Kohta is pleased to present two artists who both strive, in their own ways, to reconcile a fundamental tension in modern and contemporary art: the quests to erase boundaries between art and life and to safeguard an autonomous position for art in society. An aesthetics of inclusion (and transgression) versus an ethics of non-participation (and self-reflection).

Hans Rosenström (Finland, 1978, lives in Stockholm) is well known to art audiences in Finland for experiential installations that feature sound, voice and language, and also light, props and built environments. They may be more or less temporary (when they happen in galleries and museums) or permanent (for instance in the new Espoonlahti metro station, yet to be inaugurated). Rosenström also co-curated the exhibition ’A I S T I T / coming to our senses’ at Kusthalle Helsinki last summer, and he is a member of the Kohta Council.

Evanesce (2022) is a new piece devised for Kohta’s larger exhibition space. Lengths of light-weight white fabric hang from the ceiling. They form a porous and semi-permeable labyrinth alluding to the construction and consistency of the human body. Although each layer of fabric is thin and quite transparent, the view from inside becomes a milky whiteness. Visitors may choose different routes to reach the centre but must eventually exit through the entrance. That is the very definition of a labyrinth. This one also brings to mind the convoluted architecture of the human ear.

Tõnis Vint (Estonia, 1942–2019) was one of the leading characters in the unofficial art scene that somehow managed to exist in Tallinn from the 1960s until the end of the Soviet occupation of Estonia. He was a graphic artist in the fullest sense: not just a draughtsman, printmaker, magazine and book designer but a visionary creator of total works of art in black and white (and occasionally red and other colours).

Kohta is pleased to be able to show a generous selection of these early works in collaboration with the artist’s widow Eva Vint and with Temnikova & Kasela Gallery in Tallinn, which recently exhibited a very similar selection under the same title, ‘Guided Randomness’. We are grateful to them.

Eva Vint and Elnara Taidre, curator at the Kumu Art Museum in Tallinn, have also edited a lavishly illustrated selection of Tõnis Vint’s essays on what today would be called visual culture (Tõnis Vint: Kogutud artiklid/Collection of Articles. Tallinn: ;paranoia publishing group ltd, 2021), which will be available for purchase at Kohta.