Jaanus Samma, Not Suitable For Work. A Chairman’s Tale

Center for Contemporary Arts, Estonia, is proud to present the Estonian Pavilion at the 56th 

International Art Exhibition — La Biennale di Venezia, with a new project from emerging Estonian artist Jaanus Samma, Not Suitable For Work. A Chairman’s Tale, curated by eminent Italian curator Eugenio Viola. NSFW. A Chairman’s Tale is a fragmented fictive opera, which follows a Soviet Estonian collective farm chairman, on trial for acts of homosexuality in the 1960s. The exhibition will bring together archive materials from the Soviet Estonia and the elegant aesthetics of opera. 

Since 2007, Jaanus Samma has focused his artistic research on collecting the hidden histories of gay lives in Soviet Estonia. Not Suitable for Work. A Chairman’s Tale is based on rumours and the criminal file of war hero and family man kolkhoz chairman Juhan Ojaste (1921–90). Due to his involvement in homosexual acts, Ojaste was expelled from the Communist Party and later sentenced to one and a half years in a labor camp. Following the loss of his social status as well as his dignity, family and job, Ojaste moved towns, where, as an ex-convict, he was offered only low-status jobs. In 1990, just a year before Estonia regained independence and homosexuality was decriminalised, Ojaste was murdered, allegedly by a Russian marine and male prostitute. The baroque-opera-like plot of a simple man, NSFW. A Chairman’s Tale aims to connect the social debate on LGBTI rights, with the broader issue of the violation of fundamental human rights, as common in the past as in present. 

The exhibition is accompanied by a two volume publication designed by Brit Pavelson and co-published by Sternberg Press and CCA, Estonia. The catalogue consists of contributions by commissioner Maria Arusoo, curator Eugenio Viola, writer Maarja Kangro, artist and activist Slava Mogutin, scholar Kevin Moss, Rebeka Põldsam and historian Riikka Taavetti, a compilation of the Chairman’s criminal file, and excerpts from personal accounts of the Chairman edited by Martin Rünk and Jaanus Samma.

La Biennale di Venezia is the oldest and largest international art fair. Participating since 1997, this is the tenth time Estonia is exhibiting. Center for Contemporary Arts, Estonia, is the official representative of the Estonian exposition at la Biennale di Venezia.

This project is supported by the Estonian Ministry of Culture, Borenius Attorneys at Law, Temnikova&Kasela Gallery, DSV Global Transport and Logistics and produced in collaboration with Fagerhult, Valge Kuup, Signature House, Lahepuu and FORM.

Jaanus Samma (b. 1982, Tallinn) lives and works in Tallinn, Estonia. Since 2011, he has been studying towards a PhD at the Estonian Academy of Arts, Tallinn. In 2013, he won Estonia’s most prestigious contemporary art award, the Köler Prize grand-prix, as well as the audience award. Recent exhibitions include Hair Sucks! Sweater Shop (Tallinn Art Hall Gallery, 2014), Feeling Queezy?! (EKKM, Tallinn, 2014), Is This The Museum We Wanted? (Tartu Art Museum, 2014) and After-Life of Gardens (Kumu Art Museum, 2013).

 

Eugenio Viola, PhD (b. 1975, Naples) is an art critic and Curator at Large at MADRE – Contemporary Art Museum of Donnaregina, Naples. He is a scholar of theories and practices related to performance and body art. On this subject he has edited monographs devoted to Hermann Nitsch (Ed. Morra, Naples, 2013), Marina Abramović (Ed. 24 Ore Cultura, Milan, 2012), and Orlan (Ed. Charta, Milan, 2007). Viola has curated a number of catalogues and exhibitions internationally, including Karol Radziszewski—The Prince and Queens. The Body as an Archive (Center of Contemporary Art, Torun, 2014); Francis Alys—Reel-Unreel the Afghan Projects (Madre Museum, Naples, 2014); Mark Raidpere—The Damage (EKKM, Tallinn, 2013); Marina Abramović—The Abramović Method (PAC | Padiglione di Arte Contemporanea, Milan, 2012).

