Kristina Norman

Eesti Kunstimuuseum; Veneetsia biennaal, Eesti paviljon

Kristina Norman (1979) is an artist whose interdisciplinary work includes video installations, sculptural objects, and interventions in the city space, as well as documentaries and performance. Norman's artistic practice is context-focused and she works with themes that relate to ideologies, controversial political processes and the sore points of history, looking for ways to approach polarising subject matter beyond mutually exclusive narratives. A notable part of Norman's work addresses the collective memory and identity through monuments. One of her most well-known projects “After-war” represented Estonia at the 53rd Venice Biennale in 2009 (curated by Marco Laimre). The work was based on the story of the Bronze Soldier, a monument to the Soviet army that the Estonian government had removed from Tallinn city centre in 2007, which was then replaced by a golden replica of the statue by Norman. Through this intervention the artist was looking for ways to use the golden monument to draw attention to the various groups living in Estonia who do not share the same historic memory. “After-war” was based on Norman's several previous projects addressing the Bronze Soldier, such as the film “Monolith” (2007), and the installation “Community” (2007) that consists of souvenir size figurines of the Bronze Soldier, painted in the colours of various pop culture characters. This was followed by the film “A monument to please everyone” (2011) looking at the process of putting up the monument to commemorate the Estonian War of Independence. The film focused on the reorganising of the landscape of Estonian collective memory and correlating it to the nation-focused narrative immediately after the Bronze Soldier was moved. This was also a project for the people in power to establish their political will  that came to divide the mostly Estonian-speaking public regarding the monument's name and meaning (a monument to freedom or a statue to victory) as well as its aesthetic qualities. Following the young patriotic authors of the monument and the politicians who directed them, the film shows the behind-the-scenes of the process. Her following works “0.8 square metres” (2012) and “Common Ground” (2013) also address perpetuating or erasing collective memory, tied together into a trilogy by an artistic exploration of spatial aspects of remembering and relying on historic parallels. In 2014 Norman took part in the 10th Manifesta Biennial in St. Petersburg (curated by Kasper König and Joanna Warzsa) with the public sculpture project “Souvenir” (2014) and a video installation “Ir

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Contemporaries in Eesti Kunstimuuseum: Peeter Laurits · Taavi Piibemann · Priit Pajos · Sang-gon Chung · Markus Lampinen

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Data from MuIS and the EKM Digital Collection. Full catalogue