Leida

Compiling the current issue of Leida has been guided by my personal and professional interests as a curator, as well as the desire to draw attention to the field of design curation. In recent decades, the field of design exhibitions and curation has seen rapid development with a wide range of exhibitions, published catalogues and media coverage. At the same time, discussions around design curation as a professional practice are meagre. Curation is conceptualised rather in the contexts of contemporary art, art history or architecture, while design curation holds the position of the overlooked little brother or sister.

Curation often culminates in exhibitions. Yet, the object-centred and traditional approach to exhibitions is becoming challenged more and more frequently, and public programmes and discussions are preferred. The 7th issue of Leida sets out to examine the field of design exhibitions and curation in Estonia and Europe through various case studies, conversations and analyses.

In Estonia, among other art spaces, design exhibitions are organised in the Museum of Applied Art and Design (ETDM), which opened in 1980 when it was still called the Museum of Applied Art. Although initially the museum focused on applied arts, the first design-related exhibitions took place already in the second half of the 1980s. The design collection was established in 2000, and the name of the museum changed in 2004. Internationally, the early 2000s were a period when several exhibition spaces and museums specialising in design were founded and opened. They emerged alongside existing historical giants, such as the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum in New York, the MAK in Vienna, the Vitra Design Museum in Weil am Rhein, the Design Museum and the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, and the nearby Helsinki Design Museum. Although these museums play an important role when it comes to design research and collection, they are not the only ones to curate design. Design is also curated in the context of gallery exhibitions, design weeks, biennials, festivals, fairs and elsewhere, which has increased the visibility of the field and opened opportunities for diverse and multi-purposed curatorial experiments.

In her study “Curating Design. Context, Culture and Reflective Practice” (2022), the British curator Donna Loveday points out that although contemporary design curation is a rapidly developing field, its research and documentation have not caught up compared to art curation. Design curation practices have been poorly mapped and their position is rather peripheral. In this regard, Loveday makes a remarkable contribution with her book providing an overview of the history of design curation and exploring contemporary trends. While the current issue of Leida was being edited, the curator Beatrice Leanza’s book “The New Design Museum. Co-creating the Present, Prototyping the Future” (2025) was published. Leanza reflects on the critical role of cultural institutions as places of knowledge production and points out several institutions engaged in design research and curation.

Several texts in Leida’s current issue highlight the role of institutions in knowledge production, as well as the movement from object-based exhibitions to programmatic and participatory curatorial work that centres around responsibility towards both communities and the environment. New tendencies in Western European design museums emphasise the importance of dialogue and an active engagement with the citizens. In Estonia, however, design curation is more focused on programme-based involvement, bringing to light thus far undiscovered materials and writing design history. The exhibition programmes of museums and galleries are striving to find a balance between the different directions, making efforts to both study local design history and to raise questions about contemporary design through exhibitions and public programmes.

The 7th issue of Leida opens with a conversation between me as the guest editor and the curators Karin Paulus, Karin Vicente and Kai Lobjakas, who have long been actively involved in the field of design and art exhibitions in Estonia. Along with outlining the evolution of design exhibitions, curatorial practices and institutional history, the discussion also emphasises the importance of mapping the local design history and calling attention to contemporary design practices. 

Prague-based Lilia Gutiérrez explores the shifting role of design museums and calls upon us to react to environmental and social changes, drawing from terms used in the natural sciences, such as taxonomy.

The Basel-based curator and critic Vera Sacchetti shares with the guest editor her curatorial journey characterised mainly by participatory and programme-based formats. She summons curators and museums to stop making exhibitions and instead engage in conversations with the audience. Similar to Sacchetti’s views, three curators with a background in the Design Academy Eindhoven have stepped away from traditional curation. Tiiu Meiner’s interview with Nadine Botha and Delany Boutkan reveals how education has influenced their professional journeys and shaped their understanding of curation in its extended sense, including developing educational programmes, creating contexts for dialogue etc.

In her essay, Sunny Lei, a master’s student in the graphic design department at the Estonian Academy of Arts, analyses exhibition paratexts (labels, wall texts) and looks into the ways they may influence the interpretation of the work or shape the political or cultural dimension of the exhibition. Marite Kuus-Hill, a master’s student in craft studies at the Estonian Academy of Arts, writes about a course in the framework of which the textile students visited the exhibition “Between Borders, Between Materials” (curated by Karin Paulus and Ingrid Allik) at ETDM. This inspired them to later make experimental connections between text and textile, while looking for new artistic and intellectual perspectives.

The issue also features two case studies of design exhibitions. Grete Tiigiste, curator of the Estonian Museum of Architecture, writes with the design historian Ivar Sakk and designers Aimur Takk and Andree Paat about the typeface Tallinna Infošrift and the designs related to the Tallinn sailing regatta, which was part of the 1980 Moscow Olympics. The exhibition “Sailing Forward. How the 1980 Olympic Regatta Shaped Tallinn” at the Museum of Architecture (curated by Grete Tiigiste, Ivar Sakk, Karin Paulus) presented a suitable context for examining and revitalising the typeface. 

The curator Annelies Thoelen introduces the exhibition “Colour. Seeing Beyond Pigment” at Z33, House for Contemporary Art, Design and Architecture in Hasselt, Belgium, where her aim was to focus on creating a relationship between the object, environment and the audience, even though physical engagement with the material seemed complicated at first. 

The graphic designer Paula Buškevica created a visual essay for the issue based on the unfinished anthology of design exhibitions compiled by the guest editor. Its aim is to map and visualise the development of design exhibitions held in Tallinn. The cover design by Chloé Gourvennec, a master’s student in graphic design at the Estonian Academy of Arts, was filmed at the CAP contemporary art center in Saint-Fons, France, and marks one possible starting point for curatorial work. The chair in the middle of the room in the video invites the curator to contemplate the exhibition which would fill the empty space.

Although I am currently the guest editor of Leida’s 7th issue, my daily work consists of curating exhibitions. As a curator, I am driven by the opportunity to create something new and synergistic in a space together with designers, artists and architects. Delany Boutkan aptly marks in the interview with Tiiu Meiner and Nadine Botha that exhibitions are interesting precisely because they serve as a research method and a way of asking questions – and although the same could be achieved through text and conversation, working in space allows us to approach knowledge production through a bodily experience. Each exhibition and project grants us the opportunity to create new spaces, highlight design works and draw attention to historical connections, themes and dialogues. All of this encourages us to see and feel both the historical and contemporary design practices and concepts specifically through spatial shifts and alterations.