2025 programme

Each year, Kogo Gallery’s programme is designed to capture a certain vibe that embodies the emotional undertone of the events and questions topical in that particular moment and which define the contemporary zeitgeist. For 2025, we have chosen to call this vibe Thrifters and Transformers.

Knowing how to mould the world’s matter using existing resources entails a certain kind of alchemical skillset. Although there are countless new inventions made year after year, the truth is that most of them are born by successfully combining already existing things and ideas and then transforming them in meaningful, sometimes even life-changing ways. Thriftmanship and transformation can be as simple as learning from books and applying ideas to your life or buying used things and reshaping them into fashionable costumes and home decor. It can be an act of sustainability, recreating waste as something of value, or a political act, recasting something old or even problematic as a symbol to platform new and visionary policies. In a time when people are wilfully borrowing authoritarian ideas from the past to seize power while our planet’s natural resources are being emptied, turning the world into a hostile greenhouse, more sustainable and inclusive ideas need to be found and embraced.

We have gathered together projects in which artists thrift ideas and resources from the Internet, image culture, recycled production, nature, and cultural traditions and transform them into new matter. These magical realities do not obey the rules of time, space or function, but instead, they open our eyes to a more complex and exciting world. 

Text by Šelda Puķīte
Design by Aleksandra Samulenkova

The programme is funded by the Cultural Endowment of Estonia and the City of Tartu