SUMMARY

It was the early 1980s. The orientalist Linnart Mäll had just translated the foundational Taoist text, Laozi’s “Tao Te Ching”, into Estonian. For the young artist Mari Kurismaa, who had recently graduated as an interior architect from the State Art Institute of the Estonian SSR, it became a constant companion, a book she returned to again and again. 

How do you free yourself from the inner tension that paralyses and prevents you from living? How can you release the forces of life and creativity? By imagining, of course, that you are the wind – ethereal and in constant motion. Every evening the young artist would fall asleep with this thought and wake with it again, for months on end. It was quite difficult and unpleasant, because she did not even particularly like the wind. And yet she held firmly to the conviction that it was the wind that would finally set the frozen branches in motion.

And it worked. At a certain point, entirely new landscapes opened up before her. Vast landscapes that were completely… still. “It’s so strange that you never know what you’re going to get. But if you really want it, you’ll get something. [—] For me, what matters is that these are simply landscapes – they are not my inner landscapes. They are some kind of objective landscapes that exist somewhere. [—] It’s an endless world. You can move around in it however you like.”

What world is this, then? And where are these landscapes? They are on the threshold between light and shadow, enchantment and tension. It is precisely this threshold – this liminal state – that forms the living contour along which the artist moves, where both space and time open out endlessly. It is light. A strange light – at once the rising sun and the falling night, the onset of sleep and the moment of waking.

Twilight is the hour of storytelling, a turning point that allows new meaning to emerge. We do not know whether the story has just ended or is only beginning. What is certain is that from this half-light, this in-between time, something new is coming into being: a geometry of twilight.

Although no human figure appears here, it is a human world. These are human thoughts and actions, dreams, words and insights on the boundary between eternal being and non-being. A place one can reach only by becoming wind.