Girls’ Island turns care into a vision of another world

ERR’s Sveta Grigorjeva reviews the group exhibition “Girls’ Island,” on display at the EKA gallery through September 6. The exhibition imagines a world free from fascism, sexism, violence, technofeudalism, climate collapse and a surveillance society, placing care at the centre of efforts to build a better one.

The review, published in Sirp, draws on Ruth Levitas’s book “Utopia as Method,” which presents imagination as one of the most powerful ways to rethink and organise society. Levitas argues that utopia should not be understood only as an attempt to reach a better or ideal society, but also as a method for reshaping the world around us. This gives utopian thinking both theoretical and practical value.

Creating a better and more sustainable world requires both the ability to imagine an alternative to present conditions and the ability to put that imagination into practice. Against what Grigorjeva describes as a growing crisis of imagination, “Girls’ Island” attempts to resist the forces that make people feel powerless. The exhibition insists on the possibility of a better world and sees care as a central tool in pursuing it.

Although care affects everyone, practices of care tend to be undervalued both in the art world and in society more broadly. The growing prominence of soft, and positively naive, concepts in art-related disciplines does not mean they have stopped being underestimated. Because care, empathy and hospitality are often associated with femininity, some people may regard them as suspicious or unserious from the outset.

Grigorjeva praises the artists for having the courage to address vulnerability and care in their work, calling this approach deeply necessary.

A journey through tiny forms

“Girls’ Island” is a relatively minimalist exhibition. At first, the gallery appears almost empty and unremarkable. A few large pastel-coloured fabrics hang in the air, embroidered with colourful figures, people, horses, birds, tears and houses. A bright melody plays in the background, while a table in the middle of the room is covered with a tablecloth bearing embroidered messages.

Gradually, however, the abundance of miniatures surrounding the viewer becomes visible. They include all kinds of sculpted female forms: fuller figures, smaller bodies and multi-bodied figures in shades of red, blue, grey, purple and orange. The room is not empty; the viewer simply cannot see everything at first.

To take in the sculptures, the viewer must keep looking down, almost make themselves as small as the figures and crouch to register their lines and sharp edges more clearly. Their vision must be recalibrated to a different scale, length, width and depth in order to notice the small forms at all. It feels like a world of its own, an exhibition within an exhibition.