Lasnamäe-beginnings and endingsLasnamäe-Beginnings and Endings revisits a place suspended between public reputation and private memory. Long associated with crime, danger and social unrest, Lasnamäe has often been described from the outside through stories of what went wrong there. For Liivak, however, it is first and foremost the landscape of childhood: the place where life began, friendships formed and an understanding of the world quietly took shape.

 

​The exhibition approaches Lasnamäe through the particular logic of memory, where tenderness can coexist with unease and innocence can remain intact beside events only understood much later. Although danger was never entirely absent, the artist’s childhood experience of the district was shaped by familiarity rather than fear. Stories that now appear dramatic, absurd or frightening were once simply part of the environment in which everyday life unfolded.

 

​Rather than resolving the contradiction between Lasnamäe’s harsh reputation and the artist’s affection for it, Beginnings and Endings holds both realities at once. It explores how a place can be notorious to some and deeply beloved by others, how childhood softens what adulthood later learns to recognise, and how memory transforms even the most difficult surroundings into something intimate. Lasnamäe emerges not as a backdrop, but as a formative presence: a place of beginnings, endings and everything that continues to exist between them.