From 21 January to 30 April Kai Art Center welcomes you to visit Holger Loodus’ solo exhibition ‘18 Moments of Spring’, which is the first presentation of new artworks by a versatile artist. Loodus, working with painting and media art is showing this time two video installations displayed to provide a comprehensive spatial experience.
The exhibition is set up as a spiral: the viewer can explore it like a gastropod shell and find a tiny pearl at the very heart of it. In contrast to the constant haste and fragmentation of contemporary life, Loodus strives to slow down and while doing so, also shares his ideas and methods with the viewers. The exhibition with an all-encompassing and somewhat fantastic atmosphere, amplified by sound, also includes a benevolent humor reminding us that we should not take anything too seriously.
The title of the exhibition refers to the Soviet era television series ‘Seventeen Moments of Spring’ (1973, directed by Tatyana Lioznova), which espouses an aesthetic logic that does not always follow the ideology of the content. Breaking out of the (pseudo)documentary approach of propaganda films, a genuine humanism and particular visual philosophy break through, akin to the creative creed of the pioneers of ‘slow cinema’ like Andrey Tarkovsky or Ingmar Bergman. If not directly in this type of artistic legacy, the roots of Holger Loodus’ art can be found in a related worldview – a conviction that visual art is an independent language that can be used to address even the most complex of topics and a desire to move toward a slowed down thinking process, where in a single drop of water a whole world can be found.
Holger Loodus is a musician, painter, multimedia and installation artist, as well as a lecturer at the Estonian Academy of Arts. His work is characterized by the construction of strange situations that at times strive toward fantastical realities or alternative histories. In order to do this, he uses analytical and poetic-philosophical visual means – from hyperrealist painting to mechanisms he has constructed himself and from video to staged installations. In 2018, Loodus participated in the exhibition of the Köler Prize nominees at the Contemporary Art Museum of Estonia and was awarded the People’s Choice Award. Since 2010, he has exhibited in group and solo exhibitions in Estonia, Lithuania, Finland and Germany, his most recent solo exhibitions took place at Kogo Gallery in Tartu (2021), Turku Art Museum (2019) and the Tallinn Art Hall Gallery (2017).
Text: Elnara Taidre
NB! We offer also education program for students at the exhibition ‘18 Moments of Spring‘. More info and booking: info@kai.center.
The exhibition is supported by Cultural Endowment of Estonia, Tallinn Culture & Sports Department, Vestman Energia, Estonian Centre of Folk Culture and AkzoNobel.