On Friday, 23 May, Kogo Gallery will open a solo exhibition by sculptor and installation artist Eike Eplik titled In Times When Everything Else Seems More Important. Returning to the imaginative world of childhood, Eplik invites visitors to loosen the strings of control and awaken a sense of unlimited possibilities that childlike openness and curiosity can offer. The exhibition is curated by Šelda Puķīte.
Eike Eplik offers her new exhibition as the platform for an intuitive, even visceral exploration of oneself. The exhibition is a playground for exhausted grown-ups who have forgotten the transformative effects and freedoms that a childlike openness and curiosity can present. Through playful rediscovery of her natural and youthful self, she questions the limitations and lack of imagination that the world of reason presents. Becoming a mother and observing her child’s free-spirited engagement with the world awakened in Eplik an urge to seek the same unapologetic courage to explore and nurture her inner child. In its own way, this project is a return to Eplik’s childhood world in the countryside near Rapla. This is a place where your fantasies create different worlds to explore, and neither the space nor the body suffers from limits built by rules. The closet can become a nightclub, the outdoors an extension of one’s body, melting into the forest or the mud.
In Times When Everything Else Seems More Important will open at Kogo Gallery on 23 May at 18.00. Kogo Gallery is located in Tartu at Aparaaditehas, on Kastani 42. The exhibition will remain open until 9 August, the gallery is open for visits Wednesday to Friday from 12:00 to 18:00, and on Saturdays from 12:00 to 16:00. In Times When Everything Else Seems More Important is part of Kogo Gallery’s this year’s programme Thrifters and Transformers. The show is curated by Šelda Puķīte, exhibition programme manager and head of international projects at Kogo. The exhibition is funded by the Cultural Endowment of Estonia and the City of Tartu.
Eike Eplik (b. 1982) is a sculptor and installation artist based in Tartu. She creates sensitive and imaginative works full of personal mythology through different visual expressions and materials such as clay, plaster, metal, wood and ready-made. She holds an MA from the Sculpture Department at the Estonian Academy of Arts and a BA from the Sculpture Department at Tartu Art College. Eplik’s recent exhibitions include White Dwarfs and All Those Beautiful Nebulas at Kim? Contemporary Art Centre in Riga (2024), Down In The Bog – Sporulation at EKKM in Tallinn (2024), Emotional Landscapes at Arka Gallery in Vilnius (2023), Growing Out? Growing Up? Contemporary Art Collecting in the Baltics at Zuzeum Art Centre, Riga, Latvia (2022); My Bitter Sweet Frankenstein Body at Titanik, Turku, Finland (2022); Shared Territory at Tartu Art Museum, Tartu, Estonia (2021). In 2025, her works were presented at the contemporary art fair Esther II in New York and in 2021 at Liste Art Fair Basel. Eplik is a recipient of the Annual Prize of the Cultural Endowment of Estonia and several other awards, and was one of the recipients of Estonia’s national artist’s salary from 2021 to 2023. She is represented by Kogo Gallery.
Šelda Puķīte (b. 1986) is a Latvian curator, writer and researcher based in Estonia. Her formal education includes a Master’s and a Bachelor’s degree from the Department of Art History and Theory at the Art Academy of Latvia. She has worked on several international exhibitions, curated stands for art fairs including Liste Art Fair Basel, viennacontemporary and Art Brussels, published art albums, created catalogues for contemporary art festivals Survival Kit and Riga Photography Biennial, as well as written several essays for Baltic culture publications. Her most recent curated exhibitions include Eike Eplik’s solo exhibition In Times When Everything Else Seems More Important (2025) at Kogo Gallery, Tartu, Silver Girls. Retouched History of Baltic Photography (2025) together with Agnė Narušytė and Indrek Grigor at National Gallery of Art, Vilnius, and White Dwarfs and All Those Beautiful Nebulas (2024) at Kim? Contemporary Art Centre, Riga. Since 2020, she works at Kogo Gallery as an international project manager and exhibition programme curator.
Exhibition www.kogogallery.ee/ee/naitused/ajal-mil-koik-muu-tundub-olulisem
Artist www.kogogallery.ee/ee/kunstnikud/eike-eplik
