As our relationship with technology is ever more intimate and pervasive and its influence deeply entrenched within the human living complex and our working and living practices, it seems increasingly difficult, even impossible to uphold the artificial separation line between nature and technology. The influence of the digital world is no longer confined to our online activities: we use wearable monitoring devices and digital extensions to gather data about our health, condition, and performance. Consequently, the human body is ever more frequently and closely connected to digital media and the associated logic of codes and algorithms that control life in our current society. Laura Kuusk’s exhibition Dear Algorithm is located at the centre of this field of tension, trying to seek alternative relations and forms of kinship with non-human agents such as mushrooms and other organisms.
The exhibition is part of Tallinn Art Hall’s 2020 thematic focus on feminism in the 21st century, highlighting critical issues confronting women today. Maria Kapajeva, Flo Kasearu, Laura Kuusk, Ede Raadik and Maria Valdma will stage solo exhibitions dealing with complicated narratives that go beyond what is regarded as “women’s issues” such as the politics of care and the body, the impact of technology on everyday life, violence and trauma, labour and poverty, as well as fertility and decay. These topics nonetheless have a very powerful impact on women’s lives. These artists will use the language of contemporary art to infuse a sense of urgency to engage with visual politics that moves between the female body and the spheres of public discourse.
Niekolaas Johannes Lekkerkerk works as a curator and writer for The Office for Curating and is director of A Tale of a Tub, a not-for-profit art space in Rotterdam. Central to Lekkerkerk’s work are social and political discourses revolving around daily living and working practices, cultural norms, and ideologies. He particularly focuses on debates concerning the Anthropocene, ecology and climate, post-humanism, and the increasing entanglement between nature and culture. Lekkerkerk recently published The Standard Book of Noun-Verb Exhibition Grammar (Onomatopee, 2018), a publication regarding the exhibition as an ecological assemblage. In 2012, he received the inaugural Demergon Curatorial Award, and in 2014 he was the beneficiary of the Akbank Sanat International Curator Competition.