Artist and Her Text
Subversive Embroidery
A duo exhibition together with Tiina Sööt
August 19th – September 6th 2025
Pärnu Artists’ house, Pärnu, Estonia
The exhibition ‘Subversive Embroidery’ by Tiina Sööt and Killu Sukmit addresses the everyday radicalism of feminism. By employing a visual language rooted in activism, embroidery becomes a tool of persistent resistance.
Never underestimate a woman who embroiders! For centuries, women have stitched resistance into fabric, documenting history, culture, and the fight for their rights.
In 1912, suffragettes in the United Kingdom were imprisoned. Since pen and paper were forbidden in prison – but embroidery was allowed – the needle became the women’s means of writing and their voice.
In the 1970s, artists like Judy Chicago, Miriam Schapiro, and others used activist embroidery to challenge hierarchies in the art world. In Chile during the 1970s and ’80s, women created embroidered burlap tapestries known as arpilleras as a form of resistance to Pinochet’s dictatorship. Four decades later, in 2017, garment factory workers at Zara, Mango, and Next in Turkey secretly sewed protest messages into clothing after not being paid for their labor.
Text by Killu Sukmit & Tiina Sööt
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Talks with a Tiger
October 31st – November 23rd 2024
Draakon Gallery, Tallinn, Estonia
Sukmit’s exhibition deals with feminist folklore in fairy tales. In the 17th century, Baroness Marie Catherine D’Aulnoy coined the term conte de fée (fairy tale). The earliest fairy tales served as feminist critiques of patriarchy, revealing behaviors that oppressed and degraded women. D’Aulnoy and other female authors blended elements of pseudo-history, autobiography, and adventure in their stories.
Stories by the Brothers Grimm, Charles Perrault, and the family policy platforms of conservative parties also offer an endless trove of patriarchal fairy tales. The original versions of these so-called classic fairy tales often feature particularly brutal violence against women. These tales were drawn from real life and intended to serve as moral lessons, but justice within them is notably biased. It seems that to change these macho fairy tales, real life itself must also change.
The works in Killu Sukmit’s exhibition, Talks with a Tiger, tell stories of an emancipated wind, a sound artist great grandmother, and a 12th-century feminist activist tiger. Was the Venus of Milo posing as a warrior, a mother holding a child, or spinning yarn? Cinderella embodies all of these roles as she peers through the looking class. The exhibition primarily features embroidery and also includes sound.
The works draw inspiration from a variety of fairy tales, including Madame D’Aulnoy’s Cunning Cinders and The Hind in the Wood, Friedrich Reinhold Kreutzwald’s The Orphan’s Hand-Mill and Goldspinners, Donald Bisset’s Talks with the Tiger and Other Tales, Italo Calvino’s Miss North Wind and Mr. Zephyr, Hans Christian Andersen’s The Princess and the Pea, Emil Kolozsvári Grandpierre’s The Magic Flute and The Princess Dancing on Razors, and Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There.
Text by Killu Sukmit
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Pudu and Bread
May 4th – May 28th 2022
Pärnu Artists’ house, Pärnu, Estonia
The exhibition Pudu and Bread, which is predominantly made in the format of embroidery, continues the themes of Killu Sukmit’s previous solo exhibitions K’s Garden (Kraam artist-run space, 2019) and Artist and Her Work (Tartu Art House, 2021): the work of the artist, the work made by women, dialogue with other artists, plant motifs, typography, sound and feminist folklore.
According to the explanatory dictionary of the Estonian language, the word ‘pudu means drops, but ‘pudu’ is also embroidery, edge, crochet, tassel, hook, rosette, fringe, needle, thread. In Sukmit’s new small-format embroidery series, the words ‘edge’, ‘crochet’ and ‘rosette’ are materialized in a broader political framework.
The exhibition will feature both the artist’s newer and older work. A separate band is formed by women, some of whom are known to be our great-grandmothers, some of whom are witches, some of whom are the first pioneering sound artists. The exhibition also features a manifesto, activist message from the 12th century about this year’s Year of the Tiger, the criticism of which is relevant both in the present time and in the historical context.
Text by Killu Sukmit
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Artist and Her Work
September 3rd – October 3rd 2021
Tartu Art House, Monumental Gallery, Tartu, Estonia
The concept of the exhibition is partially connected to the artist’s previous solo exhibition ‘K’s Garden’ (2019) that also examined the theme of work. While that project was conceptually linked to the painting ‘Mr Sukmit’s Garden’ (1994) by the artist Malle Leis, the symbol of the garden at the present exhibition can be understood in a similar manner as Hemingway sees the sea, Tolstoy the bread or Robin Morgan the sisterhood.
The exhibition consists of new works. Embroideries and the soundtrack sometimes quote and reference other artists and their works although the authors of these are not always known. The print ‘Artist and Her Works’ (1968) by Evi Tihemets has also been a source of inspiration. The exhibition will additionally bring together the first feminist Mary Wollstonecraft and the first Estonian female DJ. The gender wage gap is represented by monumental embroidery. Also present are curator composing poetry and clouds starting a dialogue with Zeus.
The feminist philosopher Judith Butler said that we are living during a time that is culturally anti-intellectual, where art and culture are increasingly considered entertainment that is expected from the artist. Estonian Unemployment Insurance Fund should not classify art as a ‘hobby’.
Text by Killu Sukmit
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K´s Garden
September 5th – October 6th 2019
Kraam artist-run space, Tallinn, Estonia
The artist Malle Leis painted her work ‘Mr Sukmit´s Garden’ in 1994 while looking through her studio window. Coincidentally, my own studio is located in the same house for quite some time and through the window I can see the very same garden that Malle Leis was looking at. Actually, Leis had more than one painting on the same subject. While the painting from 1994 depicts the garden during wintertime, the other ‘Mr Sukmit´s Garden’ (2003) offers a springtime view. ‘A View of Rästa Street’ (1993), ‘Rästa Street V’ (1993), ‘Birch Trees’ (2003) and others share the same motive. Today the landscape has changed, one birch tree has been cut down and the neighbor to the left of the garden has set up a sign ‘Tire Artists.’ It´s a tire workshop. Congratulations, Joseph Beuys.
The feminist movement spokesperson and activist Gloria Steinem didn´t particularly like the idea of a garden. The green expanses felt depressing for her. At least until she decided to create a 100% conceptually-laden garden for her friend Alice Walker, so they could spend time together in the garden with Gloria and her cat Magritte when Alice happened to visit.
In her book ‘In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens’ (1972), the writer and activist Alice Walker compares her experience to Virginia´ Woolf´s book ‘A Room of One’s Own’ (1929). Walker writes about women who didn´t possess a room of their own where they could do creative work, neither did they have enough money to pay for their basic needs. Indeed, some of them were slaves who didn´t even have possession rights for themselves, but were still involved in creative work. Alice Walker raises the question what would have happened if the slaves were forbidden to sing by law, just like they were forbidden to read and write.
The art critic Rael Artel explains in her introduction to Malle Leis´ exhibition catalogue how the artist tried to redefine the still life tradition and how the modern gender-conscious viewer could very well see these paintings through ‘queer-colored glasses’. The exhibition ‘K´s Garden’ tries to build a dialogue with the garden paintings of Malle Leis as well as with “the feminist interest towards women´s world” that the art critic Katrin Kivimaa considers in her article in the aforementioned catalogue. ‘K´s Garden’ is an exhibition that has Malle Leis´s work as its starting point. An important side theme is how we think of artist and her work.
The exhibition is made in collaboration with Urve Sukmit (textile art, handicraft).
Text by Killu Sukmit