After a three-year break in exhibiting, Kiwa opens on March 25 at 6 p.m. in the ArtDepoo gallery his new personal exhibition HIGH ON NOTHING.

There is a blank after the renunciative case

Minimalism was about the thingness of things. The matter mattered there. But nowadays nothing matters as well.
Matthew Collings

Kiwa´s “high on nothing” is an exhibition, which has become high on the vacuity, aridity and “coolness” of conceptualism and minimalism, handling “the instrumentalization of the speculative non-existence category proceeding from rough matter”, as the multi-talent himself announces us. 

The compère of Cabaret Derrida, the heading athlete of Estonian anti-philology, makarov of the Festival of Non-Existent Bands (calibre: 9×18mm PM), a nihilist helilääts, an Eternal Juvenile and ex-pop-artist presents at the exhibition “6 logical-formal operations as 6 pieces, the result of which is vacuity”, while vacuity has here been also equated with “nothing, non-existence, blank, zero and silence” and “inanity in the given context has not been equated with deficiency, lack, absence”. In the Western psychological logics the feeling of vacuity is as a rule connected with down – conditions, with something depressive. Being “filled” with emptiness is something incomprehensible for such logics. But it is not incomprehensible for the logics of hardcore conceptualism/ minimalism, where all of the adrenalin flows out or rather flows in from hollows, empty production. For a conceptualist void is an intensive poetic drag, the quintessence of dry logics, pure materialization of flesh-free structure.

Let us be honest – this is not an exhibition for those wishing “to embody terrible and impersonal reality from the point of view of dead art, which reveals vehemently revealed discourse of xeric” as put it one sentence of a message that recently fell into my post-box. There’s no point for such people to drag their bodies to ArtDepoo, who have never giggled over Duchamp, sat behind the obsessively cleaned up desk of Mondriani, done karate with Klein, counted days with On Kawara or sang the alphabet with Martin Creed. Who has NEVER ever felt the toxic feeling of emptiness,
when making something leads to nothing while making nothing leads to something!

Honestly, we may never be certain that by the time the exhibition is opened there is something in addition to the thorough description of the works. Even less we may be certain that there actually is something. But still the artist does plant into us some kind of belief that nothing can materialize in certain series, saying that there will take place “creation and disclosure of the presumption of nothingness (and simultaneously creating an addiction to it) through the matter,  language, language of pictures and side-products of empiric reality”.

Anders Härm

P.S. Nothing is a nice English word – a no-thing, an anti-thing. The problem of possible equivalents in other languages lies in the fact that they do not correspond to it exactly in such manner. They are powerless against nothing – the German nichts or even for example the Lithuanian niekas are as incompetent as the especially clumsy Estonian “ei miski”, but at least they sound better.