Hedi Jaansoo & Juliana Lindenhofer “She put the butterfly on the door and said spring has now arrived”

On Wednesday, August 27 at 18.00, Hedi Jaansoo’s & Juliana Lindenhofer’s duo exhibition She put the butterfly on the door and said spring has now arrived will open at Draakoni Gallery. The exhibition will remain on view until September 20, 2025.

“She put the butterfly on the door and said spring has now arrived” is first and foremost a collaboration, an exchange of ideas based on a shared sensibility toward material and a sensitivity towards the world. It grew out of a connection, formed between two artists, Hedi Jaansoo and Juliana Lindenhofer who met in Brussels in a residency a couple of years ago. It’s a bond that still holds strong, containing enough friendship and creative trust to let conversations materialise as an exhibition.

“She put a butterfly…” puts forward a constellation of artworks created independently by the two artists in their studios in Tallinn and in Vienna, their practices quite different from one another. Hedi and Juliana share a fascination towards fragments, working with their poetics and power in a world, where everything seems to increasingly break apart, where divides deepen and it is easy to succumb to a sense of hopelessness. Still, both are looking how to put things back together, even if it means by starting small, just with things in your immediate reach, how to navigate fragmentary states and vulnerability that could be read as powerlessness. Yet, Hedi’s and Juliana’s works suggest that in these states of half-life and becoming, strength can also be found.

Hedi mainly works with photographic images and installation. She often uses layering to break things apart and put them back together again. This extends to both the composition of her images as well as the way she shows her work in exhibition spaces. Using motifs of plants and a variety of fragile or frayed materials, she explores ideas of vulnerability, wounds, contrasts, weakness but also that of subtle resistance.

In her sculptures, Juliana sketches with and fashions material, inspired by the vast array and experiences outside the artworld. She is influenced by nightlife, fashion and dressing up and the possibilities to slip into different roles briefly, prompting her to take an interest in using medical products, cosmetical waxes etc. For Juliana, fashioning sculpture and creating non-gendered accessories is a way to shape material to discover new potentials, to explore new combinations, while always being led by curiosity and joy for material.

For both artists, it is important to work with accessible and easily available materials, perhaps with the kind you could perceive as “weak” at first glance – in terms of their perceived value, durability and sometimes in their importance. At the same time, they are also rehabilitating these “weak” materials – Hedi by turning the spotlight onto brittle and discarded ephemera, Juliana by combining a variety of materials into works in a way that reads like an open-ended suggestion. There is subtle tension in their works, born out of care and concern towards the world that surrounds us, composed by a sensitivity characteristic to people not inclined to push for grand gestures. In the end, it is a matter of centimetres, as the artists say.

Hedi Jaansoo (1989) is an Estonian artist and a photographer based in Tallinn. She graduated from the Estonian Academy of Arts in Contemporary Art (MA, 2018), Photography (BA, 2014) and also studied at Bergen Academy of Art and Design (2012/13). She works with fragilities, weaknesses, tensions and beauties, among other – mainly small – things. Her recent work combines photography, flowers, non-functional jewellery, unfinished thoughts and uncertain decisions, (be)longing and acceptance. A common thread through most of her works is thinking of women, grandmothers, gentle acts of resistance and almost-invisibibility. In 2023 she was an artist in residence at WIELS, Brussels. She is the project manager of Estonian Union of Photography Artists (FOKU) and FOKU gallery.

Juliana Lindenhofer lives and works in Vienna (Austria), where she graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. In her drawings, sculptures, work titles and DJ-Sets, she searches for a rewriting of normative anatomies, for alternatives to patriarchal family models, for a fraying into space without powerful gestures. Club culture and nightlife are her first and continuous inspiration as a space for misunderstandings, experimentation and self-fashioning. In 2023 she was a resident at WIELS in Brussels (Belgium), in 2026 she is a resident at Rupert in Vilnius (Lithuania).

Texts and translation: Keiu Krikmann
Graphic design: Stuudio Stuudio
Assistants: Laura de Jaeger, Lisette Lepik

Thanks to: Alex Kolowos, Artsmart, FOKU Gallery

Supporters: Cultural Endowment of Estonia, Embassy of Austria in Tallinn, the Austrian Federal Ministry for Housing, Arts, Culture, Media and Sport; Bildrecht

Exhibitions at Draakoni Gallery are supported by the Cultural Endowment of Estonia, the Ministry of Culture, and Liviko AS.

Additional information:
Draakon Gallery
Tel:  +372 5645 1591
       +372 528 5324
       +372 6 276 777
E-mail: galerii@eaa.ee
Pikk 18, 10133 Tallinn
www.hobusepeadraakon.ee
Mon–Fri 11.00–18.00
Sat 11.00–17.0