Liisa-Lota Jõelehe exhibition questions the need for a perfect form

Liisa-Lota Jõelehe’s solo exhibition “Even More Beautiful” questions what happens after the happy ending and whether a correct form exists at all, ERR’s Olivia Soans writes. The exhibition is open at the Container gallery in Telliskivi Creative City through August 31.

Once there was an artist who took her works to a small gallery, placed them behind glass and closed the room with a door. She did not draw the curtains or cover the glass, allowing passers-by to look inside. Behind the glass is a tiny world that cannot be entered: crooked trees, potted plants made of crepe paper, the fragile architecture of a small house, a tilted stump, carefully made framed embroideries and a battered young bird beneath a misshapen sun.

The exhibition text identifies the grey bird as a duck, which initially brings to mind Hans Christian Andersen’s 19th-century fairy tale “The Ugly Duckling”. Both Andersen’s tale and Jõelehe’s exhibition feature birds, but the logic of the fairy tale is even more important: the feeling that a world exists behind the glass, with its own rules and rhythms, to which the reader or viewer has no complete access.

This distance is not merely a practical limitation. It shapes the entire viewing experience. Fairy tales cannot be touched either; they can only be imagined, believed in and entered in one’s mind. Trees, the sky, passers-by and the viewer’s own reflection appear on the Container gallery’s glass, merging with the interior. Suddenly, two worlds are being viewed at once: the one behind the glass and the one in which the viewer is standing.

Andersen’s “The Ugly Duckling” is a story about a creature that is wrongly defined and eventually finds its proper form. The duckling grows up and realises that it was never truly an ugly duckling, but a swan. Its wandering then comes to an end. Its suffering gains meaning in retrospect because it had a purpose: reaching recognition.

The fairy tale offers the comforting idea that the right place and the right form are waiting for all of us somewhere, and that one day it will be possible to reach them. Jõelehe’s “Even More Beautiful”, however, seems to ask what happens after the happy ending.

The key to this question lies in the title. “Even more beautiful” draws attention not so much to beauty as to the word “more”. This small word seems to shape an ever-greater part of our contemporary late-capitalist experience: better, more, grander, younger, slimmer, more beautiful. More, more, more.

This does not express a lack, but something more paradoxical: the impossibility of being sufficient. For something to become even more beautiful, it must already be beautiful. Yet “more” never allows that state to remain. Every achieved moment becomes merely a stopping point on the way to the next improvement.

In this sense, “more” is almost a violent word. It does not allow anything simply to be, but assumes that there is always something in the existing state that can be improved, added or removed. If everything can be better, the present inevitably becomes insufficient.

This way of thinking extends beyond consumption and appearance. The self, too, has become a project that must be constantly improved. The body could be slimmer, life more meaningful, work more significant, the home more beautiful and the self more fully “oneself”. Even authenticity becomes something that can be produced in greater quantities. Sufficiency becomes almost a form of failure: if there could be more, why settle for what already exists?

Perhaps this is where Jõelehe’s young bird becomes intriguingly different from Andersen’s. We do not know what kind of bird it really is. The exhibition text says it is a duck, but its appearance does not quite confirm this. It is clearly neither a duck nor a swan, and even less is it a recognisable ideal form. It simply is: small, grey and slightly battered.