Since 2007, Estonian artist Jaanus Samma has focused his research on collecting stories of gay lives in Soviet Estonia. Sharing the same interest, the project Not Suitable for Work. A Chairman’s Tale draws from the life of Juhan Ojaste (1) (1921–1990), a war hero and “family man”, who was a successful chairman of a kolkhoz, i.e. a collective farm in Soviet Estonia. In 1964, he was arrested and then expelled from the Communist Party due to his involvement in homosexual acts. A degrading trial was followed by a sentence of one and a half year of hard labour. Following the loss of his social status as well as his dignity, family and job, Ojaste was forced to move to a different town, where he could hold only menial positions. In the end, he was murdered by an alleged Russian male prostitute, a year before Estonia regained independence and homosexuality was decriminalised.

From a micro-historical perspective, Jaanus Samma links the public and collective dimension of History with the private and biographical qualities of the chronicle. An archival impulse (Foster) investigates memory and images, documents and their representation, in order to restore a window into a period governed by an authoritarian regime. As a matter of fact “a heightened sense of urgency surrounds the demand to remember and commemorate in societies where social codes of communication have been historically unstable or pre-empted by state repression” (Enwezor).(2)

Despite their different reasons, both the Annales school, from Bloch to Le Goff, along with some Marxist historians like Hobsbawm on one side, and several thinkers, such as Benjamin, Arendt, and Foucault on the other agree on turning the projective thought to the past instead of the future, using, according to Agamben, an archaeological approach to the present. Samma adopts a similar strategy, which is highlighted by the title Not Suitable For Work taken from internet slang (3) and applied to Chairman’s tale in order to emphasise the precarious professional and social position of all individuals subjected to the scrutiny of power. Moreover, the computer terminology refers to the pervading nature of media society, which turns us into passive witnesses of history and its discriminations, discords and contradictions.

The social debate on LGBTI rights intercepts the wider issue of the violation of fundamental human rights, so common in the past and the current day alike. In this sense, the Chairman’s story becomes the tip of the iceberg for a broader denouncement addressed at all kinds of discrimination: cultural, social, political, religious, sexual and racial. Therefore, once again, in order to remind us that art is always for the co-existence of differences.

Eugenio Viola

1. Name changed in accordance with the Estonian Personal Data Protection Act.

2. O. Enwezor, “Homo Sovieticus: Postcommunist Archives”, in Archive Fever. Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art, catalogue published in conjunction with the homonymous exhibition, organised by Okwui Enwezor for the International Center of Photography, New York (18 January – 4 May 2008), co-published by the International Center of Photography, New York, and Steidl Publishers, Göttingen, Germany, 2008, p. 37.

3. Usually rendered with the acronym NSFW as a warning of sexually explicit or potentially offensive internet content that might be considered inappropriate in a working environment or in situations of limited privacy

Mostre a Palazzo Malipiero

Estonian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale - Dénes Farkas - Evident in Advance

The exhibition EVIDENT IN ADVANCE develops a vast diapason of issues, grouped around the elusiveness of language, the (im)possibilities of translation and the logic of infinite re-translations. Its concept is playfully inspired by an adventurous storyline of American writer, Bruce Duffy’s ground-breaking novel, „The World As I Found It“ (1987), a melange of fiction and reality, truth and fake, where history, biography and philosophy are intertwined in a witty narrating of lifes of three philosphers, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Bertrand Russell, and G. E. Moore.

Here, on the pages of this fascinating book, contemplation, free thinking and magnetic philosophy construct an architecture of thought, precise and logic, but unstable too, challenged by a polymorphousness of sense and meaning.

The exhibition in Estonian Pavilion is orchestrated as a composition based upon a slightly varying sets of a (as if musical) score: the articulations of the same story created from the carefully deconstructed novel and from other related sources (the texts of the above mentioned philosophers, texts of the authors and co-authors of the project) are spatialized within a give physical space and a mental space of the viewer’s perceptive field. Here, we are at the threshold of a meaning’s construction as an on-going study of a repetition and silence.

