Andres Kurg: Prescription and Myth - online lecture at Gallery VI PER

The lecture will focus on the emergence of the socialist version of postmodernism from the second half of the 1970s in the example of architects from the so-called Tallinn School. This was a group of architects and artists who studied at the Estonian State Art Institute at the end of the 1960s and 1970s and began their careers at the design agricultural office "EKE projekt," which was responsible for production facilities and public and residential buildings for the countryside.
In parallel with their professional practice, they actively engaged in the contemporary artistic life, exhibiting their works at exhibitions of young visual artists under the auspices of the Artists' Union and at solo exhibitions organized by the architects themselves. A common feature of the changes that occurred at the beginning of the 1970s was the intertwining of art, design, architecture, and the blurring of strict boundaries that existed between different professional spheres. By the end of the decade, several architects in the group began to promote an approach that emphasized poetic imagination in their designs, especially when working for individual clients and family houses. During the design process, the architect was to create a "mythos, a story" that would "consist of illusions of the future user, their unconscious dreams."
Kurg will look at how this architectural "mythos" was put to the service of new buildings in agricultural cooperatives and in architectural competition projects, while also relying on regulations, materials, and conditions of late Soviet society.
Andres Kurg is a professor of history and theory of architecture at the Institute of Art History of the Estonian Academy of Arts in Tallinn and currently works at the Imre Kertész Kolleg at the University of Jena. His academic work specializes in the art and architecture of the Soviet period with a particular focus on the influence of technological changes and transformations in everyday life on the built environment from the 1960s to the 1980s. He has published articles in AA Files, ArtMargins, Home Cultures, Journal of Architecture, and Kunstiteaduslikke uurimusi—Studies in Art and Architecture; he has contributed to several anthologies and exhibition catalogs. He has been a curator of exhibitions on Soviet architecture and design, including Centrifugal Tendencies: Tallinn, Moscow, Novosibirsk at the Museum of Architectural Drawing in Berlin, 2017, and was also a fellow at the Getty Research Institute and Yale University.
The lecture will be held via Zoom, registration here.