This week, Kai Art Center presents Exploded View, an exhibition by Estonian artist Paul Kuimet and Norwegian artist Magnhild Øen Nordahl, curated by Johannesburg-based Anthea Buys.
The title Exploded View refers to a technical drawing method in which an object is disassembled in space so that its parts are made visible. Both artists take as their starting point the logic of the exploded view itself: that to understand how something holds together, you first have to take it apart – and that something changes in the process.
The exhibition premieres Technique (2026), a new 16mm film by Kuimet, shown publicly for the first time at Kai Art Center. The film is built from hand-drawn architectural plans made by Kuimet’s mother, the architect Tiina Soans – rendered on semi-transparent tracing paper, layered, and photographed in extreme close-up. A spoken text accompanies the footage, moving between autobiography and speculation, meditating on vocation, craft, and the passage of time. A series of large-scale analogue photographs extends the film’s logic into still images, overlaying the architectural drawings with abstract colour fields that hold in tension the apparent depth of the image and the flat materiality of the photographic object.
Øen Nordahl’s sculptures trace similar journeys through abstraction and rematerialisation. Her series Objects at Hand derives from 3D scans of objects found in a reverse-engineering office in Hyderabad, cast in Jesmonite after digitisation and displacement; Secret Support gives sculptural form to the disposable scaffolding generated by 3D-printing algorithms; and Spoilboards preserves the accumulated production traces left on CNC machine baseplates across Norwegian workshops. Her Holder sculptures invite direct handling, as they are objects made to be picked up and interacted with.
‘An exhibition can be about containment, and it can also be about expansion,’ says curator Anthea Buys. In Exploded View, that expansion is material: labour, craft, and the knowledge embedded in a skilled hand accumulate across every work in the show. Kuimet’s photographic series A Brief History of Scaffolding – images of scaffolding elements photographed in the gentrified neighbourhood of Kalamaja, cropped until they read as sculpture – closes on a sharp note. A single scaffolding foot, as the artist puts it, is among the smallest structural units of the modern real-estate economy: a temporary, modular element that appears and disappears in every modern city as quickly and inconspicuously as the movement of capital that assembles it.
| On the opening day of the exhibition, Saturday, March 21st at 2pm, Kuimet and Øen Nordahl will be in conversation, moderated by curator Anthea Buys.
Paul Kuimet (b. 1984) is an Estonian artist working with photography, 16 mm film, and installations comprising these media. The indivisibility of depicted material and the image’s material support is a recurring motif in his practice, as is the tension between formal qualities and narrative possibilities. Modernist building materials such as steel, glass, and tracing paper appear in his work not only as subject matter, but also as malleable material for creating new forms and spaces.
Magnhild Øen Nordahl (b. 1985) is a visual artist based in Bergen, Norway. Her work examines how scientific and technological abstractions shape objects, environments, and perceptions. Through sculpture, she materialises these systems, translating abstract structures into spatial and physical forms. She recently completed a PhD in artistic research and is co-founder of Aldea Center for Contemporary Art, Design and Technology in Bergen.
Anthea Buys (b. 1984) is a researcher, curator, and writer living in South Africa. She is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow with the SARChI Chair in Art and Visual Culture at the University of Johannesburg, and is interested in collective fabulation, unlikely place-making and the intersections of art and philosophy. Her PhD research looked at New Babylon, the interdisciplinary life’s work of the Dutch artist and architect Constant Nieuwenhuys.
The exhibition runs from March 21 to August 9, 2026 and is supported by the Estonian Cultural Endowment, the City of Tallinn, Estonian Academy of Arts, and Office for Contemporary Art Norway (OCA). |