Curator’s foreword

… the Wolf said to Little Red Riding Hood

Unfolding before you is a story of growth – of growing up. It is a story of how a young girl’s sharpness matures into a woman’s wisdom, and how a male apprentice becomes a master. This is a story that travels from the joy of discovery to being hurt, to doubt and fear when facing one’s own creation. It is a story of adaptation, death, and resurrection.

None of the characters in this story have the luxury of refusing the inevitability of growing up. What they can do is preserve or extend the child’s ability to be simultaneously open-eyed and dreamlike. Becoming an adult requires taking responsibility, and if you don’t have children, the question, “For what?” is highly justified. That which seems worthwhile often turns out to be tattered, worn, and full of holes. The joyful shout of “I’ll eat you up!” turns into an encounter with the beast – with life – a life you don’t yet know well, but one that can break you, settling scores with both the individual and the entire post-truth era. It is good if you can change the game, like an old art collector or gallery that, when the grand and sacred objects have run out, been sold, or stolen, begins to search with a thirst-sharpened gaze for precious beauty in everyday utilities. And behold, that beauty – half-craft, half-art – proves to be truly present!

We thus arrive closer to the present day, where the still-living, good old artist knows nothing of everyday things, only of art, while the young and promising artist tends to consider too many things as art, calling their works “creations” with astonishing ease, and being aware of the importance of finding an everyday application for their activity. They study their body and discover the objects surrounding it, attempt to enter beneath the skin and between the tissues, and even notice that an object has a body and a body can become an object. They attempt to identify with nature, and sometimes succeed, for a while, because who hasn’t spoken to a flower, an animal, or a tree – often even a vacuum cleaner, a car, or a sewing machine? And a robot! Especially if its algorithm has tuned its values to be brighter and clearer than those of our neighbour. Continuity with art history is fragile and hard to recognise; the artist’s professionalism is pointless, since everything ends quickly anyway, and perfection means very little. But even that changes.

Ene-Liis Semper, Liisamari Viik, Kristel Zimmer and Anita Kremm. Videos

There are both young and older artists in this exhibition – teachers and students, one could probably say. Because the teachers, who were forgotten for a while, and the students, who didn’t feel like students, have gradually returned. First, the “patricides” of the nineties once again became respectful admirers reminiscent of parents and grandparents, and then the teachers also followed them. They have stepped very close to their students – so close that a sporadic exchange of roles becomes inevitable.

Ene-Liis Semper, whose work’s starting point is the cultivation of an artistic image from life itself, has much to say to young people, including that professionalism is not a trifle but requires serious effort, so they should prepare for a longer period of apprenticeship. She emphasises from the start that the eloquence of an artist’s work does not necessarily depend on the choice of medium, thereby pushing the view of theatre arts students beyond the stage performance.

The work of Ene-Liis as a video artist is laconic, with an effectively simple execution and a risky performance by the executor, who often puts herself in danger. The brazen freshness, which is very personal and total, with which she entered the art scene in the late nineties is difficult to imitate. Perhaps this is partly why neither her students nor those of Mark Raidpere – who shares the developmental period and the department with Ene-Liis as a faculty member – resemble either of them.

Ene-Liis doesn’t teach the final result, but the method and process by which to reach it: a clearly thought-out and deeply felt authorial position, an action articulated simply and precisely, often using repetition and the tension that accompanies a rather slow unfolding. Her own works operate on the border of a strict framework and substantive permissiveness. Her teaching, I assume, suggests a knife that always cuts the user first, and deeply reveals the depth of the cut. She teaches young people vulnerability made visible through the body and a courageous sensitivity, which would be the foundation of the honesty and authenticity of the artwork’s result. No one hesitates to undress, and this, although the simplest way to point to vulnerability, almost always works. They work with everydayness, with material gained from observing it, and from amplifying their own experience, using the most direct route to every person’s heart.

Anita Kremm, Kristel Zimmer, and Liisamari Viik – all of them have been involved in the activities of the Laboratory of Figurative Thought during the years 2021–2023. (“The Laboratory of Figurative Thought is a creative unit formed within the Scenography Department at the Estonian Academy of Art that deals with the artistic image and its manifestations in various media forms,” says the EKA website).

