Photo reportage from the exhibition 'Octopus Rococo' at the Kogo Gallery

January 31, 2024
Author Echo Gone Wrong

Published in Photo / Video from Estonia

Krišs Salmanis, Future Perfect, 2023. View from the exhibition Octopus Rococo, Kogo Gallery, 2024. Photo by Marje Eelma

A group exhibition Octopus Rococo which tackles serious humor, is currently on view at Kogo Gallery, Tartu, Estonia. The participating artists are from Estonia, Latvia and Ukraine, the show is curated by Šelda Puķīte. Octopus Rococo remains open until 2 March 2024.

Humour has been a tool for detecting the zeitgeist and exploring power relations for hundreds of years. Some artists have become masters in expressing their trickster and sinister entertainer’s role so skillfully that their work makes you laugh and shiver simultaneously. When humour is used to cope with life’s more serious challenges, it can be described as “serious humour” or, to borrow German philosopher Kuno Fisher’s phrase, “a playful judgment”. The exhibition Octopus Rococo brings together works by Estonian, Latvian and Ukrainian artists who are known as explorers of irony and humorous mischief. Together they send up, give social commentary and create poetical metaphors to address what it is to be human in the contemporary world.
The participating artists are Kateryna Berlova, Eike Eplik, Alexei Gordin, Ivars Grāvlejs, Krišs Salmanis, Sabīne Vernere and Elīna Vītola, the show is curated by Šelda Puķīte.

The combination of the words octopus and rococo is itself nonsensical, used by critics at the turn of the twentieth century to mock the ornamented facade of the legendary Hofatelier Elvira in Munich designed by architect August Endell. In the exhibition, octopus rococo becomes a code name for serious humour – a strange, seemingly nonsensical, dadaistic joke that, in truth, camouflages the different layers of a very complex existence.

The exhibition is open from 19 January to 2 March 2024 at Kogo Gallery. The gallery is located in Tartu, Estonia at Aparaaditehas, on Kastani 42. Octopus Rococo is open for visits on Wed–Fri at 13–19 and on Sat at 13–18.

The exhibition is part of Kogo Gallery’s this year’s programme Performing Existence which looks into global and personal existential questions and presents some of the ways people perform to cope with them.

The exhibition is funded by the Cultural Endowment of Estonia and the City of Tartu.
Special thanks to VV Foundation and Valmiermuiža.

Curator: Šelda Puķīte
Production and public programme: Stella Mõttus
Administration: Liina Raus
Communication: Karin Kahre, Kristlyn Liier
Installation: Siim Asmer
Photo documentation: Marje Eelma
Event photography: Evelin Lumi
Graphic design: Aleksandra Samulenkova
Translation and language editing: Refiner Translations