On the last weekend of the exhibition »Capital (It Fails Us Now)« at the Kunstihoone, the new art museum Kumu, designed by the Finnish architect Pekka Vapaavuori, was opened. The highest political honours on both the Estonian and Finnish side accompanied this symbolic show of strength by the young nation. The construction of a national museum of art had been decided upon in the very first phase of the state’s foundation in 1920 and had waited to be implemented ever since. Now the building could be constructed with the help of additional funding from lottery money and casino cheques.
The pictures in the Kumu reflect the turbulent history of the foreign rule of Estonia – from portraits of Baltic German nobles to the monumentalist pictures of Stalin (which are being shown for the first time since Estonia became independent). In the nineties, Estonia reduced state intervention and opened the way for neoliberalism. The structural change can also be seen in the most recent transformation of the silhouette of the Hanseatic city Talinn (Reval), whose character was formed in the Middle Ages - it is now ridden with the towering glass and steel constructions, built using capital from international investors, which are pushing aside the striking local wood and limestone houses.
Into these surroundings, the curator, Simon Sheik, inserted the exhibition »Capital (It Fails Us Now)«, produced by the NIFCA, which had supported critical curating for some time. The title of the show is taken from the song of the same name by the group Gang of Four. With the works on display, Sheik undertakes the attempt to show how capitalism intervenes in everyday life and, most commendably, presents works that generate counter-strategies and resistance: collective and subjective alternatives to, and representations of, global capitalism, works dealing with the erosion of social welfare in Europe and the massive deregulation taking place in post-communist countries. The curator goes looking for convincing models of visualisation, asking himself the question whether, in analogy to Michel Foucault’s »non-fascistic life«, there can be a »non-capitalistic subject«.
»What is to be done«, the famous quote from Lenin (after Chernyshevsky), can also be seen as a theme running through the exhibition, and is even explicitly present as a title in two works (it also occurs in a figurative sense in many others, such as those by Oliver Ressler and Fia-Stina Sandlund). Susan Kelly and Stephen Morton initiated the project »What is to be done« as a travelling archive. The installation is based on elements from Alexander Rodchenko’s workers’ reading room of 1925 – Rodchenko set up the reading room as a refuge for the schooling of the intellect after the trials and tribulations of gainful employment – and contains a series of short statements and questions on themes regarding employment and immaterial work. As a participatory project, »What is to be done« is meant to be applied by the visitors to the present day. How can a dialogue be provoked that, at best, can bring about an economic and political change?
The »Praise of Dialectics« by Brecht is an important source for the work of »Platform Chto delat?«, a group of artists and activists from St. Petersburg. Tsaplya, Olga Egorova, Nikolay Oleynikov and Dmitry Vilensky use quotes from it in the convincing performance »Angry Sandwich People« with the activists of the group »Worker’s Democracy« and »The Pyotr Alexeev Resistance Movement«. A free newspaper with the title »Why Brecht?« intensified the project (www.chtodelat.org).
The installation »The Hidden Flow Shop« by Andrea Creutz focuses on an alternative economy. It is based on the central concept of the »ecological rucksack«, »ER«, calculated by the Wuppertal Institute for Climate, Environment and Energy. The artist offers various products to be swapped on the basis of the alternative currency of the »ER«.
The works of the group associated with Stephan Geene display decoration in the critical mode of reflexivity. They explore the representation of the animal kingdom and fabulous creatures in the transnational market system: logos of global players like Puma, the Generali lion, or more local contexts like a Meissen monkey with a rococo wig, the eagle as a heraldic animal, fur, masks …
Ashley Hunt is concerned not only with conveying theoretical content, but also looks at the power of seduction in a huge decorative tableau in coloured pastels. In »A World Map«, he presents the crisis of capitalism not as a geographic phenomenon, but as social, cultural and political phenomena, and depicts its network of connections. Katya Sander’s video »What is Capitalism?« presents a questionnaire on the same theme in no-man’s-land with very different results. In his video »Wandering Marxwards«, a presentation of self-portraits of the artist reading »Das Kapital« by Karl Marx, Michael Blum takes a humorous and ironic approach. »The Factory of Escape« by the Copenhagen Free University is placed strategically as a kind of motto of the exhibition, namely at the staircase, and means both the beginning and the end of the exhibition and an option of action. The identification with the aesthetic movements of modernism was part of the national symbolic inventory of the briefly independent Estonia in the twenties. Neoliberalism, which this show criticises, is today a constitutive figure in the foundation of the new young Estonia.
Translated by Timothy Jones