Towards the end of May, a new gallery opened in Tallinn. Hoib gallery, a small space run out of the basement of an apartment building in the city centre, was founded by Lilian Hiob with the aim to offer younger artists a place to think together and experiment.
The gallery’s very first exhibition Sheets of Past and Layers of Reality, curated by Lilian Hiob, includes works by five artists: Alice Hagenburch, Raluca Manaila, Denisa Štefanigova, Lisann Lillevere and Johanna Ruukholm. The show is placed in a wider framework of affect theory, more specifically centred on the idea of “the affective turn” (1) belonging to professor of Sociology and Women’s Studies, Patricia Clough, who postulates that affects, which are often perceived as belonging to the private sphere, are very much evoked and shared through social and historical dimensions.
The five artists featured in the show all work with affects of various intensity and mood in one way or another. Denisa Stafanigova’s It’s Necessary to Hide it (2019) is painted on a bedsheet and looks at sexuality and sensuality not so much from a perspective of deconstruction or disruption but rather in the context of the immediate affect it produces. Raluca Manaila showcases a notebook of drawings called Instinctive Fairy Tales (2019–2020), blending folklore and her own personal stories into an umwelt of feelings through various creatures, like birds, snakes and rabbits. In a call for you (2020), a work looking at feelings around technology and social interactions during quarantine, Alice Hagenburch exhibits a phone that may or may not ring for the visitor; it did not for me. Lisann Lillevere and Johanna Ruukholm are approaching technology and affect from a different angle – their work If I would be a Nintendo Elf, What Kind of World would I Enter? (2019–2020) looks to bind the technologically-mediated world with that of magic and fairy tales, bringing togetherness and a sense of unity to the fore.
One of the many ways in which affect theory looks at affects is as something that connects us to others and mobilises emotion in order to do so. This is especially true when looking at the impact of affects in a larger, social and political context. In her introductory chapter Happy Objects, feminist writer and independent scholar Sara Ahmed writes about the “stickiness” of affects and their ability to easily transfer between people as well as larger crowds (2). This exhibition, however, seems to centre emotions in the artists’ immediate vicinities rather than in the public sphere. By this, I do not mean that the artists are exclusively focusing on their feelings, but I think there is a wider romantic sensibility present here that connects them to a distinct contemporary artistic practice, which engages with, but also goes beyond, affect theory to an extent.
In his 2018 Mousse Magazine article, author Michal Novotný sketched out what he called the Emo-Romantic turn witnessing the emergence of a distinct artistic expression with its focus on a “certain lyrical intimacy”, while “manifesting itself with the accentuation of expression, authenticity, sincerity, and emotionality” (3). Novotný linked this Emo-Romantic turn to art that appeared mostly in small alternative scenes, works often shown in project spaces, at off-site exhibitions and art blogs all connected via networks existing in a not-too-distant proximity to everything ‘online’ (adjective). Highlighting the strengths of this he added that focusing on “small networks of friends and local communities, with often interdisciplinary crossings” seemed to be enabling, and a way to find “help and co-financing as much as for collaboration (needless to say) when connecting different kinds of events”. Rather than labelling particular artists or making any aesthetic claims, he concluded that “…the morphology of many artists who could be associated with the Emo-Romantic draws on iconography associated with different kinds of classical or more recent subcultures and counter-cultures”. Here I find Novotný’s writing helpful in tracing the context in which artistic practices grounded in these particular affects are situated both in terms of ideas and aesthetics.
Stemming from the emotional, the kind of art I’m thinking about here also prioritises an intuitive approach to art. It also often features elements of spirituality, folklore, (return to) nature, mysticism, witchcraft and fairytales, which are favoured over an explicitly socially-engaged approach. However, it’s not necessarily about therapeutic practices and self-soothing care, it also has a darker edge, inherently present in many of these traditions, which is sometimes driven to its extreme or distorted. To evoke the same affects visually, inspiration is drawn from traditional, vernacular and outsider art practices – craft before industrial production, hand before machine. It feels as if the very same stickiness Ahmed writes about, or “texxture” (texture that is dense with offered information about how, substantively, historically and materially it came into being) that the late American scholar in queer, gender studies and critical theory Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick discussed in her book Touching Feeling (4) is manifested to convey a string of affects to the viewers. The grittiness, at least at one point, also served to mark a removal from the sleekness of more conventional spaces and structures. But maybe by now this is no longer true – what eventually gets institutionalised is streamlined in more ways than one.
A lot of these particular influences seem present in Sheets of Past and Layers of Reality as well, which is why I wanted to place the show in a wider (global) context. I don’t think we can necessarily speak about alternative scenes in Tallinn as the art scene is generally quite compact with the opening of small independent spaces increasingly becoming a rare occurrence. However, due to the pervasiveness of digital networks even small scenes can’t often be considered “local” anymore as they are interconnected – from Australia to Russia to Czech Republic and the USA, which applies to what I’ve been discussing here. Even though the artworks might seem to be rejecting technology in favour of exploring practices that turn away from it, their connections and the routes of dissemination of their ideas and work are dependent on digital networks. Reliance on these interpersonal networks is at least in some part a conscious choice – making use of resources that are available, coupled with distrust of institutions due to an increasing stratification in the art world. Art institutions (and the impact they have or do not) can, of course, mean very different things in different geographic regions, although, it is not insignificant that the global background to this is a general lack of imagination in current mainstream politics, severely impacting all areas of life.
Coming back to the starting point of this piece – although Hoib Gallery and Sheets of Past and Layers of Reality were conceived before the pandemic, I’m glad they both nevertheless came into being. It is difficult to say in what ways life will just fall back into its old patterns and in what respect it won’t, but it will be interesting to see how much capacity, and for what kind of art, people will have and what small spaces can do to mitigate and mediate contagious affects.
You can find photo documentation from the exhibition here.
(1) The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social. Patricia Ticineto Clough, Jean Halley, Durham: Duke University Press, 2007 p.1-33
(2) The Promise of Happiness. Sara Ahmed, Durham: Duke University Press, 2010, p.230
(3) The Emo-Romantic Turn. Michal Novotný, Mousse Magazine, http://moussemagazine.it/emo-romantic-turn-michal-novotny-2018/
(4) Touching Feeling. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2003, p.14
