nomaadgalerie presents Honey en Route, the first solo exhibition in Paris by Estonian artist Rebeka Vaino.
As untangling yarn, the twisted world is knitted into different forms. Each one must shape it, forging a grid out of otherwise chaotic reality, weaving natural with artificial into a resilient coat of protection.
Crocheting, knitting and protective amulets resonate deeply as folkloric codes in Baltic culture, once serving as talismans of warmth and endurance for generations who survived wars, occupations, and scarcity. How to keep up the lightness, when ethos of today’s media lies heavy on us? What do we let through our cocoon layer of self? In Rebeka’s practice, these ancestral gestures are transfigured into soft yet rigid sculptural forms, rendering time tactile, each element serving as preservation of memories – comforting yet elusive, light but vigorous.
Being tangled in a constant grid of connection, moving from city to city for work and leisure – motion itself becomes a condition of being. As much as linked as divided, searching for a state of belonging in the vast web.
Somewhere in between Nicolas Bourriaud’s prediction of “portable cultures” and Marcel Duchamp’s portable museum La boîte en valise, Rebeka invites the visitor to depart Honey en Route with a portable emotional k[n]it—a protective charm for contemporary existence.
Last summer, Rebeka completed her Master’s degree at Goldsmiths, University of London, presenting A Portable Paradise: What would you pack in your case of emergency kit? alongside the performance The World Is Spinning Too Fast, I Need Something To Hold On To. Honey en Route continues this trajectory of embodied research practice: installations exploring materiality, ritual gesture, and Estonian pagan cosmologies, offering provisional sanctuaries within the turbulence of the present.
Rebeka Vaino
“HONEY EN ROUTE”
Curator: Eliza Ramza
Graphic design: Johanna Ruukholm
nomaadgalerie (9, rue Commines 75003 Paris)
21 October – 2 November 2 2025
Supported by: Ene Grauberg Foundation, Estonian Embassy in Paris
