Peeter Laurits

Peeter Laurits (born in 1962) has studied in Tartu and Leningrad State Universities, Estonian Humanitarian Institute and New York International Centre of Photography. His main means of expression are photography and multimedia. He has enriched the tools for photographic expression and broadened the role of the photograph in the Estonian cultural space. Made one-man shows in London, Berlin, Moscow and Chiang Mai, his work has been bought by museums, public and private collections and his monumental pieces have been assigned to public space. In 2017 he was invited a visiting professor for liberal arts at Tartu University and in 2020–2023 he was curating a series of interdisciplinary art and science forums Biotoopia.

In the nineties I moved to the forest to experience the completeness of biodiversity, to become a part of it. To feel the throbbing, to touch it with my body, to smell it, to stroke it, to taste it, to change the lights, to see it in my dreams and to study it from different angles in my half-sleep. To turn my eyes and mind towards the world of other life forms, to learn to imagine them from the inside.

My art throbs on the border between the visible and the invisible, the explainable and the inexplicable. I use photography to give a face to imaginations and thoughts, to biomorphic sensibility. I look for ways to make different ways of being and other life forms perceptible.

My artistic interests are orbiting in wilderness, and posthumanist ethics. In the situation of the Anthropocene, we are trying to radically rethink our ways of life, to enter an equal contractual relationship with wildlife. To learn to treat her as a powerful and sensitive partner.