Maria Kapajeva

Maria Kapajeva (1976) is an artist mainly focusing on gender and identity, microhistories, and the position of women in different cultural contexts. Her practice encompasses photography, video installation, textiles, embroidery, participatory practices, and found images drawn from archives, the internet, and other sources.

A recurring theme in Kapajeva’s practice is the representation of the individual and their experiences of the surrounding environment. In her 2015 solo exhibition “Interiors”, she examined women’s self-representation through photographs found on dating websites, depicting women posing in stereotypical and often sexualised ways. Kapajeva altered found photographs, placing the female figures within everyday interiors reminiscent of the environment in which she had grown up. By juxtaposing the forms of self-representation found on dating sites with her own post-Soviet cultural experience, Kapajeva explored how visual stereotypes shape women’s self-image and identity.

In 2017, in the exhibition “Dream Is Wonderful, Yet Unclear” (curated by Liisa Kaljula), Kapajeva turned her attention to Kreenholm Manufactory and the stories of its former workers. At the height of its operation, the factory employed around 12,000 people, most of them women. In preparation for the show, Kapajeva conducted interviews with former Kreenholm workers and collected photographs and memorabilia from their family archives. The dedication of these women to their work and to Kreenholm as a community seems like a wonderful dream, in stark contrast with the values and working culture of today’s capitalist society. Developing the project further, she published a book under the same title in 2020, which received the Kraszna-Krausz Photography Book Award in 2021.

In her subsequent solo exhibition “When the World Blows Up, I Hope to Go Down Dancing” (2020, curated by Siim Preiman), Kapajeva continued to explore the position of women in society. She looked at the expectations society sets for women and the social invisibility that women experience as they age. For example, her installation “OR OTHER” (2020), consisting of a neon sign and two framed photographs, focuses on Freud’s Madonna–whore complex, according to which women are seen either as saints or as sinners. The artist also asks what other feminine roles are present in society today.

Kapajeva also addressed womanhood and the roles assigned to women in her solo exhibition “By Losing Them I Become A Whole” (2025). This time, she approached these questions from a personal and embodied perspective, drawing on physical changes in her own body and a process of recovery. The exhibition brought together photography, video, textiles, ceramics, and found objects, and constituted the first chapter of a new body of work addressing womanhood and queer life. The personal experience acquired a collective dimension as Kapajeva involved women carrying hereditary BRCA1 and BRCA2 gene mutations or diagnosed with breast cancer, as well as members of the queer community, in the development of the works. Their participation transformed the works into a kind of archive of bodies and voices.

Women’s personal stories and family archives have increasingly brought the question of memory to the foreground of Kapajeva’s practice. In 2022, she presented “Loose Photos, Odds and Ends” at Kumu Art Museum, bringing together 105 old photographs that she had purchased in 2013 from an online shop based in the United States. According to the seller, the photographs had been taken in Estonia between the 1920s and 1940s. The exhibition entered into dialogue with Kumu’s permanent exhibition “Landscapes of Identity: Estonian Art 1700–1945”. Kapajeva investigated the origins of the photographs and the people depicted in them, while also involving visitors in the research process, inviting them to contribute their own knowledge and memories. In 2023, the exhibition travelled to Võrumaa Museum and the National Archives of Estonia. At the end of 2024, the National Archives acquired all 105 photographs for its collection.

In 2024, in her solo exhibition “Listen to My Scream, Hear Their Dreams”, Kapajeva looked at the mediation of the war in Ukraine and its effect on our ability to empathise with the suffering of others. The starting point for the exhibition was the gallery’s location opposite the Embassy of the Russian Federation, as well as the artist’s own experience of continuously following war news and images of violence. Rather than using direct images of war, Kapajeva focused on the personal stories of people who had fled Ukraine and on the emotional and psychological impact of the experience of war, including her own suppressed anger. Through photography, video, textiles, and installation, she explored how war reaches us and how continuous exposure to mediated images of violence can affect our response to the suffering of others.

Questions of the body, identity, and family memory came together in Kapajeva’s largest solo exhibition to date, “I Am a Border” (2026, also curated by Siim Preiman). Photographs, textile and video works, and installations intertwined the personal struggle surrounding breast cancer prevention with a tragic family history and the experience of being situated between different identities and truths. At the centre of the exhibition was the artist’s father’s former home in Narvataguse, a territory that is now inaccessible to Estonians. A recurring motif throughout the exhibition was the fruit tree. One of the central works depicts Kapajeva’s brother sawing down a barren plum tree, while drawings of apple trees continue the motif, evoking growth, rootedness, and decline. The exhibition’s materials likewise intertwined personal and family memory: works based on the family archive and personal belongings of relatives brought the past into the present and connected it with the artist’s own body and experience.