The Museum of Baltic Remont
2019
Installation
Size variable
Bita Razavi (1983) born in Tehran, lives and works between Helsinki and Tartu. She graduated with a Bachelor’s degree in Music Performance from Tehran Art University and holds a Masters in Fine Art from the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts, Helsinki. Razavi's practice is centred on observations and reflections on a variety of everyday situations. She examines the inner workings of social systems in relation to the political structures of various countries and national events of historic proportions. Razavi reacts to and explores the agency of objects and systems as they act upon her and as she documents and records them.
Bita Razavi's ongoing project The Museum of Baltic Remont is composed of documentation of what may appear to be a mundane task. Over the last three years, she has been renovating an abandoned house in the Estonian countryside and an apartment in Tartu. What sets her construction apart is her fascination with and scrutiny of the various materials that have been used to repair homes in the Baltic region throughout years of changing economic and political situations. The materials that were used during the Soviet era to insulate and renovate the houses she is now working on have been collected and preserved as if they were samples for an anthropological research study. Following on from an earlier series of photographs in which she documented the common traits of Finnish households, Razavi has now built a commemorative scientific installation to showcase the invisible building materials that many people in Estonia and Latvia still live amongst.
bitarazavi.com