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Indepth Arts News:
"Liina Siib: Eye Strip"
2006-01-20 until 2006-03-18
Giedre Bartelt Galerie
Berlin, ,
DE Germany
Liina Siib (*1963, Tallinn) is one of the first artists in Estonia who started to use digitally treated photographs. From the very beginning, her "topic" has been the deeper facets of human nature, the complicated relations between childhood and the world of adults. Liina Siib penetrates ever deeper into those concealed facets, creating more multilayered and elaborate systems of allusions. She has chosen to cast a closer look at one savoury moment - a child's wish to become an adult as soon as possible, and the images that childhood presents as the grown-up world. Profound sadness can sometimes be glimpsed on these pictures ˆ an adult‚s submission to laws that cannot be changed, and an inability to comfort children in their activity and games.
Digital treatment has provided Siib‚s photos with a special dimension of reality, a kind of space. It differentiates them already by their visual perception from the so-called documentary art, and from the world that fixes the everyday life impartially. It is still not the matter of created reality versus the actual reality. Like so many things in Liina Siib‚s work, the notion Œreality‚, too, moves on the border where the different sides have not been precisely determined.
Sirje Helme, Director of KUMU - New Art Museum of Estonia
The posters of the project "Movie Posters" (2001-2004) advertise films and film characters that do not exist. Each poster is provided with a sentence summarizing the film. The posters interpret different film genres like action, horror, documentary, neorealist drama, gay and lesbian, musical, romance etc. The unfulfilled dreams of people are realised in fairy tales or films of different genres as if by magic, the story simulates perfection. Viewers are given the chance to identify with likeable characters. The posters base on archive of photographs taken by author in different parts of our world.
Liina Siib about "Movie Posters"
The series "The Fig Leaf" (2002/ 2004) examines cultural conventions, presenting a `photographic herbarium' of marble or plaster fig leaves, including examples from the public places or museums and parks in Tallinn and London. A fig leaf was added to the sculptures in order to protect the viewer from seeing the discreet places of naked figures. The conventionality of exposure in public places is associated with the still existing class ideology, although considering the specifics of different sculptures (emperor, young girl, ancient Greek god), the fig leaves positioned over the private parts are today rather protecting the sculptures from the lewd glances of the viewers. From here unravels the topic of the catastrophic constriction of private space, and the fig leaf could easily start denoting privacy instead of marking the Fall and exit from the Garden of Eden.
Liina Siib about "The Fig Leaf"
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