Mari Laanemets - Hier wäre das Leben leicht

How would an environment appear where everything was in harmony, where all daily duties and problems found natural solutions? An environment “which freed life from the slavery of things” as Karl Kraus wrote about the work of the architect Alfred Loos in 1933?

The exhibition Hier wäre das Leben leicht/ There, Life Would Be Easy* deals with questions of design, the arrangement of environments, the formal character of surfaces, things from which lifestyles are constructed: from textiles to texts, from facades to fonts, from interiors to streets and cities. The gaze is set upon composition, which structures reality and organizes life. The layout of a newspaper fabricates its sense of being up to date; TV series delineate behaviour patterns; apartment furnishings construct identity; fonts formulate content.

The artists in the exhibition react attentively and critically to questions of daily configurations. They analyse the practices of design and search for possibilities to intervene in these contexts. The examination of form, order, composition, display and the organization of space is also applied to the production of new ideas and concepts in the social context.

On view are works by Kadi Estland, Anton Koovit, Tere Recarens, Sirje Runge, Florian Wüst, Killu Sukmit und Mari Laanemets.

Mari Laanemets

*The title of the exhibition is a quote by Georges Perec's novel Things (orig. Les Choses, Paris 1965).

Mari Laanemets (born 1975 in Tallinn) lives in Graz and works as an author and curator. Recent projects include the exhibition and publication 'Environment, Projects, Concepts. Architects of the Tallinn School 1972-1985' at the Estonian Museum of Architecture (2008). She wrote her Ph.D. at the Institute of Art History at the Humboldt University Berlin ('Between Western Modernism and Soviet Avantgarde: Artistic Practice in Eastern Europe, Estonia as an Example') and is the author of numerous essays on contemporary art, most recently on Mladen Stilinovic' in his book 'On Money and Zeroes' (November 2008).

Curators from Eastern and Central Europe III:

Hier wäre das Leben leicht (There, Life Would Be Easy)
Kurator: Mari Laanemets

Künstler: Kadi Estland, Anton Koovit, Tere Recarens, Sirje Runge, Florian Wüst, Killu Sukmit, Mari Laanemets