The duo-exhibition Shedding Skin at Gallery Vaal brings together Laura Põld’s site-specific
installations, drawings and ceramics and Piret Karro’s poetry, prose and photos in the format of a
notebook series.
The title refers to changing, hardening, and the need for self-creation. The dialogue between Põld
and Karro took place in the context of the movement restrictions established in the course of this
year’s global events. Particular focus was set on the practical issues of living arrangements and
cohabitation constellations as well as the survival strategies of cultural workers.
Shedding Skin focuses on the precarious life of cultural workers, and elaborates on how professional
structures that provide temporary employment, education, stipends or residency positions also direct
the nature of our intimate surroundings. With whom do we share our home spaces and morning
coffee routines, and who bumps into us on our way to the bathroom? Often, this person is not our
life partner, but a random housemate, one in the line of many. Institutional precarity creates the
precarity of intimacy. One can experience their close relationships in a new place only temporarily,
until they need to catch a new job opportunity in a new place. At the exhibition, this condition is
elaborated on from the perspective of artists and cultural workers.
Piret Karro’s texts are straightforward and convey Eastern European realism. She uses assertive and
poignant free verse to write about intimacy and violence and the relationships between body and
space, locating herself en route between Tallinn–Berlin–Budapest.
All images copyright and courtesy of the artists and Vaal Galerii