ESTONIAN EXHIBITION AT THE 51st VENICE BIENNIAL

 

PRESS RELEASE

51. International Art Exhibition - La Biennale di Venezia
“The Experience of Art; Always a Little Further”

MARK RAIDPERE

"ISOLATOR"

June 12 - November 6, 2005
Opening hours 10.00 am – 6.00 pm, closed on Mondays
INAUGURATION: FRIDAY, JUNE 10 AT 5.30 PM
Preview: June 9-10-11, 2005 (9.00 am - 8.00 pm)

Palazzo Malipiero (San Samuele boat station, line n. 3,4,82),
San Marco 3079
30124 Venice 

Commissioner: Sirje Helme
Curator: Hanno Soans
Artist: Mark Raidpere
Organiser: Center for Contemporary Arts, Estonia
Co-organiser: Arte Communications

Isolator, representing Estonia in the 51st Venice Biennial is a solo show of Mark Raidpere. Raidpere started in the mid-1990s as a model and fashion photographer. He entered the art scene in 1997 with “Io”, a series of traumatic self-portraits pairing homoerotic motives with glorified signs of self mutilation. Together with internationally known Estonian video artist Ene-Liis Semper he became a main figure of late-nineties Estonian art working with transgressive subjectivity. “Io” is re-approached in the background of recent outcry of homophobia. In a main daily paper a secondary school director harshly reproached the first local gay pride, demanding segregation – “In my opinion such Estonian ‘men’ are enemies of the Estonian state and should be isolated.” No wonder the artist is so aware of the performative nature of identity. “10 men” (2003), a video made out of the photo session with convicts reveals his interest in prison as a zone of social rejection. In videos “Father” (2001) and “Voiceover” (2004) we experience his father’s privacy as a zone of defeat, where relative safety of isolation is achieved through mental alienation. In “Shifting Focus” (2004), a strained talk between mother and son, Raidpere conceptualises the staged sincerity effect, so characteristic to his interview-pieces with his divorced middle-class parents. It is through almost compulsive returns to the family scene and attentiveness to minute psychological details the determinedly private nature of his work acquires wider social meaning.
Text by Hanno Soans, curator

 
Mark Raidpere, “Voiceover”, video, 2005

 

Mark Raidpere, “Io”, photo, 1997


Project catalogue: ISOLATOR, Center For Contemporary Arts, Estonia 2005, ISBN 9985-9321-8-8