Location: In the building next to the Narva Art Residency, Joala 20.
Opening hours: 22.08, 3–7 PM; 23.08, 1–7 PM; 24.08, 1–7 PM.
▶︎ The exhibition opening will take place on Friday, 22.08 at 5 PM. Admission is free
German artist Tina Haber, Thomas Ravens, and Birgit Schlieps have been involved in the project SLICED BREAD since 2022. In January 2023, they curated the first group exhibition, SLICED BREAD, at Zwinger Galerie in Berlin. The exhibition sketched a symbolic-aesthetic landscape centered around the theme of bread, interwoven with economic and political contexts.
During their residency in Narva, they set up a temporary BREAD LABORATORY to engage in an exchange on the topic of bread with local residents and Estonian artists. For some people from Narva, the first thing that came to mind was the Russian proverb ‘Хлеб — всему голова’.
The artists are happy now to present the results in an exhibition and thankful, that we were given the opportunity to show in the former administrative offices of the Kreenholm factory at Joala 20, opposite the Narva Art Residence building. Their approach was based on three sources: what we discovered in Narva, what
people sent us per mail and what we carried in our luggage.
The exhibition consists therefore of three parts:
– Talks on bread – Exchange with people of Narva. The first part features an interview film that shows what they learned about bread in Narva through discussions with people from Narva. They look forward to having further conversations about bread during the exhibition. They are interested in the role bread
plays in people’s lives, what types they like, where they buy it, what social role it plays, and what expressions and stories come to mind. It’s a historical topic. Bread culture is changing and at the same time preserved.
– Mail Art buttered bread. The second part presents the arrivals from the Open Call for Mail Art – a format popularized in the 1970s in the wake of conceptual art that was intended not only for artists, but for everyone. Mail Art was a strategy to overcome borders and censorship. Robert Filiou coined the term “eternal networks”. For the current Open Call people from Europe and beyond were invited to send postcards and letters inspired by their associations with buttered bread.
– Multiples and other portable small works. The third part is based on the exhibition they curated for the Zwinger Gallery in Berlin in early 2023. Most of the artists, as well as some newly invited Estonian artists, are represented with “transportable” contributions