The video at the exhibition originated from Liisamari’s expeditions to the Baltijets factory in Narva in 2022. Currently, alongside her Master’s thesis, she works in both theatre and film as an artist, performer, and designer.

Kristel, alongside her theatre work at Von Krahl, also manages to engage in acting and exhibitions, and even literary art: she participated as a compiler and author in the publication of the anthology of young Baltic writers.

Anita assists Ene-Liis at the academy while also pursuing her own artistic work. She has achieved a full-scale, ambitious solo exhibition at the Hobusepea Gallery, and it seems she thrives in artistic solitude. Hardworking and eager to learn, simultaneously childlike and adult, she is ready at any moment to dive into the unknown of black holes.

It’s important not to forget that, according to their schooling and qualifications, we are dealing with scenographers who have been persuaded into this exhibition hall, but who remain dependent on theatrical experience in one way or another – just like wolves remain dependent on the forest. At a time when theatricality and performativity are strongly present in exhibition spaces, and terms like “dramaturgy” and “choreography” are used not only for theatre but also for art exhibitions, the works of Ene-Liis, Anita, Kristel, and Liisamari in this exhibition possess a genuineness drawn from life itself. The chosen works by Ene-Liis are earlier and less-known video pieces – those in which her fragility and pain threshold are revealed brightly and gently. This seemed important.

Tõnis Saadoja and Eero Alev. Painting

In contrast to Ene-Liis Semper, Tõnis Saadoja digs deeply, but in a very limited area. His medium is painting, which he looks squarely in the eye and battles with. Not a life full of savagery, but culture – his own interpretive abilities and skills set against the heritage of painting – places the unavoidable presence of others on the path of Tõnis Saadoja as an artist. These are opponents who are both refined and powerful. Towards one (himself), he is merciless; he is an eternal apprentice who constantly presents new challenges and tasks to his work in an effort to grow. From the other (art), he demands nothing; he is grateful like a pilgrim, for what would he do without the opportunity to continue the continuity of painting.

Tõnis begins with what was given to him at the start of his artistic journey: photography and the relationship between the photograph and the image transferred onto the canvas. Initially, the gradations of black and white, and the line that runs smoothly or intermittently, suffice. However, even by acting in the simplest way, by polishing scarcity to the extreme limit, he succeeds in making his arrival perfect. Systematic, consistent, and precise, and moreover, articulate, he not only shows the result of his work but also makes the process he has undergone observable. His explanations are understandable and rather businesslike, restrained, and devoid of emotion.

Yet, everything that Tõnis Saadoja’s strict systematicity and well-thought-out structure excludes and avoids, silently creeps up behind him and one day arrives: colour, which belongs to every self-respecting painter; chance, which the wise master puts to work in his favour; and the growing speed and self-confidence of the painting tempo. He, who was once convinced that if a black-and-white photo or painting doesn’t work, it won’t work in colour either, introduces colour into his pictures. It starts lightly with an “atelier brown,” as he is predominantly a studio painter, and later becomes freer and brighter.

He, who once worked on a picture for weeks, can now finish a piece in less than an hour, painting skies and clouds first (still in the studio and using a photograph), and then going into nature and capturing natural motifs. This change is greater than it initially appears: Tõnis Saadoja, the studio artist who preferred conceptual still lifes, is now painting in the open air, in an uncontrolled environment and at the mercy of chance! It is true that Tõnis has been talking about the importance of chance since 2018, giving Eero Epner a reason to say: “Saadoja’s art has always seemed to me not cool, but sad, because, unlike me, he doesn’t consider himself, us, or art to be chosen, but rather a collection of coincidences where, at best (and as a result of good preparation and concentration), we can have our share of the universal existential loneliness.”

Sad indeed, until… Tõnis Saadoja is only human and may eat his once-spoken words, but he acts unerringly and paints divinely. The interaction between Saadoja’s two states – the conscious and purposeful one, and the one ready to face unexpected challenges as he consistently delves ever deeper into the unpretentious world of painting – creates a tension that gives his works the charm of both timelessness and contemporaneity. While the German journalist writing about Art Cologne had reason to compare his series Model of Recollecting to the achievements of Dutch art during its Golden Age, Alexei Gordin, commenting on Saadoja’s latest landscape exhibition on social media, has no less reason to state: “It’s punk to exhibit open-air painting today; it’s even more punk than bringing Instagram stories into the exhibition hall!”

