Installation view of the uncensored work at Helsinki Biennial
© HAM/Helsinki Biennial/Sonja Hyytiäinen

Installation views of the censored work at the Estonian pavilion, 59th Venice Biennale. photos by David Kozma

Orchidelirium

Kratt: Diabolo №3

(2022)
Kinetic sculpture
metal. electric motors, botanical drawings and archival photographs printed on belts, sound of un-oiled machinery

Technical team Tõnu Narro and Mihkel Lember
Produced by Post Theater Collective, Tallinn Art Hall and Estonian Center for Contemporary Arts
Commissioned and censored by Estonian Center for Contemporary Art

Kratt is a mythological creature from Estonian folklore. Comprising household objects, this machine came to life—the artist asserts—once three drops of blood had been sacrificed to the devil and thereafter performed any task, including wrongdoings, for its owner. The spidery creature moves its mechanical insides to produce images on command for the viewers on a platform while those below can only observe.

The upper rollers reproduce Emilie Rosalie Saal’s botanical drawings. These beautiful images emerge from a central printing press that references Andres Saal’s background as a printmaker and the development of modern printing technology which made the colonial worldview tangible for a wider audience through the production of botanical images, maps, and information about the colonies. This machine represents the possibility of a servant for a servant. Emilie’s practice as an artist relied on the labor of local Indonesian women who worked in her household. Addressing historical erasures and incomplete narratives, the images are placed on the machine’s white belts just as Emilie’s drawings appeared on white backgrounds that detached the plants from colonial contexts.

From below, the visitors can barely see the botanical drawings produced by the upper part of the machine, instead they see images in a rushed loop passed through rotating rollers resembling the legs of a spider. The legs spin a web of archival images of destroyed landscapes that document conditions of colonial extraction of labor and soil. Among them are archives of the rubber plantation owned by Andres Saal. Despite its offerings, the artist’s Kratt is old and un-oiled—a crooked structure with audible creaks standing on missing legs that, nevertheless, has managed to continue functioning for years.

The archival images of the lower belts of the sculpture were removed from the exhibition of the Estonian Pavilion, at the 59th Venice Biennale without artist’s consent, and the uncensored sculpture was exhibited a year later at Helsinki Biennial.