REVIEW
VIDEO
Festives Spaces,
2016
Kristina Norman
Artist
T
he video Festive Spaces was originally commissioned by Annely Porri for the
exhibition Silence. Darkness. – If we know what was, do we know what will come?
The show was on display at Tallinn Art Hall in autumn 2016. In the video, I explore
how art can be subjected and reassigned by different political regimes.
Festive Spaces(1) is a documentation of a dramatized lecture-performance which I
structured around the notion of a festive space and presented as a series of imagination
exercises. There are three ceremonial halls that I connect in the piece and which are
representative of different ideological regimes of Estonian history. All the three rooms
are the most festive spaces in the institutional buildings where they are located, but only
two of them are decorated with art. The first one is the main hall of the Estonian History
Museum, situated in the historical Maarjamäe castle. As its decoration, it has the largest
mural ever painted in Estonia – The Friendship of Nations by Evald Okas (2), one of the
most renowned Estonian painters of the Soviet time. Okas painted the mural at the decline
of the Soviet era, in 1987. The second room scrutinized in the video is the White Hall in
Toompea castle which is the home to Riigikogu, the Parliament of Estonia. There you have
two lunette paintings from 1937 - The Triumph of Estonia and Industry and Agriculture
by August Jansen (3), an artist on familiar terms with the authoritarian government of the
pre-WWII sovereign Estonia . The last of the three rooms I am discussing in the piece is
the ceremonial hall of a Russian-language school in Lasnamäe district of Tallinn (4) . As
already mentioned, regardless that the hall is supposed to be the most festive space of the
institution, it appears to have no decoration at all. In my lecture, I try to bring into view the
political significance of these aesthetic circumstances of the three halls.
70
Observing Memories
ISSUE 2