The other painter exhibiting at this show is Eero Alev. Although only a couple of years younger than Tõnis Saadoja and, moreover, a recent faculty member at the academy, he does not formally qualify as Saadoja’s student, even though the large difference in the time it took them to reach professional art allows one to make that assertion.

The intensity of the searches, work capacity, and persistence of the talented Alev, who reached his specialised studies relatively late compared to popular conventional notions, has much in common with Saadoja. The younger artist virtually had to be able to read the work process of his more mature colleague, which offered itself undisguised to the viewer – no secrets, but what a result! – and this must have been instructive. It is true that the emotionality that strongly expresses itself as the impetus for Eero’s work is just as obvious as it is hidden in Tõnis’s work. The re-experiencing of childhood inherent in the theme of his paintings adds novelty and individuality to the current pictures of this artist, who is still young as a creator.

The turn toward childhood, however, makes Eero himself and his work more fragile and vulnerable, because, apart from talent, nothing else significantly protects them yet. He feels the importance of chance in both life and art better than Tõnis – though he seems to take it more as fate: “The figure of the journey has always been sympathetic to me and somehow comparable to the metaphor of life: you roll the dice and the journey then depends on that.” The realistic style of depiction connects them not only with each other but also with Ene-Liis and the girls. Although multilayered in interpretation, with all of them, everything is just like real.

Kiwa and Kiwanoid. Total Future

“Kiwa is undoubtedly the most interesting and at the same time the most cryptic representative of his generation, one who is difficult to subject to any generalising analysis. Traditional binary oppositions, such as reality and hyper-reality, morality and immorality, do not apply in his works. Instead, he combines a certain cynicism and (self-)irony with an infantilism that made him the local media’s favourite enfant terrible. All of Kiwa’s artworks – texts (articles, essays, poetry), visual art (sculpture, body painting, painting, video, performance, installation), and sound art – or his various roles as a curator, editor, model, and social figure, form a single complete text, a personal semiosphere, where one theme is expressed through different means,” Elnara Taidre writes, capturing the powerful scope of Kiwa’s activity with her characteristic fair impartiality.

Like an ever-ticking perpetual motion machine that has run for centuries, Kiwa knows how to appreciate both the traditional and the unprecedented. Through all his activities, he fearlessly chants the totality of the future. Having picked the best pearls from the alternative edges of art and life, he has played with them intoxicatingly like a child. He has seen the very clear interdependence of everything, but refused to express it in the language of conventional comprehensibility.

Forgive me, Kiwa, but your exhibition partners here understand and know how to utilise the vocabulary of the reality surrounding them, which is why a slightly unsettling role has been left to you – though with plenty of physical room and audio freedom, because we all love you, and we also know that you can handle role-plays better than any of us. Just as you are capable of working in any medium, you are also capable of coping with “functional misinterpretation” and chaos. Therefore, please accept your part and come to terms with the fact, which will arise in the time and space of this exhibition, that your play with pearls in the periphery has reached the total future ruled by artificial intelligence. A future that you yourself might not fear, but which the vast majority of mortals do.

Your series, The Robot’s Path is a Shift – the first one in Estonia painted by AI – which looks like an invasion of nymphet-aliens; your second series, Wildlife Documentaries, which is a nature picture opened in a text editor, but appears as a cryptic chant of stars and characters; and your sound piece, which you have created to appeal to the ordinary listener, simpler and more ear-pleasing than is your usual custom – all of these find themselves in a common space with Kristel Zimmer’s girl who is fleeing dejectedly into a snowy forest, and Terje Ojaver’s beast that has just struck down Little Red Riding Hood.

Jass Kaselaan and Art Allmägi. Terje Ojaver. Sculpture

The exhibition Plenty of Room to Grow features two very well-known works from the Estonian sculpture landscape: the model of the monument Balance, created by Jass Kaselaan and Art Allmägi for the Jõhvi military campus (2021), exhibited as the opening chord of the exhibition, and Terje Ojaver’s Beast (2019), which has just returned from her solo exhibition at the Tartu Art Museum. All three sculptors have been teachers in their field, all three have been recognised for their exhibition activity, and all of them have sculptures in public spaces.

