Mari Volens (b. 1981) is a visual artist with a background in the Academy of Arts photography department. She pursued additional studies at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, and was one of the founding members of the artist-run space Rundum. A site-specific artist, Volens is interested in underscoring the different qualities of space through the use of delicate touches and ephemeral media.
At Estonian Photographic Art Fair, Volens is displaying part of the still-continuing series “Same Difference”, where we see fragments of prefab housing towering in Tallinn’ bedroom communities. Patches of grass between cold stone walls and regularly planted trees and shrubs prove particularly important. The main characters are thus not the “mikroraion” developments and ABC centres as monuments to the long-promised communist utopia that never arrived; they are instead part of the natural environment that has been relegated to decorations. The vegetation – given to spread and become lush were it not for human intervention – are here subjected to strict rules, much like the buildings.
