ARS Showroom #82: Maris Karjatse and Sarah Nõmm "Flora erotica"

ARS Showroom Gallery 6.–30.05.2026

Mon–Fri 12–18, Sat 12–16

Opening on May 6, 18.00

we attract

we sting

we soften

we suffocate

we wither

we swell

we stick

we simmer

we rot

we sparkle

we shed

we savor

we evaporate

we curl

Present exhibition-teaser brings together materials, collaborative experiments, and motifs from Maris Karjatse and Sarah Nõmme’s shared wet dream, in which someone pollinates, blooms, and becomes intoxicated by nectar.

The exposition serves as a small opening into a pink fever, where things do not remain in a unified form. The flyswatters caress and reprimand while weaving themselves into a carpet; the curtain becomes a flowing, safe shelter. The formless pink ribcage supports, squeezes and holds its breath.

The hosiery of visual decadence stretches longer than the substance allows; the image is decomposing along the final cut line of a dimming gaze, and as it falls into the abyss, material with the new agency emerges from the exploded fragments.

The exhibition brings together objects and images shifting between the forms of a fetish object, a botanical specimen, and staged artifacts. Like a metamorphosing lover, throwing into the embrace of the beloved one, so that all surrounding matter and static identities explode and the boundaries between species blur, everything transforms its existing form, and molecular cross-pollination takes place.

Maris Karjatse is an artist and translator whose artistic practice primarily engages with photography and linguistic expression. Her work explores the philosophy of everyday objects, agency, corporeality, and processes of healing. Recently, Karjatse has turned toward analogue photographic techniques and plant philosophy, approaching the plant as a body. Karjatse has studied English philology, photography, and contemporary art.

Sarah Nõmm is an artist whose practice explores the body and its forceful, fragile, and tension-filled presence in space. Her works revolve around sculpture, installation, and material-based research, combining personal experiences and bodily themes through folklore, taboos, and rituals. Nõmm’s works are characterized by intimacy and the poetic unfolding of corporeality, where thresholds of pain and pleasure, softness and aggression, control and submission meet.