Photo credit: Roman Sten Tonissoo

Jaanus Samma

Jaanus Samma is a visual artist from Estonia. His body of work includes photos, installations and videos with topics that have been grounded in the study of urban space and the subjective experiences of it. Over the years his interests have moved towards gender studies investigating into the representation of male sexuality and ways of portraying this by artistic means.

Photo credit: Lewis Ronald

“I always feel a guilty pleasure when I can queer folk culture, because folk culture is usually presented in such a sweet, national, and romantic way, loaded with nationalistic ideology.”

Courtesy: Nykytaiteen museo Kiasma

His fields of interest include history, ethnography and museology as well as the narratives used at the intersection of the three. In his most recent projects, he has explored the museum as a tool for establishing authentic histories and asserting a cultural canon. In queering national heritage, he has found ways of broadening the perspectives on identity formation and offered alternative ways of contextualising the past. Samma’s practice relies on fieldwork – interviews and archive research – to produce subjective artistic output based on his findings.

In 2015, Samma represented Estonia at the 56th Venice Biennial.