Marko Maetamm has a confession to make. Or sorry, let me rephrase this: he has loads
and loads of confessions to
make. He wants to tell it all, just everything to us, and he wants us to listen to his worries
and problems. Maetamm is
confused, he feels weak and almost completely inadequate when facing the demands and
challenges of the
contemporary world. He is afraid of failing, of losing his job, of not being able to pay his
bank loan. He feels miserable
without his wife and kids but feels equally unhappy when being with them. In other words,
M�etamm seems to be in a
deep mess.
But hold on, are these confessions as works of art true? Does he really mean it? Sure, of
course they are bothand.
These litanies of failures of coping with modern life are obviously and painstakingly as
true as they are blue, but at the
same time, they are also something else. They are, not so surprisingly, made, reshaped
and coloured by a wide variety
of white lies. You know, with all the shades between pure white to grey on grey as in dirty
snow. In short, they are
stories.
And yes, they are fabulously well and vividly told and expressed stories with the means of
contemporary art and visual
culture.
The project Marko M�etamm presents at the Estonian pavilion has the title of Loser�s
Paradise. A title that again
simultaneously tells it all while quickly camouflaging the actions and covering his traces. It
is a project that can
alternatively be filed under a) Collection of Modern Miseries, b) I Told You So, c) A Good
Idea, and d) When is Supper,
Honey? It is a project, which constantly and with amazing coherence plays with the double
act of telling and showing it
all and not telling and showing anything at all. The point being: this is a body of work that
you can�t explain away or
solve. It stays there to haunt you, to bug you with more and more questions about was it
really like that, or was it
again just another lie?
With the strategy of going head on, and seemingly without a helmet, against the mighty
currents of our daily lives in
so called western market orientated capitalist systems, M�etamm is able to combine
something personal with
something very common and general. Even if most of us will never go and make public
announcements how lost and
lonely we feel, it is inevitable that we know more than well what M�etamm is hinting at.
We
sense the pressure to
compete, we live with and through the necessity to succeed. We face fear, we see pain �
and we do all that is in our
abilities and powers to deny it.
(...)
Curator Mika Hannula