Tender Ground

Angelika Kollin‘s art is like breathing with a camera – quiet, calm, and deep. For her, the purpose of photography is not to stop time to capture a decisive moment, but to create a safe space where two or more people can meet in trusting presence and, together, bring something sensitive and meaningful into being. It is a space where vulnerability is not feared and pain is not hidden; where the wholeness of life – beauty and hardship, love and loss – can be revealed all at once. A place where life is not divided into good and evil. In that wholeness, with all its layers and nuances, the viewer can encounter something that is at once deeply personal and universally human.

Angelika was born and raised in Estonia during the Soviet occupation, in an atmosphere marked by tension, restraint, and emotional absence. As a teenager, she moved with her family to Germany – an uprooting that meant losing her sense of home and experiencing displacement at the age of fourteen. Later, life took her to the United States, Spain, and eight years in Africa, including Ghana, Namibia, and South Africa.

These continual shifts – between cultures, languages, and homes – have left a deep imprint on her artistic path. Her work weaves together themes of immigration, the search for belonging, and questions of identity. These journeys have been as challenging as they have been transformative. As she has said, “My heart is in Africa. People taught me to trust life. They showed me everything I needed to see.”

These photographs have mainly emerged from the dusty backroads of South Africa and the soft, hazy light of American suburbs – in homes where generations share grief, care, hope, and love.

Her journey as a photographer is deeply personal. “All my work is autobiographical. Every person I’ve worked with has been my teacher. They have all shown me things I needed to see in myself,” she says. Many of her projects are not merely documentary series but maps of her own inner landscapes and crossroads. Through them, she has revisited her childhood wounds – especially her complex relationships with her parents – and found ways to heal them.

“Vulnerability, because it was absent during my childhood, became the impetus for my artistic process,” she explains. She does not see vulnerability as weakness, but as a door waiting to be opened – an invitation to be receptive, to feel deeply, and to meet others with trust, without protective layers.

Her process is meditative and intuitive. Angelika does not deliberately seek the so-called beautiful image. Instead, she guides each encounter through her own invested presence – listening, observing, allowing mistakes and returning to try again. Many of her sessions are brief yet intense, because the space that opens is at once fragile and abundant. “I allow myself to be fully present in the moment, without a set goal or expectation – except to witness the person in front of me and to honour their story.”

The title “Tender Ground” reflects both the ground from which these stories grow and the delicate inner landscapes her photographs touch. Each portrait is like a seed that needs care to take root. Tender ground is never predictable – it can be uncertain, sometimes stony, sometimes soft – but it is precisely there, in that fragile balance, that the deepest and most sustaining growth happens.

Tender ground is also found where different artists and their works meet – where varied impulses, materials, and forms begin to create new layers and connections. This is a space for dialogue, for harmony through contrast. For this exhibition, we have also invited ceramic artist Liisu Arro to present works from her series MuMuusad – intimate sculptures that embody primal femininity and the diversity of bodies. In both artists’ work, there is a universal authenticity, holding beauty and fragility in equal measure. They carry traces of both Estonia and South Africa, echoing the philosophy of ubuntu, which teaches that “I am because we are.” The idea that our identity and essence are formed through our relationships with others and the surrounding world is an invisible but tangible foundation of this exhibition.

This exhibition invites us to slow down – to let the images dwell in us longer than a glance. It is an opportunity to look and, at the same time, to be seen; to touch and to be touched. As Angelika says: “When I started engaging vulnerability consciously, everything – even pain – became an opportunity to return to my wholesome self.”

As curators, we thank Angelika for her trust and for the stories she has shared with us – and now, with you.

– Kristel Aimee Laur & Toomas Järvet