Jaanus Samma

Jaanus Samma (1982) focuses in his work on the margins of everyday life and the border between public and private space. He draws primarily from the fields of history, ethnography, and museology, exploring the stories that emerge at the intersections of these fields. Samma works in print, installation and video, and has also designed textile objects.

Rising to prominence in the Estonian art scene during the 2000s, Samma’s work employed an ambivalent camp play with male eroticism and gay symbolism; such as fountains, cannons and dolphins. He began to explore Estonian history in the project Applied Arts for a Gay Club (2010), which eroticizes archaic male farm work and places it in the context of gay culture. With the audio collection Stories (2007/2011), Samma gave a voice to gay men who shared their experiences from a time when homosexual relations were criminalised. They talk about fear, norms, finding partners in Soviet Estonia, and the impact of sexual repression on their lives.

In the project NSFW. A Chairman’s Tale (2015), Samma told the story, in the form of a fictional opera, of a kolkhoz chairman in the 1960s who was sentenced to prison for homosexual activity. He lost his job and his family as a result, but later found acceptance in gay circles. The artist traced the Chairman’s tragic fate through a spatial installation, videos, photographs, archive material, and found objects. The chairman was murdered in 1990, shortly before homosexuality was decriminalised. With this exhibition, Samma represented Estonia at the 56th Venice Biennale and attracted international attention.

In the project Hair Sucks (2012–2017), the artist collected sexuality-related graffiti from around the world, which were transformed into knitting patterns and woven into sweaters. Samma also explored graffiti as a message left in a public space in his solo exhibition at the Nomas Foundation in Rome. The exhibition, titled Outhouse by the Church (2018), featured the outdoor restroom of Kodavere Church in rural Estonia, and the public restroom at the Flaminio train station in Rome. The Flaminio toilet was one of the few unrenovated public toilets in Rome and played an important role in the local cruising culture. The messages and names written on the walls of the Kodavere outhouse tell the story of the village and its people from the early 20th century. At both sites, Samma documented the graffiti and conveyed its social and cultural significance.

In 2022, Jaanus Samma curated the exhibition Still Lifes on National Motifs at the Estonian Museum of Applied Art and Design. The exhibition reflected the use of national patterns and designs in Estonian applied art and graphics from the 1930s to the 1950s. The artist selected materials from the collections of nearly twenty museums, and put together twelve thematic compositions focusing on themes that were particularly prominent at the time – from Kalevipoeg, the protagonist of the national epic of the same name, and Lydia Koidula, one of the most prominent poets of the era of national awakening, to labour and sport. Samma created three new works for the exhibition, which address the national conservative art canon and offer possibilities for its contemporary interpretation. Three other Estonian artists contributed to the exhibition: Edith Karlson, Anna Mari Liivrand, and Urmas Lüüs, who all interpreted nationalism in their own way.

Samma also explored the connection between national narratives and myths and power in his solo exhibition Iron Men, which opened at the Contemporary Art Museum of Estonia (EKKM) in 2023. The exhibition focused on the representation of the hero as a symbol of strength, masculinity, protection and bravery. Without making any judgements, the artist presented in the exhibition several men who have shaped Estonia’s national identity on both a mythological and political level. Each part of the exhibition dealt with different historical symbols. The first part focused on a carpet given to President Konstantin Päts by the Home Daughters youth organisation in 1938. The second part presented Voldemar Päts’ 1926 collection of patterns, The Estonian National Dress and Designs, which had a strong influence on the applied arts of the time. The third part of the exhibition dealt with the statue of Apollo Belvedere, of which several copies have existed in Estonia since the late 1880s, and the final part of the exhibition dealt with the Estonian national hero Kalevipoeg. The exhibition also included the work Jockstrap, embroidered with Estonian national patterns, which challenges entrenched notions of popular culture and masculinity. Through archival material and stories, Samma presented forgotten or hidden fragments of history and used them to shift the tenets of the patriarchal world order.

The exhibition Elisarion: Elisàr von Kupffer and Jaanus Samma, held at the Kumu Art Museum in 2024, presented the work of the Baltic-German artist Elisàr von Kupffer (1872–1942) and Jaanus Samma. The exhibition depicted utopian and idealistic spaces, and explored issues of identity. Von Kupffer’s homoerotic paintings, influenced by antiquity and the Renaissance, intertwined with Samma’s works, which deal with the sexuality of Estonian peasants and queer folk art. The juxtaposition of the works highlighted the complexity of the erstwhile coexistence of peasants and German-speaking elites, the intertwining of alienation and desire, and the juxtaposition of high and low. The exhibition was complemented by Karl Joonas Alamaa’s installation Limited Fun. Although Samma often touches on difficult social issues, his work is underpinned by a subtle humour.