Jaan Toomik at Lé Clézio, Paris

Jaan Toomik is included in the inaugural exhibition ‘Being-There’ together with Kari Vehosalo, Hanna Råst, and Elsa Salonen at Le Clézio Gallery, Paris.
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Exhibition dates: November 12, 2024— January 25, 2025
Opening: November 14, 2024, 6pm — 9pm
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‘Wait with great humility and patience for the hour of new clarity: that alone is to live the artist’s life, in understanding and creation.’— Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet (1929)
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Humans, always oriented toward the future, inevitably confront the reality of their finitude. This tension between infinite aspiration and the limits of life often creates a sense of impatience. For the philosopher Martin Heidegger, the key lies in fully accepting our ephemeral nature, in Being-There (Dasein) — either by living authentically, embracing our impermanence, or inauthentically, by fleeing from this reality.
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For Jaan Toomik, ‘Being-There’ involves assessing the depth and authenticity of human emotions, both intimate and collective, as they navigate spaces of struggle, memory, and redemption. His multidisciplinary works (painting, performance, sculpture, video, film, and documentary), sometimes as expressive as those of the Viennese Actionists, sometimes meditative and repetitive, draw on both autobiography and strange, alternative experiences of existence.
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