Everything is at Stake

blowing, fusing, cold working; plate 40 x 40 cm

dreams – becoming true
freezing – thawing
listening – saying
body – spirit
value – price
eternity – moment

Reeli Kõiv, curator of the exhibition:

Tiina Sarapu’s work is characterised by a minimalist language of form. Perfectly accomplished form is nearly always very simple, letting the idea dominate over it. Having in the recent years mainly presented herself as a installation artist, Tiina Sarapu has often alternated the meaning of an initial idea, setting it in different contexts (like in several installations with music stands and mirrors), creating thus illusory spaces, visualised sounds, stretching limits of perception. A pervading image, suitable for expressing different ideas, has been a glass sheet of the shape of a rectangle, which she has slumped according to her wish into books, music paper – and scales in this project. As a conceptual artist, she uses glass to express the idea of life’s palimpsest nature, being interested in oppositions hidden in glass as a material claiming that: Glass marks in my work the world between the opaque and the transparent, the visible and the invisible, the material and the immaterial, the real and the irreal… Thus in the present spatial installation “Everything is at Stake” polarities are balanced like on scales: body and spirit, listening and talking, freezing and thawing, etc. And the scales stand in balance. Disbalancing them, reversing the notions or refusing an old opposition, is left for the visitor to decide, if he or she wishes.

Three Estonian glass artists Tiina Sarapu, Eeva Käsper and Mare Saare were seeking balance between permanence and instability at the exhibition „A Moment of Balance” at the Tartu Art Museum in spring 2010.