‘The Laugh of the Medusa’ at EKKM Tallinn

by Lorna McDowell // Dec. 5, 2023

This article is part of our feature topic Myth.

Medusa—the instantly recognisable figure from Greek mythology who was punished for her sexuality—has been at home in our collective imagination for centuries. As the story goes, the once-beautiful priestess of Athena was either raped by or engaged in a tryst with Poseidon in Athena’s Temple: exactly which of these scenarios occurred seems to differ across historical texts. Regardless, Medusa was punished by Athena with the curse of a glance that would turn anyone who looked at her into stone, and her hair was transformed into living, venomous snakes. In art, literature and popular culture, Medusa is alternately depicted as either monstrous, or as a seductive femme fatale. Her story of blame and punishment has played out repeatedly in our patriarchal society, where women—particularly those in the public eye—are still broadly filtered into two categories: virtuous, beautiful and kind, or assertive, dangerous and unappealing to the male gaze.

In an act of reclaiming these myths of the past that still live and breathe today, the group exhibition ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’ at EKKM in Tallinn, Estonia, takes its title from a 1975 essay of the same name by French feminist writer and critic Hélène Cixous. In this essay, Cixous urges women to break free from male-oriented knowledge production, reclaim their bodies and write as a political and revolutionary act. Inspired by this, curator Maria Helen Känd asks us to think critically about “how women have been (art) historically subjected to men and their imagination.” The exhibition broadly explores female pleasure and sexuality, and how it manifests in visual culture. Rather than reducing womanhood to an essentialist definition, Känd also brings in work by artists with rich and manifold experiences—queer, trans, lesbian and non-binary. Känd writes: “Womanness is far from being self-evident or uniform, despite what we see dazzling back from magazine covers and screens.”

Weaving through the rooms and levels of EKKM, the exhibition manifests Cixous’ ideas through the works shown, creating a visual essay with a mythological sensibility. Estonian artist Terje Ojaver’s playful self-portrait sculpture ‘A Woman with a Pet Fur Collar’ (2011) is among the first works we encounter. It’s a life-size, middle-aged figure who winks over her shoulder, resplendent in a skin of silky faux fur and complete with a furry tail. In her practice, Ojaver uses materials traditionally associated with women artists, such as soft fabrics, subverting them to highlight the power of women, using fantastical scenes and characters. This first figure is accompanied nearby by a more recent work of Ojaver’s, ‘A Woman on a Log Splitter’ (2023), who straddles a motion-sensored log splitting machine, the sudden mechanical movement and sound of which jolts us out of our stupor as we pass by. This woman is dressed in furry lingerie and lace gloves and—like the standing figure we first encountered—is wearing a solemn expression, as if contemplating the stories of gendered freedoms and obligations, strengths and resignations that Ojaver’s work is known for.

In the same room, a large-scale installation of the video work ‘Lasso’ (2000) by Salla Tykkä shows what seems like a fragment of a larger narrative. We see a young woman out jogging, who slows down to approach the window of a stranger’s home. Her reflection appears in the window and she steps forward to peer voyeuristically through Venetian blinds. We see the interior of the house and a young man, barefoot and wearing only jeans, is swinging a lasso fanatically. Linking the faux rodeo of the male protagonist to a classic “spaghetti” Western, the operatic sound of composer Ennio Morricone’s ‘Once Upon a Time in the West’ (1969) builds to a crescendo over the four-minute scene. The work conveys an inverted depiction of the male gaze, and with Ojaver’s sculptures seems to further the commentary on the trappings of gender, power and control across the ages of womanhood.

Continuing through the space, we pass by photographic works and Chupan Atashi’s sculptural flower bed installation on our way upstairs, to where the focus turns towards “the abject”—a term that describes a visceral reaction of horror and disgust at something that upsets the social order, and which, when grounded in a feminist context, expresses how female bodily functions are cast off by a patriarchal social order. A 16-minute video installation by Pauline Curnier Jardin, ‘Ausgeblutet, Bled Out, Qu’un sang impur’ (2019), is installed in a dark room with a floor painted a glossy, blood red. The film is loosely based on Jean Genet’s ‘Un Chant d’Amour’ (1950)—a homoerotic love story between inmates in a prison—but here the young men are replaced with post-menopausal women relishing in their erotic power. They hit on young men and yearn for each other through prison walls, squeezing flowers through tiny cracks in-between the cells. They casually bleed in a butcher’s shop and out in the street, thrash primally around their cells and meet at the top of a hill to scream cathartically, creating both a sense of horror and liberation from the patriarchal taboos of menstruation and the ageing body.

A truly psychedelic installation work by Kris Lemsalu, ‘HOLY HELL O’ (2018) is one of the works installed in the top level of the gallery—a tableau of a jacuzzi tub bubbling with murky, tainted water, into which a procession of rainbow striped mannequins suspended from the ceiling plunge like Olympic divers. Ceramic hands embrace the jacuzzi tub, which is emerging from a swirl of patchwork quilts on the floor, which perhaps suggest the rich and radical history of women’s craft and creativity. A glistening ceramic structure in the centre, over which the water runs, suggests a fleshy opening and some kind of supernatural alien birth. The installation follows the fantastical and playful approach of Ojaver’s sculptures, seen at the start of the exhibition, and we might find ourselves entranced by its supernatural quality, but also confused, and a little disturbed, by this darkly uncanny scene that brings together symbols of birth and the domestic.

In addition to artists like Lemsalu, ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’ brings international artists such as Young Joon Kwak together with legendary Estonian artists who no longer get the attention they once did—artists like Anna-Stina Treumund and Terje Ojaver, both of whom influenced the early Estonian LGBT and queer art scenes. The EKKM, now a pivotal part of the Estonian art landscape, began as a squat 17 years ago and and has become an institution over this time. Using a wide variety of media—from installation to sculpture and video—Känd’s exhibition carves out a vital space in the local discourse, one that centres experiences and desires that exist outside of the dominant male gaze, and offers alternatives to the pervasive images of women seen in the media. In the end, we’re left wondering, was Medusa’s fate punishment, or liberation? As Känd writes: “The laughter of Medusa echoes bright and loud.”