Kumu Exhibition Spaces, 5th floor, Gallery of Contemporary Art
The exhibition deals with dark, Gothic themes in art and visual culture, and analyses their relationship with the world of beauty, advertising and glamour. Although Gothic culture is rooted in the Middle Ages, many of the art styles that came after it used Gothic and added new layers and concepts to it. This is true of Romanticism in particular, but also of art trends and subcultures of the 20th century. Gothic culture has strongly influenced, for example, the punk subculture, which in turn has had an impact on art with its radical aesthetics. Another Gothic wave brushed through Western visual culture in the 1990s, when the visual language of art was influenced by the rapidly growing advertising industry and media, globalisation and terrorism, as well as the daunting "trauma of the era": AIDS. Today, Gothic can be seen as a platform from which various approaches that combine horror, beauty and supernatural phenomena have risen, along with its dissonant and ambivalent aesthetic code referring to carnal desires and complex psychological states.
The curators of the exhibition are Eha Komissarov and Kati Ilves.
Exhibition may contain disturbing material.
Participating artists: AES+F, Tobias Bernstrup, Billeneeve, DeStudio, Gottfried Helnwein, Toomas Kalve, Laurentsius, Peeter Laurits, Kris Lemsalu, Mark Raidpere, Ene-Liis Semper, Andres Tali, Anton Vill, Toomas Volkmann and Winny Puhh
Works from the collections of: the Art Museum of Estonia, Tartu Art Museum, Andréhn-Schiptjenko gallery, Multimedia Art Museum (Moscow) and private collections.