Contemporary Art Museum of Estonia Presents Amid Bitter Flowers in Tallinn

Contemporary Art Museum of Estonia presents Amid Bitter Flowers by Anna Mari Liivrand as part of the Köler Prize nominee exhibition, through 5 July 2026. During the exhibition, Liivrand was named a co-laureate of the Köler Prize 2026 grand prize, shared with Hanna Samoson.

The work is a single large-scale installation built from wrought iron, stained and found glass, solder, spray paint, and small objects left behind by people coins, buttons, traces.

At its centre is a deliberate paradox: a garden of poisonous plants, all blooming at once, in a space that reads like a ruin.

The installative landscape incorporates glass of various origins, new and antique stained glass, found construction glass, graffiti-coated glass. Its forms evoke sacred and industrial architecture, ruins, and cemeteries, interweaving architectural and botanical ornamentation.

Engraved plants can be seen on the glass, ghost-like, haunting in an environment that has sunk into ruin. These are poisonous species native to Estonia, here depicted as blooming simultaneously and eternally.

Alongside glass and metal frameworks, the work contains small, easily overlooked objects, remnants left behind by human presence. Together, these elements coalesce into a fragile, paradisiacal garden, reflecting on transience across different eras, spaces, and scales.

Anna Mari Liivrand – Kogo Gallery

Kogo Gallery

Anna Mari Liivrand is an artist who works with spatial installations, sculpture, stained glass and drawing, often combining vastly different materials and image-making techniques.

In the exhibition context, her works usually convey a spatial quality. Often built around a drawing or another two-dimensional image, her work comes, somewhat surprisingly, closer to traditional printmaking.

Ornamental patterns with plant motifs and a tension between emptiness and intricacy, seemingly the result of gravity, create a fragile, airy and delicate environment that feels both alluring and piercingly dangerous.

What holds the installation together is not its iron framework but the glass. These are panels sourced from churches, building sites, and wherever glass accumulates in a city. On their surface, Estonian poisonous plants are engraved as though pressed flat, botanical illustrations rendered ghostly against transmitted light. The coins and buttons at the base shift the register.

This is not only a garden, but a space where people have been, and left things. Liivrand’s work does not distinguish between sacred and discarded. That refusal to separate them, the cathedral window and the construction scrap, is where Amid Bitter Flowers holds its argument.

Instagram Anna Mari Liivrand
Instagram Contemporary Art Museum of Estonia