition series have been Russia-themed and narrative-centric.
HOBUSEPEA
GALERII
Avatud
E, K-P 11.00–18.00
Hobusepea 2, Tallinn, 10133
DRAAKONI
GALERII
Avatud
E-R 11.00–18.00
L 11.00-17.00
Pikk 18, Tallinn, 10133
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