[Nettime-ro] Vaal Gallery - Tallin presents Calin Dan - EmotionalArchitecture 2

["Irina Cios" <irina.cios@icca.ro>]

VAAL GALLERY
Tartu mnt 80d
Tallinn, Estonia
www.vaal.ee


CALIN DAN 
EMOTIONAL ARCHITECTURE 2
LOST IN TRANSITION

24.05 - 10.06.2005
opening 24.05 at 17

With the participation of Reine Karp
Comments on Linna Hall by Marko Nautras, Ayaka Okutsu, Ryna Siegan-Smith, Anna-Karin Stjernolof, Niels Tilanus

Calin Dan. Emotional Architecture 2.
Lost in Transition

 

The exhibition aims at bringing together for comparison some of the urban dilemmas characterizing two cities situated from many points of reference at the opposite sides of the post-communist spectrum: Tallinn - Estonia and Bucharest - Romania. Nothing could be apparently more different than middle-sized Tallinn, an ancient Baltic trade city recovering from 40 + years of Soviet occupation, and the Balkan metropolis of Bucharest, submitted to a long history of invasions and brutal interventions, culminating with Ceausescu's dictatorship. Still, there is a fine line linking problematic areas and topics in the two cities. The post-wall developments in economy and society brought forward in both Tallinn and Bucharest a series of latent crisis situations, connected to the administration of the pre-modern and modern heritage, to consumerism and gentrification.

Besides any comparison elements, Calin Dan's interest in Tallinn is personal. His biography was deeply affected by the architectural events staged by the Ceausescu regime in Bucharest, and the Dictator's Palace became for the artist the ultimate expression of an ever present dilemma: the relation between public events and private interests, a paradigm confronting people as they live in tightly knit communities. A negative paradigm with that, until the artist discovered the public projects designed by Raine Karp for Tallinn during the Soviet occupation - Linna Hall (the City Concert Hall) and the National Library, both powerful and intriguingly ambiguous buildings.

With a morphology situated somewhere between the oppressive grandiloquence of Speer and the dark majesty of pre-Columbian architecture, those buildings were planned to/and did fulfill complex social functions, both within and out of the official agenda. Those functions and an undisputable morphologic quality helped the evolution of Linna Hall to the status of historical landmark in the rapidly changing fabric of the city. Although listed as a heritage monument, the concert hall is confronted now with an unclear future due to the new market laws at play in the development of Tallinn, and also due to its genetic program, pre-determined by an obsolete political system. 

 

Linna Hall and Raine Karp, its elusive author, are typical examples of emotional architecture - contradictory, problematic, lively - and will be the subject of the next film produced by Calin Dan. Lost in Transition is a work-in-progress presentation of this project, and involves, besides the artist, the architect himself and students of the Art Academy in Tallinn who were involved in a research on the building of Linna Hall.

 

 

With support from: Cultural Endowment of Estonia; the Mondriaan Foundation; The Dutch Fund for Visual Arts, Design and Architecture; Estonian Academy of Arts

 

Additional info:

Ellu Maar

Vaal gallery

+3726810 871

ellu@vaal.ee
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