SUMMARY

I’m immersing myself in artist Urmas Lüüs’ (b. 1987) world of meaning with a Proustian trick. I put in my mouth the red candy found in the corner of the drawer, which I had brought as a souvenir from the performance “Aunt Ōie’s 65th Birthday” (premiered on 5. IV 2024 in the Kanuti Guild Hall) and I quietly slide through a diffuse barberry-flavoured chain of connections, extending from the late Soviet sugar shortage to the specific selection and display of today’s discount market sweet stalls. Even the characteristically sharp crunch of the candy wrapper – cellophane film – sounds somehow meaningful in the morning silence, touching on a disappearing, marginalising place and time, Eastern Europe around us and within us, a topic that Lüüs has mostly opened through the self-talk of an older woman.

“Urmas Lüüs is an Estonian artist who works in the field of jewellery, sculpture, installation, writing, music and theatre” – this is what a concise definition (probably his own) sounds like. I would add embroidery, video and photography to the list of permanent fields that he is more than familiar with. At first glance, this open list seems to indicate a postmodern type of artist who moves smoothly from one medium to another, who adapts self-expression to a concept like a perfectly fitted bespoke suit and can easily outsource the execution of his work if necessary. However, that is not the case at all.

Urmas Lüüs’ multimedia activity seems to be different from the beginning. Since the starting point of his artistic ideas is not a concept, but some kind of material, physically encoded mystery in everyday objects, he often starts with an obsessive collection process. Thus, his installation solo exhibition at Tütar Gallery in 2023, entitled “Man! God Has Created You out of Nothing, and This is too Often Felt in Your Case”, inspired by Catholic tomb culture, was based on over 7,000 photographs taken in different cemeteries.

Lüüs’ fixed images located in the intermediate landscape of jewellery, embroidery and sculpture find new places in a constant recirculation in this open but oversaturated art system. The same thing happened with the video in the 2021 exhibition “Yet Another Example of the Porousness of Certain Borders” at Hobusepea Gallery, whose motif of a character blindly applying make-up on a pillow case resurfaces with new shades of meaning in the second image of the performance “Aunt Ōie’s 65th Birthday”. Every object and gesture has its own potential afterlife.

“Yet Another Example of the Porousness of Certain Borders” consisted of objects left behind by Lüüs’ grandmother, who passed away at the age of 83; the artist intervened as a kind of dialogue partner. The 2022 theatrical installation “Overcrowded Loneliness” created for the Independent Dance Stage – a freeze-frame shot from an imaginary performance – was also based on the everyday environment belonging to a fictitious elderly woman. The smaller works presented in the context of Lüüs’ installations and performances seem to be characterised by the principle of sacramentality – the invisible and spiritual is present through the visible and material, which in turn becomes sacred through this presence.

In the spring of 2023, Urmas Lüüs and Hans-Otto Ojaste took over the cramped spaces of Hop Gallery with their Kabakov-like total installation “An Owl Screamed and the Samovar Hummed Without Stopping”. The claustrophobic, labyrinthine journey guides the viewer along brown shelf units from the Soviet era, arranged as an abandoned hunting lodge with souvenir horns, electric candles and ghostly rotating fan blades, sometimes breaking their way through the shelves.

In the case of Urmas Lüüs’ latest performance, “Aunt Õie’s 65th birthday” at Kanuti Guild, which was the artist’s first performance with actors, I was most impressed by his work with background texts, which were intended to outline the character in more detail and to think through her motives for action. Next stop: solo exhibition in Kumu.

Urmas Lüüs, Hans-Otto Ojaste
An Owl Screamed and the Samovar Hummed Without Stopping
2023
Performative installation
Exhibition view at HOP gallery
Photo: Joosep Kivimäe