Outset Estonia is proud to have supported the production of the second version of Taavi Suisalu’s installation Waiting for the light. The first version was exhibited at Tallinn City Gallery in March 2019. This second version of the work was exhibited at international group exhibition Futures of our past in the gallery weisser elefant, Berlin between 18th May – 22nd June 2019, and at Un/Green in the Latvian National Museum of Art between 6th July – 22nd September 2019. Waiting for the light was also on view at the Monumental Gallery in Tartu Art House, Estonia between 14th November –15th December 2019.
Waiting for the light was an installation that departed from the fact that most of the intercontinental communication relies heavily on the submarine fibre optic cables. This network carries threads of light as thin as tenth of human hair while being as existential to technological societies as the sun is for the plants. We are hanging by a thread while the artificial sun rays plunge through the oceans and light up our faces via bright screens. Waiting for the light introduced baits into these networks and lures in threads of light from different parts of the globe. The Wardian cases function as miniature closed ecosystems and also as islands in the network between things – the Internet. Any device connected to this network becomes a target for automated processes – bots – whose motives are mostly unknown. Each plant then becomes an object of interest to these robots whose communicative acts, streams of light, once passed the floors of oceans, are lit back into our environment as bursts of growth light, giving them an agenda they are unaware of.
Taavi Suisalu (b. 1982) is working in the contexts of technology, sound and performance, mixing traditional and contemporary sensibilities and activating peripheral spaces for imaginative encounters. His practice is informed by phenomena of contemporary society and its relations to and use of technologies. He applies subjective research methods to study socio-cultural phenomena, being interested in the behaviour, perception and thinking of social beings. In 2014, he received the Young Estonian Artist Prize for curating a distributed exhibition throughout non-existent villages of Southern Estonia. In 2017, his work Distant Self-Portrait was awarded 2nd prize in Riga Photography Biennial Awards. In 2018 he was one of the selected artists to participate in the European Media Art Platform. In recent years he has shown at KUMU in Tallinn; Riga Art Space in Latvia; Le Lieu Unique in France; Impakt in Netherlands; European Central Bank in Frankfurt; Bozar and European Parliament in Brussels; gallery Triumph in Moscow; gallery Horseandpony Fine Arts in Berlin.
