"Artproof Grant Estonia 2019/20 – Kristina Õllek"

Kristina Õllek’s exhibition Filter Feeders, Double Binds & Other Silicones in Draakon gallery will be opened from Tuesday, 29th of September. The exhibition remains open until October 10.

 

“Filter Feeders, Double Binds & Other Silicones” is an installative exhibition based on Kristina Õllek’s research and personal observations of anthropocentric influences on marine ecology, focusing on the North Sea coastal area and its filter feeders – blue mussels, oysters and the expanding jellyfish population. In the past 2 years, Õllek was living in The Hague, on the coast of the North Sea, and became interested in filter feeder organisms, such as mussels and oysters. They are called filter feeders because they purify water and act as filters for polluted water; hence, they are considered ecosystem engineers. On the Dutch coastline there are many oyster and blue mussel farms (aquaculture), most of these are based in Zeeland, an area that is largely below sea level and one of the most human-engineered regions in the Netherlands. In 1953 the most devastating flooding in the Dutch history took place there, and the Deltaworks Neeljte Jans dike was built after this, which changed some of its landscape into a dystopic and alienated surface. With the on-going work she’s thinking with the North Sea, and its speculative assumptions and changes in marine ecology.

Kristina Õllek (b. 1989) is a visual artist based in Tallinn, Estonia. She works with photography, video and installation, focusing on representational processes, geological and ecological matter, and the human-made environment. In her practice she frequently uses situations when fact and fiction, synthetic and natural, copy and original intertwine with each other becoming a hybrid object/matter to obtain new and reconsidered meaning. Within her recent projects she’s been interested in the notion of new technologies and geophysics, the connectivity of the spatial and ecological circumstances, as well the components and resources that enable such technologies to create today’s environment. Her work is often site-sensitive and analyses the location and the format of exhibition-making, questioning the display and the politics of installation in the perspective of a historical museum to an online space.

Exhibition is supported by: Artproof, Estonian Cultural Endowment, L-Disain OÜ (Lauri Lenk), Tru-Vue