Catalogue > At random

"Nii tuli lõpp / And Then Came The End" is based on the experiences of a German Catholic priest, Magnus Frey, in prisoner of war camps in Narva, Estonia from 1945 to 1946. In this film, Siib depicts the locations of the story in Narva in their current state and without people, i.e. dilapidated buildings and winter landscapes. The soundtrack includes everyday life snippets from Frey’s memoirs, such as how prisoners of war were not paid the few rubles they had been promised and had their warm blankets taken away before winter came. And how religious prisoners managed to make communion bread despite the difficult conditions. And how hungry prisoners entertained themselves and each other by remembering their favourite dishes and writing down their favourite recipes. The excerpts of Frey’s diary are arranged on screen with a picture and on a soundtrack with music to create a prose poem of documentary material. The value of such micro-history, both as text and film, is not in revealing major developments or in interpreting historical turning points. Instead, the value is that individual anecdotes and fragments can be evidence that bring history to life and help us to take seriously the suffering and existence of others — past and present. By Teemu Mäki

Liina Siib is a visual artist, filmmaker and educator who lives and works in Tallinn, Estonia. The topic of her works ranges from femininity and social space to different manifestations of people’s everyday practices. She combines field observations with archival sources, historical accounts and various narratives circulating in the society as well as with psychoanalytic approaches and contemporary art and film theories. The characters, spaces and situations in her works tend to go unnoticed due to their ordinariness or are silenced or ignored. In her multidisciplinary approach she uses the means of film, video, photography, installation, performance, ready-mades, print media and artist’s books. Her experimental documentary videos and staged short films have been shown both at festivals of artists' films and at art exhibitions in the galleries, often using the format of expanded cinema. In 2011, the project A Woman Takes Little Space by Liina Siib represented Estonia at the 54th Venice Art Biennale. Her work has been included in several public and private collections (e.g., the Art Museum of Estonia in Tallinn, Neues Museum in Nürnberg and Moderna Museet in Stockholm).