We’ve never lived in a house

Situated at the crossroads between the intimately personal and the paradoxical universality of human experience, Marleen Suvi’s personal exhibition “We’ve never lived in a house” brings together 16 large-scale canvases to form a major installation, which concerns itself with the topics of memory and family.


The relationship between memory and its physical storage mediums is an oppressive one, in the sense that the second dictates to the first its horizons. How many false memories are born from old family photos? Trillions? And how often have those imagined screen memories become the cornerstone of feeling and knowledge about one’s inner world? In that light, the act of photography begins to seem almost like a crime — a potential basis for forgery. No amount of genuineness from the photographer can save the day; even nudes are not safe from the “creative” aspect of memory-work (especially when considering the fact that a naked person is never truly nude — they cover themselves with stories, after they’ve forgotten ever being possessed by them in the first place). When we think we are capturing moments, in reality, we are participating in the creation of memories. And from those memories, unconscious ideals come forth.


During the nineties, the ideal for a domicile in Estonia, recently caught up in the market economy, was a private house along with all the privacy, comfort, and luxury it promised. For most, however, this ideal was unachievable — many had to settle for an apartment. But other joys of consumption opened to the wider public, as many products and apparatuses that had up to then been deficit goods became widely available. Photography had so far been reserved for those willing to put a lot of time and effort into it, but now, thanks to cheap point-and-shoot type compact cameras and photo labs in nearly every shopping center, anyone who so wished could become a photographer. This brought on a literal photographic explosion — of photographs on photo paper — which, by the end of the decade, had in turn been extinguished by the tidal wave that was the onset of digital photography.


For the parents of the artist, these times had meant the end of their youth and the beginning of adulthood. Because that is what having children means. For the artist, these times are past, her past, which she herself cannot retreat back to. A past from which forms and figures emerge, that are almost familiar, but not quite. Not like they are here, in this picture, in this apartment, in this year — somewhere in the mid-nineties, when everyone wore clothes made out of those materials, the feel of which, to this day, the nerve endings of your synapses can still sense somewhere at the back of your mind — clothes that in their quaintness and slight old-fashionedness still manage to warm your heart.


This exhibition deals with a highly complex mode of memory, which can be mistaken for both fear and love. This exhibition deals with absolute vulnerability.

”We’ve never lived in a house”
5.07-04.08.2024
EKA Gallery, Tallinn, Estonia

Curator: Aleksander Metsamärt

Technical team: Erik Hõim, Mihkel Ilus, Oliver Kanniste, Erik Liiv, Avo Tragel, Mattias Veller
Graphic design: Rainer Kasekivi
The exhibition is supported by the Cultural Endowment of Estonia.
Opening drinks from Põhjala Brewery.
Thanks to: Christine Bebelev, Mart Saarepuu, Mikael Suvi
Photography: Patrik Tamm and Kaisa Maasik