SKUR 6: JAAN TOOMIK SOLO

Vernissage: SATURDAY, October 26 at 18:00 
Open: October 27 – December 1

Skur6
Exhibition is operated jointly by Tou Scene & Galleri SULT, entrance from Galleri SULT
Tue&Thu 12:00-19:00, Wed&Sat 12:00-17:00, Sun 12:00-16:00 
Strandkaien 61, 4005 Stavanger, Norway

What was of political importance in the art of the late 1980s and early 1990s in Estonia? If I am to address a case where personal history, transitional politics and creative ambition have come together, I can think of no better example than a set of works by Jaan Toomik.
Hanno Soans

Jaan Toomik can rightfully be considered a staple of Estonian contemporary art. He came to the fore in the late 1980s, and since the mid-90s, has been one of the most noteworthy and internationally recognized Estonian, and maybe also East European, artists. He has participated in the São Paulo Art Biennial (1994), Manifesta (1996), Berlin Biennale (2006) and naturally also the Venice Biennale, in both the national pavilion (1997) and also in the curator’s exhibition (2003).

Five video installations that span three decades are exhibited here, starting from one of his most famous work, Dancing Home from 1995, and ending with a new video that has been completed especially for this exhibition. However, the current show is not, and could not be, the “best of” his works. However, at the same time, an attempt was made to provide at least a cross-section of his work, even if it is not an exhaustive survey. Although both painting and sculpture/installation is part of Toomik’s arsenal, he has completed two short feature films and next year his first full-length feature film should reach the screen. However, he has garnered most of his fame with the short installation videos that are built around one fascinating image.

Already in 1994, Eha Komissarov wrote that permanence and repetitiveness, as the medium-specific traits of videos, are keywords that “Toomik develops, by dealing with movement in some way.”7 In Dancing Home (1995), we see an artist in the stern of a ferry dancing to the rhythm dictated by the engine. The monotonous pulsating of the ship’s engine, Toomik’s dance and movement are connected here at very different levels. This video is not about leaving or arriving anywhere, except for in the
title; this video has no beginning or end. Such fragmentary, pure images and performative gestures with no beginning or end, with no dramaturgy, pervade Toomik’s work. The Italian curator and critic, Marco Scotini, has pointed out the connections between Dancing Home and another video at this exhibition, namely, Run (2011), where we see the artist dashing through old aircraft hangars, and which also depicts movement: “Both works are metaphors of an existence that is autobiographical, singular, unrepeatable but – at the same time – generic, common and anonymous.

Sequences of behavior and forms of life, which, however normal and banal, are not necessarily limited by a biological condition but preserve the nature of ethical possibility. In other words, they are such that they call into question living itself”. As Scotini says, Toomik’s art is performative in nature – presented only here and now, in the first person – but at the same time, he never stages identity, which is constantly rebuffed, nor affiliation that is never achieved: “The manifestation of the the presence of one’s own body as a common body, ordinary within undefined collection of eventual acts reffers to the ritualistic nature of gestuality in order to bypass the rigid dichotomies of active/ passive, individual/ collective, psychic/ physical...” 

Toomik’s art delves into the deep layers of psychological experience, often extracting subconscious fears and dread, for example, in the video Seagulls, the central motif of which is an autobiographical image of the artist moving at the bottom of a pool, in a wheelchair. His only remaining connection with oxygen is a rubber hose, through which he is trying to communicate something that is almost impossible to understand, but which seems to be a poem where the word “kajakas” (seagull in Estonian) is often repeated. Toomik himself has commented on the video as follows: It is actually based on a nightmare I have had. The video expresses those frustrating physical restrictions often experienced in dreams (the inability to run fast, etc.) and clearly represents the struggle to communicate... Perhaps, it also expresses the fear of getting old or becoming handicapped and less physically capable, while still needing to express oneself.”

Toomik’s videos are often based on poorly worded corporeal or psychological experiences, but as images, they are often such that the viewers can recognize themselves. Leap or Run, which is dedicated to Toomik’s brother, who died young, are installations with autobiographical associations that are important for the artist, but as images of a performative gesture / experience they become associated with the viewers in a very different way. And this allows us to interpret them as socio-political, rather than existential gestures, which project social conditions more than the context of personal traumas.
There is some kind of industrial motif in all the works in this exhibition – be it related to sound or image, or a combination of both, like in the Dancing Home video. It is interesting to observe how this technodelic element, which is foreign to biological being, is constantly changing in Toomik’s work – either in the domesticating or repudiating phase, sometimes in harmonious unity, sometimes emphasizing inhumanity in the imagined situation of being.