Artists: Merike Estna, Jaime Lobato, Hasanlu Armastajad

Title: Borderlessness

Venue: Temnikova & Kasela, Tallinn

Photo: Hedi Jaansoo

At the heart of the exhibition by Merike Estna, Jaime Lobato and Hasanlu Armastajad are borders, borderlessness and their multiple meanings. Borders can act as a separators, limiters and definer of worlds – they divide but also protect. Yet, borderlessness can give rise to a synthesis of endless possibilities where transition is soft and gradual.

Hasanlu Armastajad is fascinated by the multiplicity of layers of time and space, soaring through the border zones of prehistory and the future as astral bodies, inspired by geological processes and archaeological finds, imagining a futuristic gaze bestowed upon our everyday present.

What will remain of our civilisation, looking back at it from a distance of thousands of years? Will compressed car wrecks and the skeletons of embracing lovers, frozen in a kiss in the past millennia be seen as fossils?

Estna and Lobato distil moments from the surrounding space-time, merging them into an intimate narrative, based on the dialogue between two artists and lovers – a symbiosis of ideas and creation.

The exhibition is structured in dualities both in its theme and its materiality. Via performative and craft methods, the push and pull between the contradictions of private and public, eternal and evanescent, tenderness and danger, wakefulness and slumber, separation and togetherness, accelerated productivity and decelerated mineralisation are discovered.

This is a biopoetical camino that started from isolation and separation, leading into togetherness in its polysemous multiplicity.

Text by Maria Arusoo

Graphic design: Martina Gofman
The exhibition is supported by Kuusakoski AS and Cultural Endowment of Estonia.
Thank you: Narva Art Residency, Publics, Saastamoinen Foundation, Aime and Priit Estna, Punch Drinks.