Kõndides mööda salateid (While Walking on Secret Paths but also While Walking on Salads) was a group exhibition in the courtyard of the Kumu Art Museum, Tallinn, that was curated by Margit Säde Lehni. Taking part in the show were Adrian Piper, Tina Melzer, Caroline Bergvall, Paul Elliman, Louise Lawler, Cia Rinne and others.
Combining mostly sound and text works, the exhibition “Kõndides mööda salateid” was aimed at looking into different ways of perceiving and experiencing language and space that surrounds it. For this exhibition I contributed a text piece called The Crossing, that was presented on one the courtyard walls.
The text is a poetic reflection on a zebra crossing, both in the form of an actual crossing, its depiction as a drawing and it’s textual description.
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Sometimes you see people pass by, they walk up or down the crossing. High heels that sound like women talking, heavy tired working boots or the feathered feet of children. Then nothing for a moment, a valley of silence before the traffic comes alive again. You look at the passing cars and you follow them from left to right, like words which are heading for the end of a sentence. You repeatedly try and look at yourself in the reflection of the polished cars. Sometimes this works and you see yourself standing, mirrored for a moment in the shiny paint, until it disappears again. This is how you see yourself, superficial and fragmented, distorted and disfigured. Appearing and disappearing, your image transforming every time, as if you are reading the same sentence over and over and its content keeps changing (Excerpt)
Read the whole text here, or find out more about the show in the hand-out, that was nicely designed by Urs Lehni from Rollo Press. Also, the text was presented in a different format for the Autumn of Modernism exhibitions at the Vleeshal, Middelburg and the Temporary Gallery in Cologne.