Held from September 6–8 in the repurposed submarine plant that now houses Tallinn’s Kai Art Center, the 11th edition of Foto Tallinn cemented its role as a key site for boundary-pushing photography. This year’s fair brought together 35 artists and seven galleries, selected by an international jury of professionals. In a format that offered a focused yet wide-ranging insight into photographic practices that are both materially experimental and politically charged, what stood out in 2024 was how international as well Eastern European artists—particularly from the Baltics, the Netherlands and Ukraine—used the medium of photography not merely to document, but to transform. Through hybrid processes, ecological materials, and archival reimaginings, their work challenged the legacy of image-making in ways that spoke deeply to regional histories and contemporary urgency.

The Dutch Connection

Since 2019, Foto Tallinn has steadily transformed from a satellite initiative under the Estonian Contemporary Art Development Center into a fully independent, international platform, marking a turning point in how contemporary photography is presented and interpreted in the Baltic region.

Crucially, this transformation was guided in part by Dutch photography professional Emilia van Lynden, formerly of Unseen Amsterdam. Her mentorship not only elevated the fair’s curatorial framework but also infused it with a distinctly Dutch sensibility toward medium-boundary pushing—a resonance still felt in this year’s edition.

Curated by Isabella van Marle (NL), the 2024 programme centered on photography as an evolving language rather than a fixed form. "One of the main ideas," she explained, "is to offer a condensed survey of contemporary photography—not just in what we see, but how images are being made, remade, and re-thought." From analog interventions and chemical processes to AI integrations and textile-based cyanotypes, the works on view foregrounded photography's deepening entanglement with material, conceptual, and geopolitical concerns.

Tactile Futures

A strong example came from Kristīne Krauze-Slucka (LV), presented by Riga’s ISSP Gallery. Her series Vibrations of the Material Universe: Thirst for Gold used chemicals, water, and light-sensitive paper to render glowing, abstract images that critique both ecological destruction and the legacy of chemical-based photography. In a parallel body of work titled Solastalgia, she translated ecological grief into ghostlike monochromes, where forms seemed to dissolve like memory.

Kristīne Krauze Slucka. Terra and Natural phenomena. Silver Landscapes (2021). Exhibition view by ISSP Gallery at Kai Art Center ©Foto Tallinn

 

 

While her analogue processes—water, light, paper—become rituals of both mourning and renewal, Krauze-Slucka’s practice exemplifies a not so recent turn in Baltic photography: a move away from representation and toward material engagement. 

 

 

Photography as Ritual and Resistance

 

 

A similarly layered approach appeared in Maria Kapajeva’s (EE/UK) Fluid Borders, a two-part cyanotype installation. The blue cyanotype was made in the UK with Ukrainian women displaced by Russia’s invasion. The image includes non-native plants in the UK—perhaps a metaphor for the women themselves, who are now part of a new landscape, growing in foreign soil. The red cyanotype was created in Estonia with Russian artists in exile. It shows invasive plant species in Estonia—plants that overstep boundaries, mirroring the complex identity of Russians living in a post-imperial context, especially amid the war. Coming from a region shaped by the Estonian-Russian border (marked by a river), Kapajeva is interested in challenging the idea of rigid national borders. She uses rivers as metaphors—natural borders that move, shift, and don’t obey strict lines on a map, while the cyanotype, one of photography’s oldest techniques, becomes a shared act of care: image-making not as spectacle, but as collective grounding.
 

 

Maria Kapajeva. Fluid Borders (2023). Cyanotype prints on cotton fabric, 150x700cm.

 

Spiritual Technologies and Material Echoes

 

 

In Who Has Come Here?, Agate Tūna (1996), another Latvian artist shown by ISSP, merged spirituality and technology through UV prints and photograms that recalled ghost photography. Her use of outdated tools—analogue cameras, expired chemicals—paralleled her interest in the unseen: spirit traces, electromagnetic glitches, familial memory. Tūna’s visual language echoed early photographic experimentation, yet addressed contemporary disorientation in a hyper-mediated world.

 

Agate Tūna. Who has come here? (2024). Pigment print ©Agate Tūna

Essential Goods: Contemporary Ukrainian Photography

 

 

Curated as a focused section on Ukrainian work, the group exhibition Essential Goods gathered artists such as Sasha Kurmaz, Daria Svertilova, Elena Subach, and Vasylyna Vrublevska. Their images refused both victimhood and simplicity, instead offering resistance, irony, and deeply personal counter-narratives to war imagery. These artists push past the photojournalistic gaze, inserting subjectivity into political photography.

 

Elena Subach. Chairs on the Border (2022). ©Elena Subach

 

The inclusion of Essential Goods—previously co-curated in Kyiv by Foto Tallinn’s 2024 curator Isabella van Marle—symbolized an act of curatorial solidarity. At a moment when Ukrainian visual culture risks being flattened by crisis coverage, this exhibition reframed it as part of a larger contemporary discourse, not apart from it.

