MARE TRALLE

Published 4 September 2025

Mare Tralle 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?

That’s an interesting question as I do not have one particular process as such. I have used lens based mediums a lot in my practice and often what I do is a performative work, where the lens captures an act or situation, which I stage, create. I set up the camera and then perform in front of it. Until that moment I spend a lot of time thinking and developing the idea. And I do use various media in my practice. The media and idea have to suit together. I used to take a lot of photographs all the time and everywhere when I used an analogue camera. Many of these images were used in my digital artworks not so much as standalone photographic works. I am actually much more selective now and take far less photographs. Sometimes photography serves as a reference point, like for the work I am doing for Tallinn Photomonth. Most of my influences come from life and from queer and feminist practices of all sorts. 

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

The work for Tallinn Photomonth is a site specific  installation and in one way you could say that it is a study of form and movement as it is a relational to the sculpture Hämarik (Dusk) at Tallinn city centre. I studied the form of the sculpture to create 'a shadow' and add some movement to the static sculpture this way. However more important for me is what I hope my work will convey. I hope it is a rupture to the space, that it provides a small queer disturbance to the very sterile environment, that it asks few questions about the representation of bodies in public spaces and in the society at large, and the violence women's and queer bodies experience daily.

Typically, are your works more about construction or deconstruction?

Depends from which angle you look at my works, I do want to deconstruct the patriarchy and hope my works just take a little bite out of it. 

Are you a photographer or an artist using photography?

Most certainly I am an artist using photography as it is just one of the mediums I employ in my practice.

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

For me photography is a tool, which I use to tell stories. It could be any other medium the same way. I do not reflect on the medium because I use it. The message I want to tell is what I reflect on.

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 am not very good at thinking about any of my works as objects, which have to survive long time. I like using things, banal objects and materials, which are not meant to be archived forever. I have used photographic images in my performances and destroyed them during the performance to specifically make a point of the perichable essence of time.

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?

I guess when it is taken out of it’s normal context, where it is supposed to exist or operate, when it is used to create a shift or disturbance, then other meanings are created and it may become art.

Mare Tralla (b. 1967, Tallinn) is queer-feminist artist and activist. Her professional art career started in Estonia in the early 90s, where she was one of the very few conducting a feminist revolution in the field of contemporary art. Drawing from her personal history and everyday experience her practice was in direct critical response to how the transition period of East-European societies affected women. In her art practice she employs and combines a variety of media: video, photography, performance, interactive media, painting and various traditional crafts. As an activist she has been involved with Act Up, London, Catwalk4Power, No Pride in War coalition and LGSMigrants. Her recent performative projects deal with queer experiences, gender issues, HIV stigma, and investigate sustainability and economics. Currently Mare Tralla lives and works in Edinburgh.