Katrin Tees

Katrin Tees’s Handbook of Creative Littering, Advanced Level consists of photographs that have been taken on sunny summer days in Estonia’s wilderness. Since the local weather is generally cloudy, the cheeriness of the photos is surprising. This hypocritical cheerfulness is also magnified by the bright colors of the consumer paradise’s garbage. The artist has refrained from any kind of staging or formal aesthetic interventions. The texts are also put together following the principle of copy-paste and then matched up with the photographs.

Katrin Tees belongs to the younger generation of photographers whose principles have been influenced by the synergy of the group Infotankistid (The Infotankers). The Infotankers emerged from the Estonian Academy of Arts in 2003, when the early capitalist consumer boom and invasion of cynical commercials that accompanied local economic growth began to increase beyond tolerable levels. The group’s artists operate as activists, driven by a mission similar to that of the magazine Adbusters. Quoting the founder of Adbusters, Tallinn-born Kalle Lasn, “Our mental environment is a common-property resource like the air or the water. We need to protect ourselves from unwanted incursions into it, much the same way we lobbied for non-smoking areas ten years ago.”

The mission of Katrin Tees and her group of friends is to charge into battle, using laughter as a weapon. Since their goal is to reach real “victims of consumer society,” they often spread their message in newspapers with large circulations, department stores, rural schools, and villages. They have even held activist happenings—for instance, an art project as a “clean-up outing” open to all. The group’s creations are based on the critical analysis of social and gender-specific analyses and offer positive solutions, which are mostly hypocritically simple and speak in a language familiar to “victims of consumer society”—the language of advertising. The idea’s specificity dictates the specificity of the work’s rendering: a photographic installation, video, flyer, performance, (pseudo) advertisement from the Internet, or the like.

In this context, the most interesting fact from Katrin Tees’s biography could be that she studied social work at Tallinn University. Katrin Tees states that this practical study helped her to better understand processes unfolding in society, simultaneously making her feel weak in her ability to change them, since changes should begin from the thinking process. And so she entered the photographic department of the Estonian Academy of Arts. Yet today, aesthetics seem to be applied in more annoying ways. If Plato believed that beauty would save the world, which both Dostoyevsky and Tammsaare loved to quote, then what to do with this belief a time when the definition of beauty seems more and more to be the private property of the advertising business? The only thing left to do is to swear in a politically correct manner like the Infotankers and say “R.A.I.S.K.” — Estonian for “Damn it!” as well as Radical, Agitating, Intriguing Social Art.

Heie Treier