Photo reportage from the exhibition 'That blue House on Baeri street' in Tartu, Estonia

March 2, 2021
Author Echo Gone Wrong

“That blue House on Baeri street” was an apartment exhibition and performance showcase that lasted for one day. As 24th of February is a national Estonian holiday, the majority of art audiences have a day off but so do exhibitions. The showcase offered to fill the gap that it left while exploring the idea of a gap through experimental approaches. During nine hours 15 artists or artist duos showcased their ideas in form of an installation, a performative or interactive installation, reading of a text piece, musical performance or durational performance, revealing itself in contact with the audience.

Curators: Riin Maide and Nele Tiidelepp

Artists: Liisbeth Horn (and Mait Vesker), Robin Isenmann, Saara Liis Jõerand, Gregor Kulla, Maria Izabella Lehtsaar, Liz Lethal, Janne Lias, Riin Maide, Anumai Raska, Geil Studio, Marta Talvet, Nele Tiidelepp, Raul Markus Vaiksoo, Mattias Veller

We are located in an apartment that has been put on hold for an unknown period. The rooms are spacious and inviting, but no one has moved in here. There is an expectation that something will happen, it is a matter of motivation. The rooms are almost empty, except for a few chairs and a leather sofa. The plaster panels have been cut out of the wall in some places, the floorboards have been pulled up. The apartment exists in a short moment before the decisions which have dragged out endlessly.

The apartment is a metaphor for the times we are living in – we are constantly threatened by stopping and cancellation. The past is getting further and further away and the expected future is not yet coming. We exist in the emptiness between a certain past and an uncertain future.

The lack of something is an opportunity. We can study emptiness when we acknowledge that it does not exist. Life still flows, moments are still passing. The future is not born from the past to which we look back nostalgically, the future is born now. At the moment when one normality changes to another, we are greeted with new reality!

We have filled the exhibition space with scenarios of alternative everyday, where you constantly see yourself from another perspective. Everything is the same as usual, but the feeling is different. Observations from everyday life become clumsy when translated. By putting our surroundings into words, we make a failed attempt to put ourselves into words.

The most important things pass by unnoticed. There is an unstable fluctuation between different moods, times, intensity of attention. We are weak, we are saturated, anxious. We stack Great and Small Histories and peel off layers. We enter into a dialogue with the void. We have a game and the rules. We break and set them over and over again.

The Blue House on Baeri street is one of those places where we can create and recreate. The participating artists come from different walks of life, from different backgrounds. We juxtapose different approaches so that the experience could cut into all of the senses. Only for a day, but that little is needed for any house on Baeri street to become that blue house!

Photography: by Henri Tabur and Stina Leek