Solo exhibition by Patricia Piccinini at Kai Art Centre

2021 01 22 — 2021 04 25 at Kai Art Center
Author Echo Gone Wrong
Published in Events in Estonia

Kai Art Center will present a major solo exhibition by Patricia Piccinini, which opens 8 January 2021. Piccinini creates anthropomorphic sculptures that explore the relationship between the artificial and the natural, humans and their environment, the viewer and the artwork. She uses an array of materials including silicone, leather, and human hair, and works in a variety of media – painting, video, sound, installation – to create captivating worlds in which science and mythology, the imaginary and the real, human, machine and nature become intertwined. At the heart of Piccinini’s practice are themes of fecundity – the potential of life – empathy, connection and wonder. Piccinini’s first solo exhibition in Estonia includes major group of sculptures created over the course of her career and a new video work The Awakening (2020) – a celebration of the body as a site of production that speaks about rebirth and renewal, whilst lending the entire exhibition its accompanying soundtrack of a pulsating heartbeat. The exhibition has been curated by Anna Mustonen.

Patricia Piccinini is one of Australia’s most acclaimed contemporary artists. She is best known for her hybrid, figurative sculptures rendered in silicone and hair. Piccinini was born in 1965 in Freetown, Sierra Leone, West Africa. In 1972, the family moved to Australia, where Piccinini grew up. Today she lives and works in Melbourne. Piccinini holds a bachelor’s degree in economics from the Australian National University in Canberra and a bachelor’s degree in visual arts from the Victorian College of the Arts in Melbourne, where she has been a professor since 2017. Patricia Piccinini’s exhibition We are Family was Australia’s official representation for the 50th Venice Biennale in 2003.

Anna Mustonen is an Independent Curator and Curatorial Director at daata.art currently based in Helsinki, Finland. Mustonen has fifteen years of experience from both public and private sectors having worked at museums such as Tate Modern (London) and Kumu Art Museum (Tallinn), and internationally renowned galleries Victoria Miro (London) and Haunch of Venison (London). In 2019 Mustonen curated major exhibition Distant Land by Pentti Sammallahti for Fotografiska Tallinn and Stockholm, and she was the curator of Patricia Piccinini’s solo exhibition Between Shadow and the Soul at Taidehalli, Helsinki in 2020.