Goodbye, East! Goodbye, Narcissus!

An extraordinary show in Tallinn, Estonia, meshes the past with the present.

The Contemporary Art Museum of Estonia is housed in a pair of former industrial buildings in Tallinn, a stone’s throw from the Baltic port. They stand boxlike and uneven, as if larger structures that once surrounded them have been cut away. The current exhibition says farewell to the past – Goodbye, East! Goodbye, Narcissus! – but the seven contributing artists present a more complicated working-through of the legacy of Soviet domination, of the contested notion of Eastern Europe, and of what the uncertain future might hold.

The motif of the crystal vase is central to the show. In the Soviet Union these mass-produced objects were a sign of prosperity. In Estonia they sometimes evoked the days of independence before 1940. Today their meaning has changed: Belarusian dictator Lukashenko refers to them in justification for his rule – Belarus is beautiful but fragile and in need of his protection. In a video – For Happiness! – at the beginning of the exhibition, performance artist Aliaxey Talstou makes his opinion of Lukashenko’s rhetoric clear, dropping several of the vases onto the ground in Minsk’s Independence Square.

Yet the past cannot easily be discarded, responds an installation by Elo Liiv that suspends hundreds of pieces of crystal above a dark stage on which are arranged several dolls, completely black, in the shape of cutesy girls and cartoon bears. Though it glitters under spotlights, Dream is more than an empty spectacle. From inside the stage a heavy drum beats to a military march, and the dolls quake. Following the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, its meaning seems clear: the past has come back to haunt the present.

Elo Liiv, Dream, 2022-23

The paintings in the show also explore the legacy of the past. Ukrainian painter Kateryna Lysovenko paints nude exercising figures that evoke a socialist-realist mode of physical excellence. With gormless expressions, they also allude to violence by standing on a horizontal figure, playing ball games with a skull, or digging a grave. The floor of this part of the gallery is painted with the markings of a five-a-side football pitch, as if to emphasise that the violent arena also involves us.

Kateryna Lysovenko installation view.

Crops for the State (2021) displays a painting of an excited bird by a big pile of corn by Holger Loodus. Initially this lightweight mode of figuration feels out of tune with the rest of the show. However, the painting is a study of a still from the 1961 Czech animation The Richest Sparrow in the World, popular in Estonia, and here placed in an incongruous, academy-style frame that once housed a 1950s painting of the harvest on a collective farm. Nearby, a TV shows archival footage of Estonian oil shale mining. Layered together, these elements produce an iconoclash between different visual regimes that are still in contest today.

As a kind of climax, Paulina Pukyte has installed several crystal vases on narrow white plinths on the roof. They slowly fill with rain. At this point in history the significance of these readymade Ghosts feels as refractable as the light shining through them. What will they contain in the future? Much of the political and cultural nuance of this electrifying show is beyond my competency to report. But it proves that in these straitened circumstances contemporary art is not a site of retreat, but of engagement.

Vase from Paulina Pukyte’s series Ghosts, 2022-23.

Goodbye East! Goodbye Narcissus! is at Contemporary Art Museum of Estonia, Tallinn, from 15 April 2023 – 4 June 2023. Curated by Tanel Rander, it features artists Svitlana Biedarieva, Elo Liiv, Holger Loodus, Kateryna Lysovenko, Paulina Pukyte, Aliaxey Talstou and Kirill Tulin.