13.3. — 3.5.2026
Critical Gallery invited Kristina Norman to exhibit her Orchidelirium film trilogy. The trilogy was originally commissioned for the Estonian Pavilion at the 59th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia (2022).
The exhibition also includes a side program: CRITICAL CLUB — Kristina Norman will have an artist talk in the gallery on Saturday, 11.4.2026 at 3 pm.
ORCHIDELIRIUM ELOKUVATRILOGIA
Kristina Norman’s ORCHIDELIRIUM FILM TRILOGY offers multiple ways to reflect on the legacies of colonialism. Investigating forgotten connections between Eastern Europe and the global south, it relates to the post-Socialist countries’ often uncomfortable rediscovery of their colonial history. The trilogy departs from research on an Estonian couple, Emilie and Andres Saal who end up as members of the colonial administration and elite in the Dutch colony in Indonesia in the late nineteenth century. Working with the Saals’ life stories and archives, Norman is intrigued by the conversion of the colonized into the colonizer and the hybrid identities resulting from this, full of controversies and tensions. Thus from a more global perspective her films also speak about the anxious relations between the colonial elites and the colonial subjects, and the ever-present afterlife of those liaisons. Including acts by three performance artists, the films explore the longing for privilege and abundance, as well as the environmental effect of these desires on the invisible consumption of human labour and non-human animals, plants, soil and water in the age of the Anthropocene. Being first and foremost interested in the contemporaneity of colonial past, the films explore the workings of neo-colonialism in the age of accelerating crisis, but also hint towards the possibility of resistance.
SHELTER (11 min)
Combining choreographic performance with documentary footage, SHELTER offers a commentary on colonial legacies. The film is set in a post-Soviet zoo environment and the performer embodies a female zoo worker accidentally locked in a cage and transformed into a wild animal. Paying intense attention to the passing of time, the film follows the stages of her metamorphosis. In this process, the erotic tension becomes a tool of resistance to the visitors’ gaze, challenging the hierarchy of perspectives. The post-Soviet setting of the zoo connects the discomfort of the visitors to the more general reluctance of the Eastern Europeans to admit their post-colonial heritage. As such, the zoo comments not only the continuity of colonial displays, but also the changes. In the colonial age, zoos displaying exotic animals became a place for performing and presenting colonial empires to the Europeans. Today, zoos have become the last shelters for many of those animals that are now on the verge of extinction, as their original habitats in the former European colonies have been destroyed due to environmental change, but even more so due to the extractivism and exploitation of the global south of the neo-colonial age.
RIP-OFF (14 min)
In RIP-OFF the intimate tension between a lady of the manor and her servant keen to mimic her mistress is embodied by a pair of Doppelgängers. The performance of the two women becomes increasingly intimate, embodying and eroticising the tension between the colonizer and the colonized and the entanglement of their fantasies and desires. The film is set in various manor houses in Estonia, the architectural legacy of foreign colonial power. Prior to the collapse of the Russian empire the manors used to belong to the German-speaking nobility that had dominated the Baltics for centuries. In the film, the privilege of the Baltic upper class is not associated with leisure, but with women’s artistic aspirations.
THIRST (14 min)
The film THIRST is a post-human choreography of displaced plants and machines. The thirst for luxury and abundance is the force that keeps the capitalist machinery running. The dry wells and the thirst for drinking water is what the local communities in Estonia are left with as the fragile wetlands are being drained for peat excavation in their neighbourhoods. Millions of tons of Estonian peat end up in greenhouses in the Netherlands where peat is needed as a component of the soil substrate for phalaenopsis orchids. While the mass-produced orchids may seem like a pathetic mimicry of what once was an extravagance of the elites, they are now a consumer good available for almost everyone. But the customers of cheap orchids have indeed consumed luxury, considering the massive invisible resources used during the manufacture process.
KRISTINA NORMAN
Kristina Norman is a visual artist, performing artist and filmmaker, born in 1979, lives and works in Tallinn, Estonia. https://www.kristinanorman.ee/