Apocalypse Now
Open Air Artist Workshop on Pakri Peninsula August 2017
and an art exhibition at Amandus Adamson Studio Museum in Paldiski
and an art exhibition at Amandus Adamson Studio Museum in Paldiski
Pakri Nature Protection Area, next to Paldiski town, in northern Estonia. Before Estonian independence time, Pakri Peninsula was used as a Soviet military zone. It was a closed area for ordinary citizens and a Red Army base was located in Paldiski town. Paldiski has a port with enough deep bottom of the sea for military ships and ocean ships to come into port. While the whole peninsula was used by military only, there is now a quite green zone. After Soviet time collapse, the nature protection was created. But in Soviet time when it was closed for everyone else but the military, sadly the ground was polluted by the Soviet military. Great efforts are made by Estonian government to clean up the ground: oil, chemicals, and waste is collected over time so that now the whole environment is
much greener and recovered from the previous state.
We will organise an open-air artist workshop Apocalypse Now in summer 2017 (4th August-5 September 2017) on Pakri Peninsula that gives opportunity for artists and also visitors to acknowledge or remind of recent past history of this site with both context in the form of memory as well as politics of state where nature is used to hide and secure the violence. We will invite public for discussions and artist talks while working on the artworks in the open air workshop to outreach the real intention.
There will be an art exhibition going on at Amandus Adamson Studio Museum from the 8 of August,http://www.amandusadamson.eu/eng
There will be an art exhibition going on at Amandus Adamson Studio Museum from the 8 of August,http://www.amandusadamson.eu/eng
Meteor International is an artist network who will organise the workshop and the Open to Public artist talks during the workshops. They are based in Malmo in Sweden. We want to connect our artist group members from Sweden and Denmark to Estonian, Ukrainian, Finnish, Indian and US artists to make a closer network for future possibility of making art projects and exhibitions together and here it is an intense decision to incorporate all those nations, those who crossed through this struggle of partition and migration history in both ways like interstate and durational migration. Meteor initially started working in southern Sweden and we have been following and observed the changes of the European Union and Nordic countries nature and understanding of land politics and migration and refugee policies. Sweden has during the last year become a very closed nation due to the very restricted immigrant policy and strictly closed borders with every id card photographed by border guards, and we now feel a very great need to open connections to the rest of the world as artists. We think about the state of the world at the moment. The wars going on, the refugees everywhere. The military zones are still there and present politics seems to manifest how Cold war as it was not so long ago has still much importance.
The main idea of the artworks is that these should be connected with the workshop theme to remind hard times in past of Pakri Peninsula and to keep in mind the immigration and refugee problematics in our Nordic countries and the conflicts that are appearing today in other parts of the world as well as in Europe.
We have invited artists from Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Estonia,Lithuania,India, and US.
Artist-curators Tamara de Laval and Rait Rosin are more concerned about the artistic approach than curatorial ones. We challenge the invited artists with a dramatic theme, Apocalypse Now, and give them an opportunity to experiment with their ways of expressing their opinion in different contexts and in different exhibition formats. We accept that each artist has a unique way of expressing her/himself. A traditional gallery space with limited conditions in Amandus Adamson Studio Museum in Paldiski http://www.amandusadamson.eu/eng and the open nature of Pakri Peninsula are bound to be a variable exhibition stage. Our concept for this project stresses the political situation in Europe and the world today and also it will raise a question about the changing role of the artist in a contemporary and quite chaotic world of today. Art as practice had its traditional role, but today it gets more and more variable functions that were not given to it before. We call artists to meet and get to know each other and to get time to discuss their practices as well as to explore different exposition places and spaces to try to find more precise ways to express our way of thinking. This project is important to contextualise nature in a larger meaning as well, where nature of life and politics of life cross each other in an artistic manner. During and throughout the project, nature will be surrounding all of the artists in every step of the development in the social sphere. This project will be a hint of positive signals in the form of art activity which we will place in nature and this will give possible reactions to the community around about this vulnerable time.
R. Rosin & T. de Laval
METEOR INTERNATIONAL
Supported by :
Paldiski City
Contact : meteor.tamara@gmail.com
