Mark Raidpere
DAMAGE
August – September 2013
EKKM - Contemporary Art Museum of Estonia, Tallinn
DAMAGE focuses on Mark Raidpere’s work since exhibiting at the 51st Venice Biennial (2005), presenting works created between 2007 and 2013. The exhibition centers around the latter years of Raidpere’s work with a particular focus on the photographic series and videos that were conceived and realised in Naples during his residency at the Fondazione Morra Greco in 2012, and features a new video installation Pae Str. Playlist completed especially for this exhibition.
The series of self-portraits completed in Naples titled Damage, have given the name to this exhibition, and could in some sense be a counterpart to his legendary Io, which was a series of post-traumatic self-portraits completed in 1997. The title of the Damage series refers to a film or rather to the epilogue of the film with the same name by Louis Malle. There, the main character played by Jeremy Irons tries in melancholic loneliness to cope with his life after a micro-catastrophe of his own creation has resulted in the loss of his son, wife and lover.
The exhibition continues the discursive “dissection” of Raidpere’s life and family dramas (09/12/07 – 05/04/09, 2009; Pae Str Playlist, 2013) and explores the way his central focus around personal narratives have been joined by considerably more social concerns (Majestoso Mystico, 2007; 1:1:1 and Venkovka, 2008).
