Edith Karlson is first Baltic artist with Kiasma solo show

Edith Karlson is the first Estonian and Baltic artist to receive a solo exhibition at Kiasma, Finland’s contemporary art museum, ERR reported in a review by Hanno Soans. Her exhibition, From Dawn to Dawn, remains on view on the museum’s fifth floor in Helsinki until September 27.

Writing about the exhibition after visiting it in early May, Soans says the passage of time has replaced the immediate physical experience of Karlson’s art with a haze of memories and photographs taken on a phone. He argues that a full review may be less useful than using Karlson’s work to consider contemporary sculpture more broadly.

Contemporary sculpture is still often discussed through the framework established by Rosalind Krauss in her influential 1979 essay Sculpture in the Expanded Field. Krauss described how sculpture had come to include narrow corridors ending in television screens, large photographs documenting walks in rural areas, mirrors placed at unusual angles in ordinary rooms and temporary lines drawn in the desert.

History has shown that the category can be continually reshaped. Karlson’s response to that professional dilemma is to use the freedom discovered by earlier generations of installation artists to create spaces from almost anything, Soans writes.

Her approach to materials turns toward archaic forms of expression, obsessive impressions of the body, footprints left in sand and patterns scratched with fingers into clay walls. Even dust becomes an aesthetic category in Karlson’s work. Its archaic quality allows sculpture to resist being translated into images and pixels.

A studio as a source of the work

To reconnect with the exhibition and experience part of the working process, Soans visited Karlson’s studio on Raja Street. The artist studied there during both her bachelor’s and master’s degrees, from 2003 to 2008.

Because Karlson’s art clearly grows from everyday studio practice rather than from a conceptual framework devised in advance, Soans writes that her work also channels the atmosphere of the building, which was constructed as a sculptors’ house in 1976.

The building stands at the far end of Mustamäe, behind the university campus. Its atmosphere seems to contain the ghostly presence of several generations. Studios in the partly empty building are still occupied by Karlson’s peers and friends.