SAAL Biennaal 2025 on 21-30 August in Tallinn!
We gather on the beach. A fire, chatting, bottles left to cool in the water, twirling around in waves between the rocks. That one friend who always sits beside the fire with a stick, making sure it doesn’t die out. Calling for an urgency of shared poetics, we transcribe our worlds onto the wet sand, drawing lines with our fingers. We trace overlapping maps of who we’ve been and who we are becoming, acknowledging those who have lingered here for a while and leaving space for those yet to arrive. Perhaps not measurable by grams or metres, the beach will consist of those maps for many futures to come. We keep in touch with other coastlines of those international waters, in tides and in spite of waves.
Curated by the whole collective of Kanuti Gildi SAAL, the program is not brought together in one handwriting. Now is the intersection of endless perceptions, reflections, and projections, so we connect various dots on the axis of “here or elsewhere” and “now or some other time”. It’s a festival constructed like sand that you carry home in your shoes.
To offer a relief for the need of looking into the sea together, we meet on the beach for Asphodel Meadows, Sinna Virtanen’s site-specific performance about hidden sorrow that has not been grieved. Mapping continues in Ely Daou’s storytelling performance Cognitive Maps – Chapter 1 that travels around memories of past homes. Bush Hartshorn’s 1-on-1 performance Tell Daddy invites you to sit down with the artist to tell him things you’d like to say to your father, but for some reason can’t.
After being a thrilling part of the Switchover festival in 2024, Harald Beharie makes a return with Undersang – a vibrating and rhythmic performance ritual based on dissonance, raising questions about belonging and cultural fictions. Creating a site of experience, Xenia Koghilaki’s Slamming transforms mosh pit practices on stage, reconstituting a collective ritual that lurks behind an ostensible rage. Blending club dances, drag technique, and somatic work, Sepideh Khodarahmi’s performance The Erotic Clown plays a game of seduction and destruction which ultimately ends with sitting in a cake.
Ramona Nagabczyńska performance Silenzio! uses opera to tell us about female voices, drawing upon the political aspect of the human voice. In The Teenage Songbook of Love and Sex by Ásrún Magnúsdóttir and Alexander Roberts young people take the stage to form narratives about the youth, singing songs based on their own romantic and sexual experiences. Mart Kangro’s Pantheon presents a story of interruptions and continuities, of being together and diverging, presented by three generations.
Netti Nüganen’s Estonian premiere of Ash, horizon, riding a house is a continuation from last SAAL Biennaal, where Netti presented her work Myth: last day. In her new work Netti Nüganen, KISLING and Pire Sova open up an ice-manufacturing enterprise, navigating between perspectives on locality and looking at the influences of dominant cultures. Gob Squad brings us News From Beyond, acting as mediums who wander between two worlds in order to establish contact and break through to the other side.
In All Together, Michikazu Matsune, Elizabeth Ward and Franz Poelstra share stories of people who have been important to them, but for some reason cannot be here with us at this moment. The performance connects what is present to what is absent, reminding us that “No matter if we love or hate one another, as a matter of fact, fortunately or unfortunately, whether you are here or not, we all belong together.”
The fiber program of the festival brings together various thinkers, creating moments of sharing knowledge and practices with each other. Sepideh Khodarahmi leads a workshop, exploring choreographies of erotica through the lenses of destruction, sensuality, comedy and disgust. Michikazu Matsune’s story-sharing workshop focuses on dreams and nightmares, Marta Keil and Satu Herrala invite people to imagine a loving relationship between artists and institutions. Organized together with EKKM, a workshop by Max Hannus proposes ways of using tools of ethical non-monogamy in collegial relationships, followed by a public talk on personal relationships and professional choices.
Kristina Birk-Vellemaa, an anthropologist and sex educator, discusses The Teenage Songbook of Love and Sex with the participating teenagers. In 5 GESTURES TOWARDS… two artists open the studio to the public after 10 days of working together for the first time. For the in-between moments, the wood-heated Logi sauna offers flashes of warmth with the possibility of a cold dip in the sea. Marto Mägi and Siim Pojeng give a concert at Von Krahl and the festival ends with a party at EKKM.
With excitement,
Eneli, Heneliis, Henry, Kaie, Kaius, Kerly, Maarja, Mesike, Priit, and Siim
SAAL Biennaal 2025 collaborates with the Estonian Contemporary Art Museum (EKKM), Von Krahl Tehatre, elektron.art, Estonian Theatre for Young Audiences, Sakala 3 Teatrimaja, Logi saun, TantsuRUUM, Hundipea. The festival is supported by: Ministry of Culture Estonia, Cultural Endowment of Estonia, City of Tallinn, Nordic-Baltic Mobility Programme for Culture, Onassis Stegi – Touring Program, Minister of Culture and National Heritage of the Republic of Poland from the Culture Promotion Fund, Goethe Institut Tallinn, Norwegian Embassy, Austrian Embassy in Tallinn, Performing Arts Centre of Iceland.