Floral Atlas

Artists Timo Toots and Mari-Liis Rebane are the founders of Maajaam, a technological art farm near Otepää in southern Estonia, as well as the driving forces behind its open-air exhibition Wild Bits. Kogo Gallery, however, is the first place where their works come together in a shared exhibition space.

The exhibition Floral Atlas provides a map of flowering plants from the abundant, thriving meadows of southern Estonia, where the inhabitants of Maajaam’s beehive forage. It also draws attention to flowering species that have now disappeared from their natural habitats.

At the centre of Timo Toots’s installation Pollinarium is an animated star chart in which each pulsating point of light represents not a distant celestial body but a flowering plant growing around the Maajaam art farm. The work merges the precision of an analysis of DNA captured in honey collected on the farm with the vastness of the night sky to reveal the rich floral community that surrounds a single beehive as it would appear from the perspective of its tiny winged inhabitants.

Mari-Liis Rebane’s audio work Hold What Blooms uses storytelling to guide visitors on an imagined journey through a diversity of landscapes and habitats. The stories focus on flowering plants, including ones whose lifecycles are closely intertwined with bees and other pollinators. Most of these bloomers have permanently vanished from their natural environments.

Floral Atlas invites visitors to reflect on the role of flowering plants in nature and offers an opportunity to encounter the unseen.

FOCUS ON SOUTH ESTONIA

This year, we are launching a new creative initiative dedicated to exploring and celebrating South Estonia, a region defined by its vast, quiet landscapes and nature largely untouched by dense populations. The initiative is rooted in a strong sense of place and draws on the cultural and geographic richness of the region: from the intellectual pulse of Tartu to the distinct identities of Setomaa and Võru County. It embraces the enduring traditions of the Old Believers, the timeless rhythms of Lake Peipus and its fishing villages, and the storied “Onion Road”, where heritage and everyday life remain deeply intertwined.

Each year, Kogo Gallery will invite artists, curators and cultural practitioners to engage with a particular aspect of the region’s nature, culture and history, culminating in an exhibition at the gallery. In some instances, the programme will foreground practitioners who are deeply connected to these lands, who live and work here, and who draw on the region as both source material and inspiration. In others, it will welcome artists and thinkers from different regions or countries, inviting them to encounter South Estonia from an external perspective and to contribute new interpretations, dialogues and discoveries. Together, these approaches aim to expand and enrich the evolving narrative of what South Estonia is and can be.

Floral Atlas is the first exhibition in this initiative.

BIOS

Timo Toots is an interdisciplinary artist living and working in Estonia. His artistic research concentrates on the relationships between humans, technology and nature. His work addresses the question of privacy in the surveillance society and the role of nature in the technological era.
He has exhibited his works since 2006 in Europe, the US and Asia. His works are in the Estonian Art Museum, ZKM (Zentrum für Kunst und Medien) and in private collections. In 2012, Toots won Ars Electronica Golden Nica for interactive arts.
In 2013, he founded Maajaam, a farm for technological art. Together with Mari-Liis Rebane, they run this small art centre in the wilderness of South Estonia. It has an artist-in-residency programme and different workshops for all kinds of art. Around the farm, they organise an outdoor technological art exhibition, Wild Bits.
On the side, he also invents playful objects in his studio Masinism.

Mari-Liis Rebane is an audiovisual artist based in Estonia. She holds a Master’s degree from the Faculty of Fine Arts at the Estonian Academy of Arts, specialising in New Media (2018) and has participated in training programmes in Norway, Slovakia and Germany.
Rebane explores sound as an event space and as a multifaceted material, intertwining interaction, documentation and fiction. She is interested in sound’s capacity to evoke narratives, its ontological properties and the play with auditory attention. Her practice includes experimental sound and audiovisual installations, ranging from spatial sound environments and installation-based forms to concert formats and performative situations.
Mari-Liis Rebane has participated in numerous group exhibitions, festivals and performance art projects.
Together with Timo Toots, she is a driving force behind the technology and art farm Maajaam and a co-curator of the open-air exhibition Wild Bits.

TEAM

Artists: Timo Toots, Mari-Liis Rebane
Project coordination and production: Liina Raus, Sandra Veinla
Installation: Siim Asmer, Kaarel Narro, Ola Lewczyk
Texts: Timo Toots, Mari-Liis Rebane
Graphic design: Aleksandra Samulenkova
Communication: Karin Kahre, Else Lagerspetz
Photos: Lauri Kulpsoo (opening), Epp Kubu (documentation)
Translation and language editing: Refiner Translations

FUNDING AND SUPPORT

The exhibition is funded by the Cultural Endowment of Estonia and the City of Tartu.
Thank-yous to Estonian Maritime Museum, Valge Kuup, Celvia and bees.