Laura Kuusk’s audio meditation titled How to Move Like a Slime Mold first put together as an installation and performance for the Tallinn Photomonth ‘21 contemporary art biennial main exhibition « Intensive Places » at the Estonian Contemporary Art Museum (curated by TOK curators / Maria Veits and Anna Bitkina).

The installation is built up as a sound cocoon created by a female voice and an ambient sound, walking the visitor through his/her/ their bodies to suggest an experience of becoming an other-than-human organism. The participants are asked to find a comfortable way of interacting with the installation and build their personal experience through spatial and auditory elements. The installation emphasizes the idea of reuse and growing through change, not accumulation. At agreed times the artist will guide the audience through the experience. The performance will suggest bodily choreography, encouraging the audience to change perspective in the space, to touch and move, and to eat food created by yeast or mushroom cultures.

Laura Kuusk (b. 1982) lives and works in Tallinn. She studied semiotics and culture theory at the Tartu University in Estonia (BA in 2005), photography at the Estonian Academy of Arts (MA in 2008) and fine arts at the Annecy Higher School of Art, France (postgraduate diploma in 2014).

Kuusk works as the Associate Professor at the Estonian Academy of Arts, in the Department of Photography. She is the laureate of Best Female Artist of Art Vilnius art fair (2018), Édouard Barbe and the City of Grenoble Artist of the Year (2014) prizes.

Kuusk’s fields of interest are the visual and cinematic grammar and the potentials of narrative, she often recycles anthropological visual (found) materials. Kuusk is interested in the decision-making mechanisms within the collective consciousness. Over the last years, she has worked with the experience of the human body in the surrounding environment – in homes, in clothes, in relation to technology. Kuusk mainly uses photography, video and installation mediums in her work.

FOKU – Estonian Union of Photography Artists is an artist union and an alternative platform created in 2007. Foku aims to introduce and develop contemporary art and visual culture as well as to engage different audiences in the discussion about art. The mission of the union is to broaden society’s interest towards contemporary visual culture and to increase the knowledge of the Estonian art scene internationally. Since  2011 Foku has organised Tallinn Photomonth contemporary art biennial – the biggest biennial in the country.