Kiwa

Kiwa (1975) can be viewed as a reluctant machine, disrupting leitmotifs and quotes. Bringing together principles of anarchy and pop, the artist uses various media from sculpture to painting, performance to video and sound to text.

Since 1999 Kiwa has curated numerous exhibitions. He has lectured at the Estonian Academy of Arts (2016–2018), led the sound art platform “metabor” (2001–2004) and the ethnographic documentary project “Soviet hippies” (since 2017, with Terje Toomistu). His works belong to the collections of Kumu Art Museum, Tartu Art Museum, Contemporary Art Museum of Estonia, and private collections in Estonia, Europe and the US. From 2017 to 2019 he was a recipient of the national artists’ salary.

Since 2014 Kiwa has led the publishing house ;paranoia – the corporate aesthetics of experimental literature with global reach creates an impression of an elite cultural product. ;paranoia publishes books no other publisher wants to work with either for political, financial, aesthetic or other reasons. In Finno-Ugric languages, the root “para” means “best” or “sufficient” in the totality of its meaning, “noid” stands for “witch” and “noidlema” for “lurking”. The publisher operates in a multidisciplinary field, instead of book launches, they follow a new format called “perverted product presentation” that combines experimental literature with performance and contemporary music, such examples are “Cabaret Derrida: The Field of Nothing” (2016, the conference of Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present ) and “Ulmefestival” (2018, Tartu Uus Teater).

Read more about Kiwa and look at his selected projects from CCA artists database and artist website.