ROGALAND KUNSTSENTER: LITTLE HOUSE IN THE PERIPHERY

Vernissage: SATURDAY, October 26 at 19:00 
Open: October 27 – December 1

Rogaland Kunstsenter / Rogaland Contemporary Art Centre
Tue-Fri 10:00-15:00, Sat-Sun 12:00-16:00 
Nytorget 17, 4013 Stavanger, Norway 
www.rogalandkunstsenter.no

artists:
Kristiina Hansen & Johannes Säre, Johnson ja Johnson, Flo Kasearu, Kristina Norman

The title Little House in the Periphery is borrowed from Johannes Säre and Kristiina Hansen’s micro installation of the same name, which, in turn, refers to the legendary TV series Little House on the Prairie. As a cultural product, where Sentimentality is cleverly united with the Didactic and Moralizing, this series unavoidably feels like the transference of Biedermeier-like bourgeois values to mid-20th-century America. The installation, which was created as a paraphrase by Säre and Hansen, is an excellent metaphor for contemporary Estonia – a splendid and small, but quite provincial country, which paradoxically is a diligent student of global neo-liberalism, while simultaneously being quite a sentimental and xenophobic, yet not especially religious, but doubly conservative country. The growing populist nationalism, which is accompanied by a hatred of strangers and by racism, affects Norway just as much as Estonia, and is becoming a problem throughout Europe. As we all found out several years ago, die Zeit der Multikulti ist vorbei. Naturally, multiculturalism in the meaning of the Post Modernism of the 80s is over, but does this necessarily entail the return of nationalism and xenophobia?

Nationality and identity are really among the primary keywords of this exhibition. One of the central ethnic conflicts of Estonian society is based on the differing approaches to history and attitudes toward Estonian history of two communities – the Estonians and the Russians. Estonians generally believe that the Soviet Union occupied Estonia in 1940, and first forced the Republic to accept the military bases agreement, and thereafter, supported by their armed forces, carried out a coup. However, many Russians believe that Estonia joined the Soviet Union voluntarily in 1940, and that the Soviet armed forces liberated Estonia from the German occupation in 1945. In 2007, these differences of opinion culminated in the so-called Bronze Night riots, on 26th and 27th April, at the statue of the Bronze Soldier, where the “Eternal Flame” had burned previously, and which the Estonian Government wanted to move, from its location in the city center, to the Armed Forces Cemetery. (This conflict is very thoroughly examined in the documentary Alyosha by Meelis Muhu, which will be screened in the frames of the film program Little House in the Periphery at the KINOKINO.)

The artists Johnson ja Johnson have employed sculpture for opposite reasons in Paldiski, a formerly closed military town that is located about 50 kilometers west of Tallinn, where half the population is Estonian and half is Russian. When the Johnsons went to Paldiski for the first time in 2006, the studio museum and person of Amandus Adamson, a sculptor from the turn of the 20th century who hailed from Paldiski, seemed to form the main signifier of identity and provided a significant common ground for

