New Viewings #24

Shown together with the screens are a series of works on paper by Entwistle. Using original architectural reprographic prints from the archive the artist has partially submerged the original drawing with blooms of marbling ink. The drawings depict details of the roof structure for the ‚Transportation and Travel Pavilion‘, New York World Fair, 1964.

The pavilion designed by Clive Entwistle was articulated by its large spherical roof, imagined as a representation of the moon’s surface replete with craters and texture. Concurrently to designing this project C.E was drafting a screenplay entitled ‚Harvest Moon‘, which explored, through the narrative guise of a love story, druidic imagery and feminine mythologies of the Harvest Moon. The moon, recognised as an astronomical body aligned with the female cycles and mythological deities is here reclaimed, and as with other aspects of her practice these works of vandalism attempt a spiritual repatriation of the female narratives and energies held both within the archive and more broadly in her ancestral line.

Obliquely addressing capitalism and its structure and modus operandi in which we are all immersed, Kuimet visually and aurally presents social and cultural values of our days through a-temporal details and fleeting moments.

Untitled (Double over), a series of four black and white photographs created for Galerie Barbara Thumm’s New Viewings, is a result of printing, folding and scanning the images of the empty gallery space. The attempt to bring back the third dimension in a two-dimensional representation of the space suggests an alternative spatial narrative and contributes to Vahtra’s ongoing exploration into site-specific space-oriented problematics. In the exhibition space, the series is juxtaposed with photographic fragments of the space, plotted life-size, and wallpapered directly on the wall.

Anu Vahtra has participated in numerous group exhibitions internationally, and has had solo exhibitions in Amsterdam, Brussels, Budapest, Cologne, New York, Prague and Tallinn. She has been nominated for the Kristjan Raud Prize (2015) and the Sadolin Art Prize (2014); in 2015 she won the Köler Prize 2015 grand prix, and in 2017 received the Annual Award of the Cultural Endowment of Estonia’s Foundation for Fine and Applied Arts. In 2017 Vahtra was an artist in residence at the International Studio and Curatorial Programme (ISCP) in New York, where she produced a new performance piece for the Performa 17 Biennial. Currently lives and works in Brussels where she is an artist in residence at the WIELS Contemporary Art Centre. She is also one of the founders of Lugemik Publishing (2010) and Bookshop (2013) in Tallinn.