Estonian Centre for Contemporary Art (CCA), founded in 1992, is a non-profit expert institution in international cooperation projects with a role to activate and develop Estonian contemporary art scene. CCA is the commissioner of the Estonian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale.
Merike Estna (1980) is an artist working in the space of expanded painting, with many of her works transcending the boundaries of the canvas to encompass different environments, objects, and bodies. Estna’s work intertwines repetitive patterns and mythological motifs. She references history, literature and myths, linking them to contemporary themes and personal stories. In recent years, the artist’s work has been strongly influenced by the culture of Mexico, where she has lived and worked since 2022.
Estna began her creative journey in the early 2000s with photorealistic and pop-inspired paintings and collages. Her early works feature hyper-sexualised female nudes, assertive men, and naive children, depicting a neoliberal consumer society. While studying at Goldsmiths College in London, the artist changed her mode of expression, and in 2012 began to reimagine the meaning of painting. As a result, her works include stage sets, benches, tiled floors, curtains, household items, clothing, and food and drink, inviting the viewer to experience them with their senses: her artworks can be touched, worn, or tasted. Estna first addressed the expanded boundaries of painting in her solo exhibition Blue Lagoon at the Kumu Art Museum (2014), where canvases became spatial installations and painting principles were applied to various objects such as books, clothing, etc.
Since 2016, Estna has become increasingly interested in traditional craft techniques. Expanding the medium of painting, she has used ceramics, woven carpets and other textiles, making them carry personal stories and cultural messages (Cleaners gloves, painters memoir, an installation from 2017; The seed can be initialized randomly, an exhibition from 2017). Through the historical contrast between craft and painting, Estna has explored the values associated with art media. As weaving and craft in general have traditionally been associated with women, while painting has been considered the domain of men, the distinction between the two has shaped the understanding of creative work. By applying traditional craft skills, Estna subverts established gender stereotypes, and opens up new layers of meaning and possible interpretations.
Mythology and ritual also play an important role in Estna’s work. an egg, a larva, a nymph (2018), the installation created for the Baltic Triennial 13, refers to the local belief that the souls of ancestors live on in animals. In this work, the artist used magical figures of snakes and insects. The large-scale installation consisted of a mural, a floor of 4,260 hand-painted glazed tiles, nine vases with beeswax candles, and a performative element of a naked man drinking wine on ceramic tiles. Burning beeswax sculptures and lilies placed in a pile of earth emitted scents, extending the effect of the painting to the sense of smell, and contrasting the world of the living with the world of the dead and the rituals associated with them (Disposable Gloves Guide, an exhibition at the Kim? Contemporary Art Centre in Riga, 2018).
In 2021, Merike Estna and Jaime Alonso Lobato held an exhibition entitled Borderlessness, at Temnikova & Kasela Gallery, where they worked under the artist name Hasanlu Lovers. The exhibition explored the concepts of border and borderlessness in both a physical and philosophical sense: the border as a separator and definer, and borderlessness as a space of merging transitions and infinite possibilities. The ceramic, metal, and textile objects that formed the space evoked ideas of time, materiality, and traces of human activity.
In her solo exhibition Peradam at Temnikova & Kasela Gallery in 2024, Estna explored the mythical gem peradam – a transparent stone that can only be found by those who search for it with all their heart. In creating the exhibition, the artist was inspired by René Daumal’s allegorical novel Mount Analogue (Le Mont Analogue, 1952), in which peradam symbolises rare knowledge or truth that is revealed only to dedicated seekers. In her works, Estna interwove art historical and literary references with personal memories and experiences, inviting the viewer to reflect on the journey of civilisation, and how the art created and the love experienced over the centuries influence our understanding of the future.
The same exploratory approach, and the theme of the transmission of knowledge, is taken up in the work Nightfall, on display at the Kumu Art Museum, as part of the group exhibition of They Began to Talk (2025). In her work, Estna refers to the iconography of Christian art, borrowing the silhouette of the woman and the position of her hands from the wing panel of the Tallinn Passion Altarpiece, which originates from the workshop of Michel Sittow. The work combines art historical layers and personal experience, explores the mother-child symbolism, and refers to the tensions between light and shadow, protection and ignorance.
