THEME OF THE YEAR 2024 “THE BODY”
Each year, the Museum of Photography’s exhibitions focus on a specific theme. In 2024 the theme is “the body”.
On 23 May 2024, the Museum of Photography launches a new theme year, this time focusing on the body presentation in photography. We will explore how different photographers have captured the body throughout Estonian photographic history, what influenced it in the cultural space here, and what the main genres of body photography are.
Given the broad content and expressive scope of the body as a theme, we will bring a diverse exhibition programme to the viewers. As the most realistic form of representation, photography creates new and sometimes unexpected perspectives on what it depicts. Throughout history, the representation of the body has been a battleground of sorts: it has been politicised, conceptualised, increasingly divided, and at the same time, it is paradoxically a psychological and spiritual relationship with the human form and the identity that each particular body carries within itself.
The Museum of Photography opens two major exhibitions to mark the body theme year. Starting from 23 May 2024, we invite the visitors to the Museum of Photography’s Town Hall Prison building in Tallinn Old Town, where we will display the main exhibition of the theme year, Gendered Lens and two accompanying small exhibitions: The Secret Staircase Gallery exhibition The Summer Holidaymakers and the courtyard gallery exhibition Anna-Stina Treumund. Etudes with a Bath Duck.
On 6 June 2024, the group exhibition Body will open at the Gallery Seek of the Museum of Photography, introducing contemporary approaches to the body.
The exhibition Gendered Lens focuses on the representation of the body in Estonian photographic history, specifically on gender, sexuality and the stories the images tell. The exhibition includes works from the era of analogue photography in Estonia, from the end of the 19th century until the early 2000s and the advent of the digital age. For the first time in the history of Estonian art, historical pornographic photography, which has existed as an independent genre since the early days of photography, is presented as a separate section of the exhibition.
The exhibition Summer Holidaymakers is a mischievous look at beach culture enthusiasts in the fleeting Estonian summer of the 1930s.
The exhibition Anna-Stina Treumund. Etudes with a Bath Duck presents a series of unpublished photographs by the late artist Anna-Stina Treumund (1982-2017), which in its entirety is a self-portrait nude representing the artist’s vulnerability.
The exhibition Body brings together 23 artists’ contemporary representations of the body through the camera, both as photographs and video, as well as some installation works. The exhibited works open up important topics related to the body in today’s society.
In addition to exhibitions, the programme of the body theme year includes various lectures, workshops, concerts and performances. The body theme year will run until the end of January 2026.
The body theme year programme is supported by the Cultural Endowment of Estonia.
Group exhibition “THE BODY”
Contemporary Body Representation Through the Camera
The group exhibition ‘The Body’ at the Museum of Photography brings together contemporary representations of the body by 23 artists, captured by the camera in both photography and video.
PHOTO EXHIBITION “GENDERED LENS”
The exhibition Gendered Lens features nudes and portraits with the body at the centre.