„Idols. Retrospective“

10.08.–09.09.2017, Vaal galerii

The present exhibition contains a selection of the three large series entitled Idols that have been created in the years 1992–1995. The first exhibition of the Idols also took place in Vaal in 1993. Today, however, both the location of the gallery and the context of the exhibition have changed.

Throughout times, Nukke has excelled as a virtuous collage artist. Her visual citations from the hyped-up media space of the 1990s still enchant us with their courage and wit. To represent the social profile of that era, Nukke has used themes from Greek mythology. The curator of the exhibition Marika Agu describes it as follows: „It can be said that the artist is using her absurd scenes to compensate for the fantasies that have been lost through the process of fine-tuning the society. The collages talk about the mainstream life of the alpha males of these times when heroes and heroines who are emotionally incapable and are repulsive in their naive corporeality are settling their accounts. We are seeing characters who don’t inhabit the same space any more.“

The larger-than-life depictions in Nukke’s works contradicted the restraint of the Soviet era, the so-called genderless visual culture. Using cut outs from glossy journals and other readily available materials, the artist has managed to present the viewer with the extremes of the post-soviet reality. Since these works are made in the re-contextualising and re-editing mentality of the 1990s, they still offer new impulses of interpretation. Nukke’s oeuvre of that time can be read together with the works of DeStudio, Marko Mäetamm, Laurentsius, Peeter Allik and Jasper Zoova of the same years. Triin Tasuja has started a dialogue with the artist’s retrospective and her poems articulate the kitsch and the gossip in Nukke’s collages.

The exhibition design is by Mari Uibo and the sound is by 0.9. The exhibition is curated by Marika Agu who has previously researched Estonian art of the 1990s.