 

 

The Baltics & the Netherlands: A Dialogue

 

 

Alongside these voices, Dutch photographers such as Sarah van Rij and Sander Coers contributed to a cross-regional conversation. Van Rij’s work, often associated with Unseen’s visual ethos, demonstrates how composition and atmosphere can elevate everyday scenes into psychologically charged images. Coers, with his pastel-hued explorations of masculinity and memory, added another dimension—his photographic storytelling sits comfortably between personal reflection and broader questions of identity.

 

 

Sarah van Rij. Mirror Martini (2023). Pigment print. ©Sarah van Rij

 

Both regions—the Baltics and the Netherlands—share a sensibility for conceptual experimentation, archival reflexivity, and resistance to photographic orthodoxy. In Tallinn, these links manifested not just in the works presented but in the fair’s ethos: photography not only as medium but as method—of seeing, remembering, and re-making the world.

 

 

Sander Coers. POST no. 032 (2023). UV print on plywood. ©Sander Coers

 

The fair also hosted a robust discursive programme, including panel discussions and talks with figures like Brendan Embser (Aperture), Katherine Ryckman Siegwarth (FotoFocus), and Vita Liberte (VV Foundation), culminating in an artist film programme curated by FOKU. These conversations echoed a shared concern: not only how photography is made, but what kinds of knowledge and affect it produces in regions often overlooked or oversimplified.

 

Building an Ecosystem

 

Beyond the exhibitions, Foto Tallinn also functions as a platform for collectors, gallerists, and artists to connect across borders. The fair includes dedicated programming aimed at demystifying the process of buying and collecting photographic art—an important gesture in expanding the medium’s reach.

 

Additionally, as Kadi-Ell Tähiste, the fair’s main organiser, explains: “Even though the representational model is still going strong and not going anywhere, more artists may be working independently as well, and it’s very important to give them the opportunity to show in a fair format which would otherwise be closed to them.” An example was the work Neuromantic by Ana Vallejo from Colombia, which delves into the entanglements of love, addiction, and inherited psychological patterns. By confronting her own experiences of codependency, the artist unravels earlier conceptions of romantic attachment, making space for alternative understandings of queer intimacy and a deeper awareness of the self. 

 

Ana Cristina Vallejo (CO/US). Installation of Neuromantic (2024) at Punctum Gallery. Pigment prints on archival paper. ©Ana Cristina Vallejo

 

Tähiste's vision positions teh festival as more than a showcase—it is a meeting ground for professional exchange and visibility. “Over the years,” she adds, “Foto Tallinn has evolved into a distinguished platform for fostering professional interactions between local and international art communities. It has been instrumental in placing Estonia on the international contemporary art map.”

 

Materiality, Memory and Process

 

Foto Tallinn 2024 did more than offer a survey of current photographic trends. What emerged was a collective sense of photography as a medium in flux—anchored not in surface or image alone, but in materiality, memory, and process. The Dutch connection provided a framework for experimentation, while Eastern European practices deepened it with a sense of urgency, rootedness, and historical tension. Together, they revealed how photographic art—when allowed to breathe across borders—can become a space for both formal innovation and political re-imagination.

Foto Tallinn also offers a possibility to learn more about buying and collecting (photographic) art. The fair is supported by Artproof (in collaboration with Hahnemühle), the Cultural Endowment of Estonia, DHL Express, Sunly, Tallinn Culture & Sports Department and co-funded by the European Union.

 

Header: Kristīne Krauze Slucka. Vibrations of the Material Universe. Thirst for Gold (2020–2021). Archival pigment print on analogue photographic paper.

 

Artists and Galleries

 

Gallery / Group	Artists
ISSP Gallery (Riga, Latvia)	Agate Tūna (LV), Kristīne Krauze Slucka (LV)
PUNCTUM Gallery ( Tallinn, Estonia)	Ana Vallejo (CO/US), Léa Habourdin (FR), David Fathi (FR)
Kogo Gallery (Tartu, Estonia)	Heikki Leis (EE)
Tütar Gallery (Tallinn, Estonia)	Kristina Õllek (EE)
Valerius Gallery (Luxembourg)	Daniel Wagener (LU/BE)
Essential Goods: Contemporary Ukrainian Photography	Daria Svertilova (UA/FR), Elena Subach (UA), Sasha Kurmaz (UA), Vasylyna Vrublevska (UA/FR)
Temnikova & Kasela Gallery (Tallinn)	Flo Kasearu (EE), Krista Mölder (EE)
FOKU (Estonian Union of Photography Artists)	Eve Kiiler (EE), Ivar Veermäe (EE/DE), Joosep Kivimäe (EE)
Independent Artists	András Ladocsi (HU/FR), Birgit Püve (EE), Diana Tamane (LV/EE), Charles Thiefaine (FR/IQ), Devashish Gaur (IN), Jean Vincent Simonet (FR/CH), Maria Di Stefano (IT), Maria Kapajeva (EE/UK), Paul Kuimet (EE), Ritsch Sisters (AT/US), Rebekka Deubner (DE/FR), Riina Varol (EE), Ruudu Ulas (EE/UK/DE), Sander Coers (NL), Sarah van Rij (FR/NL), Tomas Raul Aphalo (FI/AR), Triin Kerge (EE/IT), Valentin Joseph Valette (TN)

 

Sasha Kurmaz. Wasted Youth (2019).