How does one grow into a human being without a manual? While an IKEA product comes with assembly instructions and a small screwdriver, life offers no such guidance. Beyond striving for a good life, there is the deeper longing to live a right life — to assemble a whole from pieces gathered from countless different sets.
Imagine a cookbook that doesn’t start with a table of contents, but with pages upon pages of ingredients, without telling you which recipe they belong to. An ABC book teaches you the letters, but not how to weave them into words, as if it held every sentence ever spoken or yet to be spoken. A city’s worth of building materials arrives at a construction site, but there are no blueprints, no engineer’s drawings to guide the work. You find yourself among strangers, handed the floor; you open your mouth to speak — and...
Urmas Lüüs, an artist and trained blacksmith, has long drawn inspiration from contemporary puppet theatre. In this exhibition, he finally builds his puppets: beginning with nothing more than a piece of material and the daunting freedom to create, somehow, without a map.
Assemblymanualless opens on May 8, 2025, as part of a collaboration with the international visual theatre festival Tallinn Treff.