The very act of working with the original text – taking apart, dismantling, editing and appropriating – is conducted under a supervision and a control of the author of the novel himself – a mastermind – and assisted by a linguist, an expert of sorts, a passionate of words, letters, and their troublesome relationships and by a scholar, an expert in echoes and resonances, shadow-meanings and their secret influence.

The rigid interior architecture of Estonian Pavilion with a vast entrance-hallway and adjacent living-rooms writes a potential scenario of a master-narrative and chapter-like episodes. The rooms are chamber-minds – rough references to situations, positions and spaces that surround a more complex, almost questionably standard-like exhibition space. A close collaboration with an architect should help to deal with such a complex construction site by turning it into a realm of criticality where language is perceived as a mathematical issue in a truly Wittgensteinian way.

The exhibition’s concept relies upon elements that come from various fields of culture and knowledge production. A variety of direct references in a spatial concept of related rooms but also the articulation of the main thought are fueled by the ideas of collections, archives, museums, libraries, but also of dictionaries, indices and cataloging. They deal with the systems of order and classification and correspond with the usage of and relationality between public and private spaces. How do we understand the same word or sentence in dissimilar surroundings? How do we communicate in different situations? How do we write space? How can we achieve a real communication with a medium of an exhibition?

Challenged by Bruce Duffy’s act of a narrative forgery, the exhibition explores a doubt and suspension of belief by a further reconsideration of the thoughts of the author’s protagonists in a reasonably critical way. Breaking up the imaginary story and creating a whole new dizzy polylogue produces an intriguing but also heavily coded play. The narrative is not eventual – the visitor, drawn in a textual net, is supposed to become a part of a unique story. Various fragments of the main text and elements of a stage paired in different forms, mostly not visibly at first sight, contribute to a new geometry of a site, both physical and mental. A relatively silent play on a very simple and restrained stage – an artificial setting, very likely just a model, existing only as reproductions on photographs, puzzles of a generic cartography. Here, we are in a realm of palimpsest, overlap of texts, an ivory towers of memory, history and contemporary desire to replay the times past.

However EVIDENT IN ADVANCE rejects a hyper-narrative which would emphasize the fabricated mastery and perfection of a human mind. Instead, it focuses on errors and logical mistakes, moments of weakness and inability. From the very beginning, being haunted by its predictability, the narrative is condemned to a delicious failure and collapse. Aware of such a fate, the project in a Beckettian way exercises its own inabilities in an ritualistic act of repetition and seriality.

Here, there is a maze of almost identical rooms, acting like words in a lost sentence before its articulation. What are we saying? Why are we saying (it)? The content and its pronounciation are seemingly blurred. How do we understand (it)? How are we trying to put bits of information together in order to construct a useful and meaningful story? The process of production and the act of reception concentrate on such questions. The despair conducts the deconstruction of a text and the assemblage of installations. Using the same words and the same sentences and even the same logical constructions, we are still in a danger of manouvering through misled areas of meaning and common sense.

Proustian paraphrase „a la recherche de la recit perdu“ (mis)guids the authors of this project. In order to receive instructions how to navigate in the exhibition’s real and imaginary space, it is necessary to open and study the specially created books, while walking around and examining the potential connections between images, objects and words, sentences and episodes. It is not the authors’ intention to create a well recognizable exhibition-like setting as a whole. Eventually the aim is to generate a bit dysfunctional interactive installation within such familiar although uncanny spaces.

Playing with the fragments and resetting the acknowledged codes of a play but also desperately trying to decipher the borders – the end and the beginning – and, last but not least, the center, a guarantee of the meaning of the story; a story which might not beconstructable; or the one which does not exist at all; a phantasmagoria.

Dénes Farkas
Evident in Advance

June 1–November 24, 2013
Palazzo Malipiero
San Samuele Square, S. Marco 3199

Center for Contemporary Arts, Estonia is proud to announce that artist Dénes Farkas will represent Estonia at the 55th International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia with his project Evident in Advance, curated by Adam Budak.

info = http://www.evident-in-advance.com