Walking with Dragons © Charles Thiefaine
The festival contrasts regional Estonian artists with European creatives resonating with a web of social issues, Sarah Moroz reports
Kai Art Center is housed in a century-old former submarine plant – “kai” means “dock” in Estonian, and is fittingly situated on the lip of the Tallinn harbour where boats bob placidly and a cluster of cafés sprawl out across the Noblessner cultural quarter. Kai Art Center is host to the biannual photography fair Foto Tallinn, which celebrated its 11th edition in early September.
Since 2019, the fair has pivoted in its branding, scope, and professionalism: Emilia van Lynden, formerly the artistic director of Unseen Photography Fair Amsterdam, was invited to mentor. “I think Unseen was one of the first fairs that really had this quite refreshing model of only focusing on contemporary photography,” noted Foto Tallinn’s 2024 curator, Amsterdam-based Isabella van Marle, “be it emerging artists with new work or established artists with their latest bodies of work. That was still quite a new thing. Then bigger fairs offered sections where you can find that as well – the Curiosa section at Paris Photo is a fantastic example, and Approche is also a smaller, curated selection of new photography.”
“Photography can be quite classical as a photo on the wall, but we are also about introducing the boundaries of the medium. What you see here are some very new cutting-edge techniques”
As of 2019, Foto Tallinn came out from under the umbrella of the Estonian Contemporary Art Development Center, got its own website, cultivated a local collector scene, and pushed its production to the next level. This year, Foto Tallinn spotlit works by 35 artists, selected by a jury of international professionals from the milieu. Rather singularly, Foto Tallinn features not only galleries (seven this year) representing their own roster but individual artists themselves (18 this year). Kadi-Ell Tähiste, the principal organiser behind Foto Tallinn, noted: “Even though the representational model is still going strong and not going anywhere, more artists may be working independently as well, and it’s very important to give them the opportunity to show in a fair format which would otherwise be closed to them.”
All works on view had been completed within the last five years. “One of the main ideas of the fair is to really show the newest contemporary photography and give an overview of what is happening in the field now. This is a short, brief course into contemporary photography today,” van Marle noted. One recurrent conceit was the prominence of interdisciplinary approaches. “There are artists who really cross the boundaries of the medium by exploring that balance between painting and photography, between photography and sculpture, or the advent of AI.” Tähiste affirmed: “photography can be quite classical as a photo on the wall, but we are also about introducing the boundaries of the medium. What you see here are some very new cutting-edge techniques, but also some artists returning to the very point where photography was born.”
Moreover, thematic variety was as imperative as formal diversity, per van Marle, who stresses that whilst some artists focus “on themes of love, friendship, family, the celebration of life… others are more critical, exploring themes of conflict, politics and war or violence. It’s important to show both alongside each other.”
The first artist encountered upon entering Kai Arts Center was Hungarian-born András Ladocsi‘s alluring portraits and non-figurative works evocative of the body, snapped in Australia, America, the United Kingdom and Hungary. As jury member and Aperture editor Brendan Embser noted in conversation with the photographer during a tour: “It’s all united by a really strong colour sensibility… But there’s an openness to chance and intimacy. I did think of Luca Guadagnino’s films looking at your work, in particular some scenes from Call Me by Your Name and the cinematic images of fruit or vegetation – but also the male body and the way people relate to natural sensations.”
Nearby, Dutch photographer Sander Coers plugged in family photos (dating from the 1940s-1990s) into AI technology, generating new – if wholly phantom – imagery in the series POST (2023–2024). Coers’ grandfather was from Indonesia, a territory colonised by the Dutch, and his family shied away from discussing this heritage. “Though entirely fictitious, when we look at it, it has this very nostalgic feeling,” van Marle noted of Coers’ work. The photos are UV-printed on plywood, becoming tangible objects that belie the delicately chimeric nature of memory and family legacy both. In sharp contrast across the fair, Estonian artist Triin Kerge used embroidery to address typology of the family photo album. In Scenes From a Lost Family Album, she recreated faceless spectral poses – all in eerily familiar silhouettes – via thread, in what the wall text described as a “longing for an elusive past.” These works create a wistful, eerie feeling of absentia. “It’s an appreciation more of the analogue sides of things, and it’s good to offer both visions,” Isabella said of including Coers and Kerge.
Maria Kapajeva’s work at the fair was impossible to miss: the Estonian artist created two large-sale cyanotypes on cotton fabric, made during her residency at the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, which unfurled from ceiling to floor. She collaborated with Ukrainian and Russian women on this series, “Fluid Borders,” incorporating their physical contours alongside symbolic vegetation. On one fabric roll, exiled Ukrainian bodies were strewn against a blue background with plants non-indigenous to the UK; on the second, against a red backdrop, bodies belonging to Russian artists who fled to Estonia were interspersed with plants considered to be intrusive weeds. It’s an allusive work that wrestles with war, diaspora, the female body, and identity in a heightened socio-political reality.
French photographer Charles Thiefaine similarly engages with these themes, but diffuses its heightened nature. Trained as a journalist, he covers the South West Asian region with a firmly non-journalistic approach – his documentary eye proposes a more grounded vision of territories in conflict. His series Walking with Dragons features young men on the island of Socotra, off of Yemen, a haven from war on the mainland. van Marle noted that Thiefane offers a mindful alternative to the “hardcore war photography that we see in the news all the time” as well as “touching and personal stories.” One such example is his beautiful image of a young man leaning in front of a Le Corbusier-built stadium in Bagdad, the sinuousness of the architecture and the casualness of the figure a reprieve from depictions of suffering in the region.
On the back wall, Foto Tallinn presented contemporary Ukrainian photography adapted from an exhibition that van Marle co-curated last year in Kyiv, Essential Goods: Contemporary Ukrainian Photography. In the scaled-down selection of four photographers, Daria Svertilova‘s striking portrait of a volunteer female soldier – from her series Irreversibly Altered – is especially moving. The subject’s fierce expression emanates determination, dignity, and strength, crystallising the resilience of a national spirit.
Foto Talinn ultimately extracts wider themes of political engagement and communal reconnaissance. The juxtaposition of regional artists from Estonia with other European creatives creates a larger panorama of resonant social concerns, and highlights photographers whose work helps reframe regions otherwise mediatised in reductive ways.
fototallinn.ee
