Temnikova & Kasela Gallery is proud to present group exhibition by American Tallinn based artist Zody Burke and Stockholm based artist Klara Zetterholm in an exhibition titled ‘Ersatz Strata’.
The textual component of the exhibition, developed in collaboration with Jaakko Pallasvuo, forms a body of pseudo-documents that expands the fictional world while undermining the assumed objectivity of museums.
The joint exhibition constructs a fictional archaeological site, drawing on the visual language and narrative strategies of natural history museums. Through reliefs, sculptures, and kinetic elements, the artists present a site that appears to have been repeatedly rediscovered by different cultures, each interpreting it in its own way. The exhibition explores how meaning is produced through display, how history is staged, and how institutions shape our understanding of the past. Klara Zetterholm’s earlier fictional archaeology project, Discoveries at Valdaesti Umdar, provides one point of departure. Her hyperrealistic figures merge prehistoric reconstruction with contemporary fantasy, revealing the overlap between scientific authority and pop-cultural imagination. Zody Burke, in turn, focuses on identity formation, national mythologies, and the aesthetics of institutional spaces. Together, they create a multilayered fictional site in which each “cultural layer” reflects its own era and its modes of understanding.
Zody Burke (b.1991, New York) is an American multimedia artist and musician who is currently living and working in Tallinn, Estonia. She finished her BFA in Interdisciplinary Sculpture in Maryland Institute College of Art and in 2024 got her Master’s degree in Contemporary Art from Estonian Academy of Art. She creates cyphers through sculpture and sound through which to cartograph the complexity of American identity within late capitalism, explore parallel inherited cultural mythologies & their relationship to truth, and interface world-building with geological time. Her material practice ranges from large-scale sculpture to ceramic high-relief to experimental music, illustration, video, and fiber work. Post-pandemic, she has recently begun to show work around Europe and the United States.
Klara Zetterholm (b. 1991 in Stockholm) lives and works in Stockholm. She graduated from the Royal Institute of Art in 2022. Working across sculpture, décor painting, installation, and assemblage, her recent practice focuses on bas-reliefs that mimic and forge materials and histories through patina and motifs. With a background in scenography and prop-making, Zetterholm employs techniques from stage and set design to construct fictional narratives that echo archeological and natural history displays. Her work engages with notions of non-linear time, mythology, and human evolution, often conjuring a sense of uncanniness and negotiating binaries such as the ultramodern and the prehistoric, the prosperous and the apocalyptic.
Exhibition is supported by the Cultural Endowment of Estonia.