Song/Rupture

Jüri Ojaver (1955) entered the art scene in the beginning of the 1980’s, received several grand prizes from the Soros Contemporary Art Center in the 1990’s, participated in the Kwangju Biennial in South-Korea in 1995, represented Estonia at the Venice Biennial in 1999, is an active member of the art-organization Estonian Energies and has taught young sculptors, metal-artists and many others in the Estonian Academy of Arts. Jüri Ojaver is interested in memory and information storage – his relationship with the present and past in a general and personal context. Jüri Ojaver can be referred to, and rightly so, as an existentialist, although many of his art projects, mainly performances, can be described more as a peculiar gallows humor. Jüri Ojaver is a vivacious and growing artist, therefore his art is also a living and growing organism. Although the works displayed in the exhibition are not all new, it can be looked at as a complete new project – a dialog between old and new pieces. The artist has chosen chresthomatic works from his previous art practice – significant in the general and personal context – and created a new communicative partner for each one. Jüri Ojaver’s exhibition can be looked at from two levels: the progress of his art and ideas through his art practice, and artist’s own interpretation of it. Jüri Ojaver has taken the double role of ambivalent creator and interpreter and placed the viewer into a complicated, but nevertheless interesting situation. The title “Song” in Estonian (rupture in English) indicates ambivalence and the possibility of ambiguous interpretation: in medical science it means the protrusion of an organ or the fascia of an organ through the wall of the cavity that normally contains it; in English of course the word is “song”; in world history it refers to one of the most successful and powerful dynasties in China – the Song dynasty. Similarly with the exhibition in the Art Hall and the title, the process has been dialectic, dynamic, full of chance and interpretation of chance.