Opening on Thursday 17.4.2025 at 17-20:
Doors open at 17.
Opening speech at 18.
Critical Club from klo 19–20: Is there future for penniless films? Liina Siib in discussion with Teemu Mäki.
”I am an observer, I like to observe people. Some of my works are based on historical figures or are semi-fictional and research-based. I like to read history, work in an archive and read documents but the observation is a very characteristic trait.”
(Liina Siib, in an interview in 2022.)
LIINA SIIB is one of Estonia’s best known and most respected contemporary artists. She was Estonia’s representative at the Venice Biennale in 2011 and works as a professor at the Estonian Academy of Arts.
Siib’s output consists of films, photographs and installations, often with a documentary basis.
One of her best-known works is A Woman Takes Little Space (2007–2017), which was part of her exhibition at the 2011 Venice Biennale. The work is a series of photographs in which, as the title suggests, she documents women in various workplaces: behind a kiosk counter, in a corner of an office, at an assembly line, and so on. Indeed, from the pictures, it seemed that each of them had about one square metre of space in this world, which they occupied during their working day. The title and idea for the work came from a gender-biased and misogynistic argument Siib had heard. Of course, the work did not claim that these photographs per se prove that women have less space in their workplaces than men. Instead, the work showed a cavalcade of women in jobs and occupations that are more common for women. It was up to the viewer to think about what the images say about women’s roles and space in society — and to observe how women perform their assigned roles through their appearance.
In another work, Averse Body (2007. 45’53”), she interviewed sex workers about their relationship to work, body and home, among other things. The interviewees’ responses were strikingly conventional: if sex work had not been mentioned, the women’s words and thoughts would have sounded like those of any woman who has accepted the realities of a male-dominated world.
I mention these two works because they are easy to describe in words and both are informative examples of Siib’s art: the themes are always frankly political, the method is documentary, the perspective is feminist and the tone of the works is humorous and compassionate. Another important characteristic of Siib’s works is that they are as far as possible from the spectacle and sentimentality. Instead of those qualities, Siib focuses on everyday experience, on the small but revealing details of everyday life and their power of testimony.
In the Critical Gallery, Siib will not be showing these old works, but three recent films and a few related photographic works.
The three films have a combined running time of 50 minutes:
And Then Came The End (2025. 17’40”)
August Procession (2023. 11’33”)
In the Storm of Roses (2022, 20’40”)
In the Storm of Roses is a portrait of Helgi Kuusik. Helgi is one of many Estonians who have had a long career in Finland, for example as a nurse like her. The film shows Helgi spending her retirement days in the Estonian countryside, in a kind of paradise, in an old house and in the rose-filled garden idyll that she has managed to achieve because of her earnings as a migrant worker. The other main character is Helgi’s daughter, who lives in Finland and whom Helgi visits. The tone of the film is gently humorous. It bears witness to decades of hard work and its fruits, to how the wealth gap between the two countries affects working life. Helgi seems happy in the film, but the film still encourages the viewer to reflect on how meaningful Helgi’s life has been — and how wonderful the resulting idyll is. What is an enviable paradise for one person may be a depressing self-delusion for another. The film also asks: what is the political significance and impact of the Victorian era aesthetic that Helgi so much enjoys?
August Procession is a melancholy film in which Siib weaves together many separate events. One is the passage of sunlight through the walls and windows of an abandoned building. Another is the annual August procession of Orthodox Christians to a monastery in Kuremäe, East-Estonia. The third view is towards the sunset, along the path along which people walk to and from the beach.
This film is partly a cipher, which may seem incomprehensible unless the viewer knows and understands the context of the film.
It is good to know that Narva is a heavily Russian-speaking area on Estonia’s Eastern border, and the procession of Orthodox Christians there is important for the Russian-speaking population in particular, not only as a religious ritual, but also as a means of maintaining their identity in a country with which they have a problematic relationship. Problematic? Many members of the Estonian-speaking majority do not consider Russian-speakers to be true Estonians, but descendants of the imperialist Soviet Union, descendants of a deported occupying power, who are not to be trusted. Russian-speaking Estonians have many different identities: many of them feel that they are as Estonians as any other citizens of the country and demand and hope that the prejudices against them will disappear with time.
The sunset view in the film shows the site of the removal of a tank that had been placed there in 1970 as a memorial to the Soviet “liberators”. Estonia has removed almost all vestiges of Soviet power of that type from public spaces. For part of the Russian-speaking population, these fixes of historical memory are sad events.
Basically, I tend to dislike works of art that rely so much on information that cannot be gleaned from the work itself. In this case, however, I like the end result, because even if the viewer doesn’t read the above facts about the context of the work somewhere, they can still fully enjoy the work — but in a slightly different way.
Without that information, the work’s main focus is on the observation of the passage of time, the sense of mortality and a slightly amused look at religious rituals. The work is somewhat reminiscent of the early works of Bill Viola (1951–2024) and the films of Andrei Tarkovsky (1932–1986). How so? Why? In his early works, Viola focused on staring at things with a documentary approach, for example, observing sunlight or a dripping tap or a mirage. And all Tarkovsky’s films have long takes in which he — instead of following the plot — concentrates on observing scenery, the movement of light, objects and nature, as if the camera were a hand touching, probing and wondering.
And Then Came The End is a brand new work, premiering at the Critical Gallery in April 2025, based on the experiences of a Catholic priest, Father Magnus Frey, in prison camps in Narva, from 1945 to 1946. Frey’s reminicenses were published in the Narva Museum’s War and post-war urban landscape of Narva (vol.16 / 2015) and originally appeared in his book Und dann kam das Ende. Meine Erlebnisse in sovjetischen Kriegsgefangenen-Lagern (Joseph Habbel, Regensburg, 1965).
In this film, Siib depicts the locations of the story in Narva in their current state and without people, i.e. dilapidated buildings and winter landscapes. The soundtrack includes everyday life snippets from Frey’s memoirs, such as how prisoners of war were not paid the few rubles they had been promised and had their warm blankets taken away before winter came. And how religious prisoners managed to make communion bread despite the difficult conditions. And how hungry prisoners entertained themselves and each other by remembering their favourite dishes and writing down their favourite recipes. Siib has taken snippets of Frey’s text and arranged them on screen with a picture and on a soundtrack with music to create a prose poem of documentary material.
The value of such micro-history, both as text and film, is not in revealing major developments or in interpreting historical turning points. Instead, the value is that individual anecdotes and fragments can be evidence that bring history to life and help us to take seriously the suffering and existence of others — past and present.
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Siib has made most of her films without any real funding, using a method that can be called “woman and the film camera“, after Dziga Vertov (1896–1954). Siib often uses the camera like a writer uses a pen or a keyboard: she watches and observes the world through the camera lens and compiles films from the material she collects, films that are a kind of essays. I think it’s great that this extremely independent, free-form and cost-effective way of filmmaking is still alive, thanks to Liina Siib, for example. Although some of her works have been made with a larger budget and a larger team, they too are based on Siib’s characteristic essayistic approach and agility.
Thanks to technological advances, Siib can make films with better picture quality than the commercial blockbusters of previous decades — and with the same 4K resolution as the blockbusters that fill cinemas now. On the other hand, the same technological advances have also meant that it can be even harder now to find an audience for video art, experimental film, alternative cinema or essay film. So much of everything is available for free on the internet and through streaming services at rock-bottom prices that stranger films and genres are easily lost in the flood. This is one of the reasons why we will conclude the opening night with a debate called Is there future for penniless films?
Rovaniemi, Finland, 10 April 2025
TEEMU MÄKI