Jahimehe Tütar
Ulla Juske and Reet Varblane
Installation, video, sound, photographs from family archive.
Tartu Kunstimaja, 2019
The protagonist of the exhibition “Jahimehe tütar” (The Daughter of the Huntsman) is Ulla Juske’s grandfather and Reet Varblane’s father. He was a huntsman and an amateur photographer who lost his home and parents in the Second World War. By looking at his archive of hunting photos (the earliest are from the end of the 1950s and the latest from the middle of the 1980s) the daughter and granddaughter, but also an art critic and artist, are analysing the traumatic event in the photographer’s life and self-defence mechanisms that helped him to live with it.
The daughter and granddaughter of the huntsman have created a multi-layered narrative based on actual facts, memories, folklore, art historical analysis, sound, photos and objects. In it, they take an ambivalent position: they are both participants and bystanders, seekers of the truth and its muddlers. First and foremost, however, they are searching for a solution, like the daughters of the huntsmen do in Native American legends.
