Artist Uku Sepsivart at the Järvselja Training and Experimental Forestry District

Projct “ArCo cubed – Artists in Collections, Communities and Collectives” presents: sculptures in the woods by artist Uku Spesivart and specially created Järvselja Training and Experimental Museum.

Järvselja is the home of Estonian foresters: for more than one hundred years they have been taught there how to research, protect and manage forests responsibly. Järvseljas’s diverse nature, with massive forests, marshes, marsh islands, bogs and lakes, has offered countless opportunities on more than 10,000 hectares. This is also the location of the oldest forest preservation area in Estonia: the Järvselja primal forest, which in 2024 celebrates the one hundredth anniversary of its founding. Järvselja is a story of legendary foresters and professors, students, whose predilection for pranks is not far behind their eagerness to obtain knowledge, and, of course, the forests themselves and all those who live in them.

A temporary Järvselja Study and Experimentation Museum will be created allowing visitors to peel back the different layers of Järvselja’s history, as well as exhibiting the “experimental sculptures” of the artist Uku Sepsivart. These are ideas and investigations which emerged during the artist’s 2023 artistic residency at Järvselja, wandering around the different forest areas, investigating the history, conversing with people and observing everyday life. Through the interpretation of Sepsivart, Järvselja’s history becomes tangible, but it is not limited to the museum room: when you are in Järvselja, you have to visit the forest, and the sculptures that the artist has made will act as guides. Three sculptures on the hiking trails of Järvselja will achieve their final form over the summer in collaboration with the local inhabitants: these, however, are not people, but the birds and the animals. How these “collaborators” will shape the works of art must be seen with your own eyes, but it is clear that the arts of survival are hidden here in the collaborations between biodiversity and various species.

The exhibition is open 26.04–07.09.2024
Tue, Wed, Thu 10:00–17:00 and Sat 12:00–18:00; other times by agreement

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Project “ArCo cubed” is a part of the European Capital of Culture Tartu 2024 main programme and has grown out of the initiative “Artists in Collections (ArCo)”, which has been mixing together contemporary art and cultural heritage since 2018. The participants in the project “ArCo cubed” are the Tartu Observatory of the University of Tartu in Tõravere (artist: Karel Koplimets), the Järvselja Training and Experimental Forestry District Foundation in Kastre County (artist: Uku Sepsivart), the riverboat Lonny at the damn on the Ahja River in Taevaskoja (artists: Sigrid Viir and Līga Spunde) and the Räpina Paper Factory (artist: Ingrid Allik, with colleagues from Estonia and Finland).

The ArCo curators and project managers are Maarin Ektermann and Mary-Ann Talvistu, spatial desgin by Mari Möldre, Margus Tammik, graphic design by Agnes Isabelle Veevo
Supported by the Cultural Endowment of Estonia, Järvselja Training and Experimental Forestry District Foundation.