MallNukke

The Estonian artist Mall Nukke’s exhibition “Manias” is telling about the human insanity, our mad efforts of trying to catch up with time, deceive or buy time for us. It is about the fear of lagging behind and the desperate attempts to obviate it, about the fear that uncertainty could destabilize the carefully elaborated systems we have constructed for our existence.

The time makes its meaning from our understanding of the past, the present and the future. When looking back in time we get the misleading feeling that we could have more time in the future when we are more efficient in the present when actually we keep having less and less time because of this efficiency. It seems as if time was something limited for the whole of humankind. The more there are people, the less there is time for everyone individually. Despite this seeming fact we still believe that we are masters of the time and not vice versa when actually we are the slaves of time. To overcome this slavery we try to capture it in illusions and things. We measure the time in the amounts of things we manage to accumulate in our vicinity. In this this way we make time visible for us. But this is in vein while both our being and also the things cannot fight against the force of time that makes it all meaningless.

Mall Nukke shows her collage series „Deus ex Machina“, „Manias I-III“, „Time & Things“ and „Time & People“. She has been working in collage since 1993. This technique is for her not just gluing and fixing, but rather conceptual combination of meanings. The small and seemingly random fragments make up a whole as a truth. Nothing is said straightforward, but rather hinted with allusions.