the diversified population. Adamson’s work was known, recognized and respected by both the Estonian-speaking and Russian-speaking residents. With the help of a copy of an Amandus Adamson sculpture, which the artists hope to erect in Paldiski, and which the residents chose themselves based on a survey, the Johnsons want to achieve the following goals: “To create a common identity for the multicultural and multinational population, and to produce motivated participants involved in the decision-making process, to expand the space for negotiations between individuals and
the society, and to create a discussion and dialogue platform. The chosen and erected Adamson sculpture is not only an aesthetic object and the eventual final goal of the project, but since the beginning, has been a city sculpture charged with social significance.”
The artists decided to increase the self-awareness of the marginalized residents of the former military town by approaching them as a community and agitating them to work together. At the same time, one could ask whether the project can even be considered to have succeeded, because the final goal of erecting the Adamson sculpture has yet to be accomplished due to the lack of money, despite the collection boxes that have been put out in the town’s public institutions. Airi Triisberg writes the following about this: “Within the framework of the Paldiski Project, the artists set out to create a situation in which the residents of Paldiski would experience dealing with an elementary collective organization. Therefore, the project was directed more at the process than at a tangible end result (although one could argue about whether the artists could have proposed something more progressive, instead of yet another academic sculpture). Primarily, the artist duo of Johnson ja Johnson used the Adamson sculpture as a tool or trigger, that could help them create practical knowledge and experience related to the methods of implementing direct democracy among the Paldiski residents.”
In her latest film, called Common Ground (2012), Kristina Norman, who, during the last decade has traveled similar paths as the Johnsons, and who has dealt with the relations between the Estonians and Russians living in Estonia, painfully and strikingly juxtaposes the stories of different generations of refugees, their fates and attitudes toward the countries where they have applied for asylum. The protagonists of Norman’s film are Estonians who fled to Sweden in 1944-45 in the final years of WWII in order to escape the Soviet Army; and the people, from very different countries, who are applying for asylum in Estonia, and are currently housed in the Illuka refugee camp in a far corner of Eastern Estonia. They all think that they have a strong case, and that Estonia should definitely grant them asylum. It has often been said that Norman is very skillful at politicizing historical memory and spatial experience, and while here it may not be as obvious as in some of her other works, then in Common Ground as well, the artist nevertheless reaches a convincing synthesis.

The two works by Flo Kasearu that are included in this exhibition – the photo series titled Re-Enacting Revolution (2010), which was created together with Tanel Rannala, and the video titled Estonian Dream
(2011) – are both examinations of certain identity shifts or even false identifications. Rannala and Kasearu took the photos for their series in 2008 – 20 years after the memorable year of 1988. The “night song festivals” that developed spontaneously in that year gave their name to an entire movement – the Singing Revolution. If this was a grassroots anarchistic self-organization, an act of civil disobedience and of people’s free will, then the Märkamisaeg4 event that was meant to commemorate the former, was a canonical celebration organized by the government – the manifestation of a dominant identity model. In the context of Negri and Hardt, these events could be approached based on the opposite concepts of constitutive and established power, where the former can be understood as an opening up of possibilities, of playing out particular situations, and the creation of multiple opportunities and the latter only a practice directed at the reproduction of itself and the preservation of the status quo.  At the same time, it must be admitted that the latter, massively financed state event, which was definitely filled with much more pathos, was just as well- attended as the “original” that was replayed 20 years later.

Although Kasearu named the photo series Re-Enacting Revolution, a revolution is actually impossible to re-enact like some 18th century battle. If the original was a manifestation of freedom, a manifestation of the insubordination of the people, then the re-enactment of a revolution is inevitably a crystallized manifestation of the dominant order and power. And therefore, equating the original and the re-enactment can be called a massive, false identification. After all, what is the real difference of the Märkamisaeg from the October Revolution demonstrations during the Soviet period?

A similar identification shift is also central to the Estonian Dream video installation. The main character in Estonian Dream is a YouTube heroine and Estonian girl who posts videos under the pseudonym Texasgirly1979. She is married to an American, and apparently, has been living in the United States for a long time already. Kasearu used the postings on her video blog as the basis for the video, and made a relatively funny and embarrassing, but also dreadful, portrait film. We see how the heroine intensively sympathizes with the Estonians that are kidnapped in Lebanon, as well as with her dogs that win medals at various dog shows. She is completely alienated from the world and living a safe and rosy fairy tale, with which she surrounds herself on a daily basis, in order to hide her true feelings. As Rael Artel pointedly noted, she has totally accepted, and has been absorbed by the American Dream, and now her onetime dream of life in America has been replaced by a strange “Estonian Dream”.6 She has clearly an inadequate – idealized and naïve – relationship with her homeland, and actually, a tragic yearning for her home shines through. However, her means of expression are hopelessly Americanized, and cannot hide the actual loneliness radiating through her postings. Kasearu’s video does not try to put her down, but rather attempts to create an intriguing and empathetic portrait based on her own material.
The Little House in the Periphery exhibition may even not be dealing as much with nationality and identity as the topics surrounding it – conflicts, interpretations, false interpretations and false identifications, which could cast doubt on the seriousness and totality of the construction. The program of documentary films at KINOKINO on November 9th is also directly related to the exhibition.