SHORT BIO
Pille-Riin Jaik (born 1991 in Tallinn, Estonia) is a Vienna based interdisciplinary artist working with video/performance as well as with sculpture and installation. She has a Bachelor of Photography from the Estonian Academy of Fine Arts (2015) and a Masters from Art and Digital Media at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna (2020). Currently she is studying in a PhD in Practice program in Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and is a member of Golden Pixel Cooperative. Her artistic work is focused on text, plants, textile, storytelling, surplus and waste materials/thoughts in feminist and class aware discourse.
Her videoworks have been screened in several film festivals around Europe (21st Ji.hlava International Documentary Film Festival, Diagonale 2018, FrauenFilmTage 2018, VI Kinodot Experimental Film Festival in St. Petersburg, Red Love international video competition in Sofia, Terrarista.tv, FIDCampus Marseille 2021, EUROPEAN MEDIA ART FESTIVAL - EMAF etc). Recently she has also been part of group exhibitions at Hobusepea Gallery in Tallinn, Improper Walls, LLLLLL, PFERD, Flucc, xE, Exhibit, AG18, Ausßenstelle Kunst, 21Haus in Vienna and has had this year a solo exhibition ‘Unbound’ in Prevenhuberhaus in Weyer.
Currently she is working on an experimental multi-narrated film with Janina Weißengruber, Klaus Rabeder and Daniel Hüttler titled ‘Freedom in the Present Past’ as well as her PhD research about political and poetic storytelling in Baltic landscapes.
POLITICAL RESISTANCE OF PLANTS AND NATURE SPIRITS
text written by Liudmila Kirsanova
Pille-Riin Jaik’s art research expands on the issues of ecofeminism, new materialism, post-Anthropocene, and political ecologies, while her art practice encompasses diverse media, including video, performance, writing and sculpture. Stretching from poetry reading in a public space across knitting, crocheting and paper sculpting to film and photography, it is complex and manifolded. However, even when Jaik creates objects they appear as objects-in-transition, when she sings her voice is free from any rules, when she directs the picture is elusive and vibrating – it is so because performativity is deeply embedded in her method and propelling the journey. And this journey could be called storytelling, but not in a sense it is over- and misused within capitalistic narratives, but storytelling as creating a genuinely magic story, evolving and sharing it along, immersing the audience into it and navigating together in the wonderful entanglements of it. Coming from Estonia, land of dark forests and pagan folklore inhabited with witches and wood spirits, Jaik has inherited this fable-informed approach in communicating her ideas. It makes her stories poetic, mysterious and spellbinding.
For example, in the video ‘Xeroines’ (2020) we are following the artist to the military site in the city of Paldiski on the Baltic coast. The former naval base, it emerges like a doom monument to modern history – vast, deserted, neglected. We are travelling around the industrial sceneries and green thickets surrounding them. The female voices are reading excerpts from the texts of Constance DeJong, Audre Lorde, Simone Weil, Valerie Solanas – they become the spirits of earth, water and air lamenting over the land in desolation. Jaik finds a way to transform the theory pieces into chants – the diverse cast of voice performers – a choir of dryads – brings different accents, paces and melodies to the citing, while the visual absence of the readers produces a feeling of a pervasive presence of these lines as if they belonged with nature and were sung by it. The artist addresses problematic Western ecologies built upon the colonial idea of men making sense out of passive organic mass and creating ‘places’ out of ‘non-places’. The haunted base in Paldiski is shown as a looming vision of the future where decayed territories of abandoned corporate facilities become a grim landscape for humankind extinction. However, it is also a moment for vibrant matter to take over the long occupied and poisoned areas – fresh grass patches between the concrete slabs, slimy seaweed covering the pebbles, water green of algae, all indicating the enormous potency of matter for transformation. Besides, we are watching ‘Xeroines’ sitting on the loose cushions with tentacles which might be the future flowers or any new species born.
The notion of creative and powerful nature capable of adapting and growing is critical for Jaik’s work. In the installation ‘So, I weed & I weed’ (in progress) the artist is exploring the energy of weeds for seizing the ‘uncontrolled’ ground. When exhibited, the paper flowers are usually positioned in the corners or along some architectural structures of the space – on the margins – like real weeds would sprout out somewhere in-between, behind or underneath something. At the show ‘Special School for Sculpture’ (xE – Exhibition space of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, 2019) they occupied the staircase and a dark niche under it, at ‘Parasitic Symbiosis’ (Hobusepea gallery, 2021) the vines coiled around the railings, window frames and grass popped up along the metal mesh parapet – they invaded and took over the most overlooked, unsuitable for anything else spots. Beautifully cut and folded, the weeds represent the irresistible vitality of matter that men have been pursuing to discipline and dominate. The very concept of weed as undesirable vegetation is produced within colonisation of nature, violent urban and agricultural expansion. Pille-Riin engages this idea of human-constructed environments and demonstrates the failure of it—we are exposed to the wonderful power of plants as agents for potential protest and revival. It is “a place untamed, unimagined” as said in Jaik’s poem ‘Desert Flowers’ (2020) – an outlook to the post-Anthropocene reality, without a human being, where nature is thriving in its fantastic abundance and diversity.
text written in the framework of Academy of Fine Arts Vienna Mentorship program