2025 Finalists
Kertu-Liisa Sarap (b. 2003 / EE)
Waiting II
160 × 200 cm / oil on canvas / 2023
Waiting II is part of the series Niguliste 21. It is a series that reflects on the memory of a home, an apartment where my grandmother lived for thirty years and which I visited as a child. After the political changes of the early 1990s, the property was reclaimed by its pre-Soviet owners and my family was unable to repurchase it. This loss left my grandmother in deep grief, and even in my early years I retained vivid memories of its rooms.
By revisiting her archive and playing with collages of different people, occasions, moods, and moments, I reflect the atmosphere of a fading memory, where fragments begin to merge and blur together, and where absence can carry as much weight as presence.
The works carry a longing for a space to which I no longer have access. I am interested in the boundary between abstraction and protecting identity. The absence of the human figure allows the form to take shape and a new narrative to emerge from memory.
(21/25)
