Erki Kasemets

1969– · Estonian scenographer (born 1969)
Eesti Kunstimuuseum

Erki Kasemets (1969) is an artist working with installation, painting, performance and theatre. His work includes trash art, polygon theatre performances, systematic documentation of personal life, focus on material, kinetic art, set and stage design, and activities in artist groups Vedelik and P.E.A.. Kasemets views his practice and method as bricolage, often creating art works from broken, useless or discarded everyday objects. Many of his works address themes like time and memory from a subjective standpoint. Kasemets began exhibiting in early 1990s when studying scenography in the Estonian Academy of Arts. The Estonian public mainly knows him for his work in trash art. Among the first objects that found a place in Kasmets’ work and which he started collecting were one-litre milk cartons. The project “Life-file” presents empty painted milk cartons with dates or text that mark certain dates in the artist’s life. In that sense, Kasemets’ practice of trash art is cumulative, process-based and evolving in time – the collected objects are like units of data. As such, use of rubbish in his works is not a critique of capitalism through material but rather a means for analysing themes like time and memory. He also uses many other items as records: tin cans (the modular system “Kompurker”), cigarette packages (“Homepage”, 1997), CDs and DVDs (“Information”, 2006), buttons, etc. Kasemets began daily and systematically documenting the flow of time in an attempt to organise the collected matter already in the 1980s. In his solo exhibition “Recycling of Time” (1996) Kasemets used the modular system “Kompurker” made of tin cans to construct images and installations. “Kompurker” allows the artist to create raster images, which can later be disassembled and assembled anew. Kasemets uses collecting and selecting as a means against forgetting, to physically record episodic memory. There is nevertheless a human perspective in Kasemets’ machine-like approach – sometimes the archives are left unfinished, for example in the case of the “Chronicle of Banalities” (1996–2002). The concept of polygon theatre was established in 1996 as part of his Master’s thesis. The polygon theatre is a space of all possibilities aiming to broaden the idea of theatre. The word “polygon” is borrowed from military terminology and refers to a training area for testing out technologies or tactics. Kasemets’ concept of polygon theatre refers to unfinished thoughts and theatre that is always open to experimentation. Polygon theatre has performed in real military polygons, art galleries, public s

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Data from MuIS and the EKM Digital Collection. Full catalogue