This work comprises an agglomeration of narratives, engaging with the veinsystem of extractive forces in an attempt to bridge the trajectories of industrialization (& its sociopolitical legacies) with the genesis of leisure culture. Integrating psychospatial materia from Estonia & the USA and their mutual regional-historical meaning-making systems, this synthesis of mythologies culminates in two pieces situated within the depths of the historically significant yet soon-to be-disappeared Kuku Club, a major nexus point of initiations for the Estonian art scene over the course of the last century.

Positioned on a scaffold, the eponymous piece, “The Under-earths Spin / Maaalused ketravad” is a coupling of plaster high-reliefs, semiotically invested in a diffusion of boundaries between distinct countries and their national mythologies by the omnipresence of what lies beneath.

“Christina’s Sacrifice II” is a metamorphosis of  an earlier work, in which the artist’s Second Body drags itself toward a depiction of a farmhouse synthesized from Wyeth’s Christina’s World and Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice. In this second iteration, the sprawled cowgirl crawls toward a reincarnation of a recently demolished building on Sõpruse puiestee, which was dismantled by the city of Tallinn before its completion. The facade is constructed from the styrofoam production waste of Estonia’s contribution to the 2024 Venice Biennale, and proposes a question – where do buildings go when they die?

— Zody Burke