EKKM COLLECTION

Alver Linnamägi

“Letters from the Army”, 2008

installation, 4 letters

Alver Linnamägi’s Letters from the Army was made during his service in the Estonian Defence Forces. At the same time Anneli Porri cureted an exhibition in EKKM titled Making of Contemporary Art. During the exhibition the museum received a letter each week for four consecutive weeks, for which there was a mailbox installed on a fence in front of the museum. There was none before and no mail had until then arrived to the museums address. Letters from the Army was from its beginning closely related to the EKKM and therefore it seemed logical to add the work to the collection. For its compensation, Anders Härm, a member of the museum’s board, replied to Alver Linnamägi’s letters while the originals were exhibited in EKKM in 2011 during the exhibition of the collection entitled Museum Files I: Collected Principles. The four replies also arrived to the museum’s address.

Alver Linnamägi: ‘The four letters that were delivered from the Defence Forces to the EKKM were one of the few chances I, as a student and as a recruit, had to maintain a connection with the art world and the people in it. The work consists of texts written during night watch, descriptions of certain situations, which purpose was to share what was happening around me with people, to most of whom this environment seemed as alien as to myself. To sum it up one can say that curator Anneli Porri got a work for her exhibition, I got a chance to combine civic duty with creative practice and EKKM got itself a mailbox.’