How I Became an Artist: Marko Mäetamm

Artist in the House!

June 7, 2017 / 16:00

Presented in relation to our Doublethink: Double vision exhibition, artist Marko Mäetamm will be live drawing on Pera Museum’s elevator and restroom walls openly in public. Mäetamm will re-create his work “How I Became an Artist” and following this, he and curator Alistair Hicks will be discussing his works.

Marko Mäetamm (b. 1965, Tallinn)is a painter, video and installation artist. Upon graduating from Estonian Academy of the Arts, he has exhibited internationally and represented Estonia at the 52nd Venice Biennial (2007) and at 50th Venice Biennial (2003) as a part of artists' duo John Smith (with Kaido Ole). Throughout his practice, the artist’s primary focus has been on family life. Treating the family as a microcosm of a wider socio-political and economic models, Mäetamm collects petty every-day situations, presenting them filtered through a prism of his unmistakable dark humour.

Temporary Exhibition

Doublethink
Double vision

Thinking has changed radically, but many people don't appear to have noticed. Our institutions have been stuck on linear Neo-Platonic tracks for 24 centuries. These antiquated processes of deduction have lost their authority. Just like art it has fallen off its pedestal. Legal, educational and constitutional systems rigidly subscribe to these; they are 100% text based.

Doublethink <br>Double vision

The adventure of the Big ‘K’

The adventure of the Big ‘K’

In a bid to review the International System of Units (SI), the International Bureau of Weights and Measures gathered at the 26th General Conference on Weights and Measures on November 16, 2018. Sixty member states have voted for changing four out of seven basic units of measurement. The kilogram is among the modified. Before describing the key points, let us have a closer look into the kilogram and its history.

Marcel Duchamp’s Bicycle Wheel

Marcel Duchamp’s Bicycle Wheel

In 1998 Ben Jakober and Yannick Vu collaborated on an obvious remake of Marcel Duchamp’s Roue de Bicyclette, his first “readymade” object. Duchamp combined a bicycle wheel, a fork and a stool to create a machine which served no purpose, subverting accepted norms of art. 

The First Nudes

The First Nudes

Men were the first nudes in Turkish painting. The majority of these paintings were academic studies executed in oil paint; they were part of the education of artists that had finally attained the opportunity to work from the live model. The gender of the models constituted an obstacle in the way of characterizing these paintings as ‘nudes’.