8 Women. 4 Spatial Dialogues

The exhibition 8 Women. 4 Spatial Dialogues brings into focus four women interior architects who reached their creative peaks during the Soviet period – Maia Laul, Kirsti Laanemaa, Aate-Heli Õun and Maimu Plees – and offers four practising women interior architects the opportunity to study, question and draw inspiration from the work of their predecessors. Laul, Laanemaa, Õun and Plees are women who designed major public interiors, led the spatial culture of their time, articulated creative ambitions through remarkable installations at exhibitions and worked both as sole authors and as collaborators within large collectives. All four are compelling personalities and creators who were, at times, overlooked as authors nonetheless.

At the heart of the exhibition are four dialogues, each pairing a practising contemporary interior architect with a predecessor from several decades earlier. What in the present is taken up from the work of those who came before? Do interiors created under very different social, economic and political conditions still speak to today’s designers? By engaging deeply with the legacy of their predecessors, can interior architects find points of identification or sources of inspiration that resonate today?

The exhibition grew out of the project People in Focus, carried out by Taimi Soo and Irena Timusk, which brought together biographical and creative material on around ten women interior architects with the support of the Estonian Association of Interior Architects, drawing on both private archives and museum collections. It is in dialogue with these source materials that the exhibition’s co-curators – Liis Lindvere, Hanna Karits, Taimi Soo and Tüüne-Kristin Vaikla – create a cross-generational and intra-disciplinary conversation.

Curator: Karen Jagodin

Co-curators: Taimi Soo, Tüüne-Kristin Vaikla, Liis Lindvere, Hanna Karits

Exhibition design: Helen Oja

Graphic design: Kadri-Maria Külaots

The exhibition is supported by the Cultural Endowment of Estonia.

The exhibition has been produced in cooperation with the Estonian Association of Interior Architects. The opening of the exhibition takes place on 19 February at 5 pm.