Marge Monko opens solo exhibition at Tallinn gallery

Artist Marge Monko has opened her solo exhibition Summer Before Darkness at Punctum, a gallery in Tallinn, ERR reported. The exhibition begins not with darkness but with the last light before people realise that something has already passed and moved through them.

The life-size work Books, from 2007, comes from a period when Monko had recently moved and was studying for a master’s degree at the Estonian Academy of Arts.

Sleep problems associated with perimenopause led Monko to observe the play of light at sunrise. Her series Sun Salutation consists of eight silver gelatin photographs made on black-and-white infrared film. The series also incorporates quotations from works by women writers addressing age-related changes.

In winter 2022, Monko began photographing gloves without their owners in Kalamaja, which passers-by had placed on garden posts or the edges of rubbish bins so that their owners could find them. The resulting series, What do I know either what none can escape?, from 2024, takes its title from a poem by Viivi Luik. The photographs are shown in dialogue with a series based on images of strangers’ hands collected through eBay purchases.

In To Liina, dated 2018 and 2026, the artist appears in two self-portraits that mirror each other, with her back to the camera. The photographs were taken in 2018, shortly after the death of Monko’s maternal grandmother. In one, Monko is bare-chested; in the other, she wears her late grandmother’s floral dressing gown.

The exhibition remains open at Punctum until October 25.