ELO VAHTRIK

Published 4 September 2025

Elo Vahtrik is one of the six artist part of the show Shaping the Unclaimed curated by Kati Ots and Trine Stephensen during the Tallinn Photomonth 2025. Shaping the Unclaimed is an international urban space exhibition that takes place in six locations around the Kaubamaja department store’s intersection. In an urban environment saturated with an overwhelming amount of stimuli, the project seeks ways in which art can offer moments of relief and open new perspectives on what we see and experience daily.

This urban landscape is a visually and historically charged area where layers of different eras as well as important landmarks of Tallinn meet. Kaubamaja department store and Viru Centre – two symbols of commercial architecture from different eras. A new skyscraper being built on the site of the former Estonian Academy of Arts. The polemic statue Dusk located on the terrace of the Viru Centre. A constant flow of people, both underground and on the ground. You are standing in a monumental environment – not just in terms of scale, but also in terms of meaning and visual intensity.

The site-specific works intervene with the urban space on multiple levels, turning up both on the usual walking paths as well as in places that tend to be often overlooked. The selection of artists is similarly diverse. All the artworks have been created specifically for the Kaubamaja intersection, and the artists from different generations and nationalities endow the exhibition with their unique perspectives and ways of relating to the space.

Tell us about your process. What reference or influence (if any) do you take from other mediums?

At the beginning there is an idea, a noticing – a feeling that disturbs. I dive into research, into obsession. I deconstruct. But in order to "create" an artwork I always have to put the deconstructed pieces together, often in a weird or unexpected fashion.

Are these pictures concerned with exploring formal and aesthetical interests – studies of form, colour, movement, how things work together, or are they representational, metaphorical?

Aesthetically they live or come from the same "world". I´d like to believe that the work is more metaphorical.

Typically, are your works more about construction or deconstruction? 

One does not exist without the other.

Are you a photographer or an artist using photography? 

I am an artist. However everything I do relates to photography, comes from it, and at some point becomes it, whether it be ceramics, printmaking, installation.

Does your work reflect on the medium of photography or the photographic image?  If so, is that intentional?

In my humble opinion photography is one of the best 3 things humankind has ever invented. Everything I do is photography, especially if the outcome is not just a print. The way I think, the way I experience most of the world... In my practice respect and disbelief towards the photographic image meet at the borders of kitch and positive irony. There is intent everywhere.

Are you interested in the notion of your pictures as objects? Do you think about how their physicality may endure as you are photographing them or is that an afterthought?

I´m facinated by the notion of pictures as objects. I think and work around the physicality in the "printing process"- I like to use scanners, different print-making techniques to kind of queer or shift the materiality of an image. Picture has a presence and I'll forever keep chasing it.

Often sculptural photographic works are concerned with elevating banal objects, situations or events to a status of ‘art’ – when does something become art for you? 

Everything is wonderful and eveything is banal. Sincerity is art. 

When an artist:

1) doesn't lie to themselves

2) has something to say or a yearning

3) is curious

– then it becomes art to me.

Elo Vahtrik (b.1999) is a Tallinn-based artist who works mainly with photography and installation. Vahtrik is interested in anomalies and representation, as well as power structures and logics behind social functioning. She often uses kitsch and irony to approach the forementioned themes. She has graduated from the photography department of the Estonian Academy of Arts where she is currently ensuing a Master’s degree in contemporary art. Since 2022, Vahtrik belongs to the Young Contemporary Art Association of Estonia (ENKKL). Together with Kertu Rannula, she runs and coordinates starter-KIT, a publication on contemporary Estonian photography. In 2023, she was awarded the Wiiralt scholarship.