On Saturday, as part of the Ukrainian contemporary art festival UKUfest, an art intervention lasting just four hours took place in Tallinn’s Tammsaare Park. Ukrainian artist Daria Koltsova’s work “Camouflage” covered the statue of A.H. Tammsaare as a way of exploring the vulnerability and protective power of culture during wartime.
During the public installation, artist Daria Koltsova covered the A. H. Tammsaare statue in central Tallinn with an art object in the form of a camouflage net.
The object was made from strips of paintings by Koltsova along with artwork donated by Estonian artists. After originally being created on canvas, the paintings were then cut into pieces and used to form a net.
The net was completed in the four weeks before the start of the Ukrainian contemporary art festival UKUfest, with the help of numerous volunteers including members of Estonia’s camouflage net weaving communities.
Last week, Alice Järvet, head organizer of UKUfest told ERR News that the installation would be unveiled with no opening ceremony.
“It is a quietly thought-provoking artistic action that also guides the audience further into the galleries,” Järvet said. “We believe this intervention in urban space will bring the audience emotionally closer to the current mental state of Ukrainian citizens. It also explains a little bit about why we started UKUfest.”
UKUfest’s main and satellite programs continue until Monday, June 30 at galleries throughout the Estonian capital.
As part of the festival, Daria Koltsova also opened her new stained glass installation “The Kiosk” at the Temnikova & Kasela Gallery in Tallinn’s Noblessner district.
“Kiosks used to form an eclectic meeting and trading space of the common people – places to buy snacks, drinks or newspapers, to exchange news, account for the latest rumors; an easy going moment to socialize,” Koltsova wrote in the text accompanying the installation.
“Kiosks as a subculture, but also as architectural objects transformed into almost contemporary art pieces, countless interrelated objects are woven together into a colorful mess, in which one can hardly notice the salesperson who drowns in his supplies.”
“Inspired by this spontaneous visual language, I filled the windows of the kiosk with stained glass postcards, memories of the land I love and miss, the land that might be partly destroyed, but symbolic pieces of it are saved in the permanence of these images,” Koltsova wrote.
“The landscapes are simplified to the visual codes, composition of colorful stripes, like the Ukrainian flag. What is a postcard? A symbolic piece of land, that one can keep with them or share with others. Places change, sometimes beyond recognition, but the postcard stores it the way it used to be.”
More information about UKUfest, including the main and satellite programs can be found here.
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