“The initial result, at least with Kaselaan, is a peculiar stillness, against the background of which prejudices and over-eagerly emerging lines of thought dissipate. /—/ Kaselaan’s art, as Kiwa has claimed, leaves one speechless,” writes Hanno Soans in September 2025 regarding the artist’s exhibition Shepherd. Grave. Human with Wings.

Jass Kaselaan is a highly exceptional type of creator; if Jass didn’t exist, one might think that such artists have died out. His creation and thinking are too different, too inevitable, and unique: “No, a human is not a machine. At the same time… (Thinks.) A machine, in my opinion, is death pretending to be life. That’s why I like machines. /—/ For example, I believe that when my daughter was born and I was at the maternity hospital, a seagull came to the window and stared in – I believe that was my grandmother coming to see us. I sincerely believe it. My grandmother was very important to me. At the same time, the seagull could have just come to look in the window. But still, it felt like it was my grandmother. I thought, let her look. Quite sincerely, this is no joke to me. /—/ I believe in ghosts, the transmigration of souls, God… I think there are certainly much greater forces, more complicated, incomprehensible things that we, little humans, do not know or perceive. I have no reason to doubt this.” (From a conversation with Juhan Raud during the aforementioned solo exhibition at the Contemporary Art Museum of Estonia in October 2025.) Jass’s “percentage art” – like the model of the bronze sculpture Balance, completed with Art Allmägi and exhibited here – is one of the best examples of what a work commissioned for a public space through a competition can offer.

Art Allmägi is the one who knows how to do everything, lends a shoulder, and finds the best way to execute technically difficult work. As a sculptor, he is provocatively straightforward, realistic, sometimes mockingly poster-like, and devoid of sentiment: “Self-motivation, perseverance, manual skills, and creative thinking – that is my personal foundation for achieving success in sculptural work. /—/ I am a very boring person and I do not have a single personally meaningful theme to dissect in my work. Based on this, I have approached creation creatively. I have chosen themes to play with. I do not relate to the themes of my exhibitions, I do not sympathise with them, I play with them,” says Art to Andra Orn in an interview for Päevaleht (April 2025). Quite a crisply dry statement.

Yet, I haven’t read anything as beautiful in a long time as the article published in Vooremaa in 2004 about Art Allmägi, the youngest participant in the Haapsalu Sculpture Festival, who arrived at the festival with stonemason credentials received from the Vana-Vigala Technical and Service School and dreamed of being accepted into the sculpture program at the Tartu Art College. He dedicated his granite sculpture Death Bell to the victims of the Estonia ferry disaster: “Having grown up by the sea, I have an idea of what the sea is. I sketched several designs, including a bell. It was initially a clumsy, labour- and material-intensive version. It didn’t have what I had in mind. I also met with people from the non-profit organisation Memento Mare, who lost relatives in the Estonia disaster. It is not easy to be in the crossfire of questions when you have nothing certain to offer. But I needed to feel that pain. I felt the panic that was born in me after that meeting for the first time. It stole my sleep for several nights, but now the bell is almost ready. All that remains is to carve the text “The storm has passed, the memory chimes in the soul” into the stone and set up the sculpture in the park.”

Terje Ojaver has always taken into account the context dictated to artistic creation by time. Time has given her the opportunity to work herself free at an age when the creativity of others tends to wane. Her self-assertion took time, but then she exploded powerfully. “Ojaver is prone to change. /—/ Therefore, she has no need for sharp turns, self-denial, and artistic rebirth. She has been ready for changes. In retrospect, it seems that the new era has arrived precisely to give her a chance.” (Johannes Saar in the catalogue for Terje Ojaver’s solo exhibition (Tartu Art Museum, 2025).)

Terje is in a good place where she is right now. One can sustain such an altitude for a long time, if only the strength lasts. Art is invaluable and helpful to everyone who works with sculpture. Although he also practices collaborative work in his creation, it seems that his uncompromising stubbornness only allows him to grow alone, in dialogue with his own understandings. Jass… may God grant him strength and health; he can manage the rest himself.