Marleen Suvi’s personal exhibition ‘We’ve Never Lived in a House’ brings together 16 large-scale canvases to form a major installation, which concerns itself with the topics of memory and family. The exhibition runs until August 8.
The paintings are based on the artist’s family photo albums, and according to the curator Aleksander Metsamärt, the exhibition reveals two main themes: firstly, the relationship between memory and memory carriers arising from the paintings created on the basis of photographs, secondly, the theme of the private house arising from the form of the installation and the period-specific context associated with it. At the crossroads of the two themes, we find the artist herself, offering an insight into her own memories with an intimately personal and a paradoxical universality.
For the artist these times are past, her past which she herself cannot [retreat/crawl] back to. A past from which forms and figures emerge, that are almost familiar, but not quite just. Not like they are here, in this picture, in this apartment, in this year – somewhere in the mid-nineties, when everyone wore clothes made out of those materials, the feel of which, to this day, the nerve endings of your synapses can still sense somewhere at the back of your mind; clothes, that in their quaintness and slight old-fashionedness still manage to warm your heart.
Curated by Aleksander Metsamärt
Technical team: Erik Hõim, Mihkel Ilus, Oliver Kanniste, Erik Liiv, Avo Tragel, Mattias Veller
Graphic design by Rainer Kasekivi
The exhibition is supported by the Cultural Endowment of Estonia.
Photography: Kaisa Maasik
