Kai Art Center’s autumn season opens with the exhibition On Fragile Grounds. Sirje Runge and Light, curated by Mėta Valiušaitytė (FR/LT), on view from October 11, 2025, to February 22, 2026.
The exhibition traces Sirje Runge’s engagement with light, color and perception. Best known for her paintings, Runge has worked across media including painting, video, and decades of teaching. Central to her practice is the concept of värviruum, or color space: a living field where light, emotion, and structure interact. For Runge, teaching and making are fundamentally intertwined. Teaching being an art form of its own, grounded in attention and experimentation. Light, too, is not only a material phenomenon, but her greatest collaborator. The exhibition will present a selection of works by Runge ranging from the 1970s to the present day. It will also feature a room dedicated to Runge’s teaching, reconstructing her experimental work with colored papers for exploring light.
A leading figure in Estonian postwar art, Runge is a seeker whose practice unfolds as a luminous inquiry into light, color, and matter. She approaches color as vibration and pedagogy as artistic practice. Centering fragility as both a conceptual and material lens, this exhibition invites viewers to inhabit the liminal space of matter and thought, light and shadow, creation and dissolution. Runge reminds us that the force of art often lies in its ability to hold contradictions, embrace impermanence, and transmute the fleeting into something enduring.
The exhibition is part of the main program of Tallinn Photomonth 2025 contemporary art biennial.
Sirje Runge (b. 1950, Tallinn) graduated in 1974 from the Department of Industrial Art at the Estonian State Art Institute. She was one of the initiators of Harku ’75, which was held at the Institute of Experimental Biology in Harku and is often considered the last unofficial exhibition in Soviet Estonia. In 1976-1977, Runge designed kindergarten playgrounds for Pärnu KEK construction company. In the early 2000s, she started the series Great Love (2003) and Dance Macabre (2001–2003), which culminated in Great Love / Beautiful Rotting (2021), one of Runge’s most ambitious projects. The work comprised a 10-meter-long linen canvas painted in silver and was installed outdoors at the Estonian Open Air Museum so as to be finished by the force of nature.
Mėta Valiušaitytė is a curator and researcher based in Paris and Berlin. She holds a PhD in art history and has served as a scientific advisor to Peter Weibel at ZKM Karlsruhe, assistant curator at the Musée Picasso, Paris, and most recently postdoctoral fellow at Académie de France – Villa Médicis in Rome, among other roles. Her work focuses on scale and size, fragility, modern ruins, with a particular interest in the materiality of works and in the medium of drawing. One of her recent exhibitions, Picasso on Wood, is currently on view at the Museo Picasso Málaga. Another, André Derain. Thinking Small: Repetition and Reduction, will open in Berlin in early 2026.
Supporters: Cultural Endowment of Estonia and City of Tallinn.