Kristina Kivirand

• Hidden stories. Minutes of silence
• Tutor: Eve Kask, Maarja Kangro
• Installation, video, image projection, textile

This work is an installation self-portrait, where autobiographical components are revealed. The story is told fragmentarily and non-linearly, while the main characters of the story are hidden. For the video, I have carefully chosen symbolic images and they do not only represent the neural maps in my brain, but they can be interpreted in many ways, i.e. they have many meanings before my story: black and white, wedding dress, ashe, sea, three birds in the sky, white fabric. Materials and colours are also multifaceted with their physicality, materiality and tactile properties. 

Weaving fabrics with your own hands is a conscious choice and a contextual point of view. Originally, fabric was woven to make a body covering, which in turn was an attempt to protect oneself from cold and wind and to create a sense of security. In this work, the weaving of fabric symbolises touch, and at the same time – in the context of the installation – it is inaccessibility, hopelessness, grief, but also hope and a new beginning.I wanted to bring a deeply personal substance into my work and thereby bring it to a universal human and philosophical level, while staying with seemingly simple shapes in the case of video and tactile qualities in the case of fabrics.

The written part of the thesis consists of three parts: in the first written part I refer to the theory of neurobiologist Antonio Damasio and his claim that “pain is an access to the intellectual.” In the second, I open the concept of autobiography from the perspective of humanities scholars and describe how it could be a method. The third part of the work is the documentation of the creative part, i.e. the visual diary, where I record the planned, excluded and selected results in the form of image material. 

I exhibit my creative work in the form of a room installation with projected video, photo projection and fabric woven on a jacquard computerised loom.