Pärnu FotoFest 2025 presents: Festival Main Exhibition “ORGANIC I MECHANIC”

“ORGANIC I MECHANIC”

Curators: Marian Grau, Jan Leo Grau

5.03.-5.04.2025

Pärnu City Gallery in the Town Hall (Uus 4, Pärnu)

Exhibiting artists: Mira Vornanen, Niina Pietarinen, Noora Sandgren, Eliis Laul, Peeter Laurits, Riina Varol, Arne Maasik, Annika Haas, Marko Toomast, and Luisa Greta Vilo

This year, the festival is titled “Organic I Mechanic”, pointing to a world increasingly characterized by sharp environmental issues. The burning topics are organic and zero waste art, where AI or artificial intelligence threatens to push creative people off the stage. Part of the world would like to press the accelerator of progress and enter a high-tech utopia, while nature and climate scientists call us to turn back in time to rediscover traditional ways of life, avoid overconsumption, and environmental pollution. What do contemporary photographic artists see as a solution in this context?

Finnish artist Mira Vornanen is a gardener and photographic artist who has succeeded in practically merging two quite distant fields. In her art, she reflects on humans and nature, using experimental, Photoshop-free photographic techniques where illusions are created manually. Together with photographic artist Niina Pietarinen, she has created a joint installation where the central “nature views” have gained two perspectives and layers in overlapping exposures, using the same roll of film twice.

Noora Sandgren explores eco-friendly materials and zero waste art, pointing to the serious issue that even photography itself poses a threat to the environment. All photography leaves an ecological footprint. Sandgren questions whether it is possible to create photographs without environmental burden and offers a solution through camera-less “organic photographs.” At the exhibition, she showcases photos from the series “Fluid Being,” created in her home garden in collaboration with organisms living in compost, which produce images during their decomposition on light-sensitive photo paper.

Arne Maasik’s work is primarily focused on architectural photography, but alongside the artificial world, he has always been fascinated by structures found in nature, seeking the same order present in construction art. Whether nature is perfect or not has puzzled philosophers and natural scientists alike. Nature reveals both astonishing nanostructures and mathematical order, but also randomness and error. In any case, nature is mightier than human creation, well illustrated by Maasik’s new photo series “Conundrum,” which explores abandoned industrial and agricultural architecture and ponders the beauty of disappearance, where omnipotent nature takes over the artificial and allows architectural heritage, which humans no longer know what to do with, to organically merge with nature and become part of it.

Architecture and the artificial environment are also central to Eliis Laul’s installation “The Skin that Covers the City.” The work is inspired by Paul Valéry’s text “L’Idée fixe,” where the author states, “Nothing is deeper within a man than his skin.” This idea allows the artist to draw a parallel not only with the human body but also with tactile vision and the development of urban experience. It can be said that the creation of any photographic image is itself a kind of contact point between the observed and the observer. It lacks the ability to penetrate the observed, being always merely a pictorial representation of the surface of any phenomenon. We never get beyond the surface, but if we recall Valéry’s words, perhaps there is no real need to? For the artist, therefore, the city, as our ultimate everyday environment, is above all a tactually measurable and palpable facade that simultaneously hides, yet is “totally naked” before the viewer’s eyes. Every change that takes place in it occurs in the artist’s view in this in-between area or her so-called invisible skin surface, which is neither internal nor external, but only the experiential contour of things.

Annika Haas is represented in the exhibition with a fragment from a long-term and extensive photographic audiovisual art project “Greenhouse Effect,” which portrays the younger generation of Estonia, who will have to solve many concerns related to overconsumption, thoughtless waste, and hostile exploitation of nature in the future. The works feature young people who are concerned about the future of planet Earth and try to signal to the older generation that a world geared towards endless consumer culture and economic growth cannot be sustainable.

Luisa Greta Vilo has always centered her art around people and nature. Nature does not worry about its existence being justified, contrary to humans, who often race against time, abandoning their natural cycle and constantly seeking new ways to escape from themselves. Nature and humans are not separate subjects in Vilo's vision, and her art does not attempt to drive a wedge between them but rather to create art that strengthens the bonds between humans and nature.

Riina Varol also travels existential paths with her series of mixed media collages “Dear Stone,” continuing from the previously known series named “Voyage.” Varol invites finding sensory experiences and genuine touch through textures and abstract forms. The works stimulate hearing, smell, and tactile sensations and the formation of personal memories. Through scanning the ground, collecting photographs and object specimens, a relationship forms between two bodies - the earth and the human body - allowing for a momentary focus on the slow processes of rock formation in contemporary culture space that favors haste.

A large part of Peeter Laurits’s work is also in dialogue with nature; however, as an artist, he does not merely take the observer position but intervenes, interprets, creates, and seeks connections between natural and artificial processes. Photos from the series “Heaven’s Atlas” and “Multiverse Processor” create a multi-layered dialogue on natural mythology, shamanism, space, as well as humanity’s progress and the all-encompassing technology, which on one hand helps us understand the processes taking place in nature, but on the other hand, destroys them.

Marko Toomast’s photos, collaborated with AI, explore the border space between organic and mechanic and invite the viewer to ponder human existence in a world where technology makes us increasingly dependent. Toomast raises the question of whether we become more like machines or our machines become more lifelike and adds that the answer probably does not lie in binary opposition but in the fine nuances of their joint development.

The exhibitions are supported by the Estonian Cultural Endowment and the Pärnu City Government

Graphic design of posters and social media visuals: Elina Kasesalu. Featuring Riina Varol’s work “Dear Stone VII” (collage, mixed media / 2025).

A FREE art bus to FotoFest from Tallinn and back! The bus departs on Wednesday, March 5th, at 2 PM from the Estonian Russian Cultural Centre (Mere pst 5) and takes passengers to the Pärnu Town Hall. Around 8 PM, the bus will start the return journey to Tallinn from Pärnu Artists' House.

You can register for the bus at this link: https://forms.gle/DMRifQYpvATaa8M18

Please register by Tuesday, March 4th, at the latest.