Interview with Marge Monko

Marge Monko (born 1976) is an artist living and working in Tallinn, Estonia. She studied at the Estonian Academy of Arts (MA in Photography, 2008) and at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. Monko’s main mediums are photography and video. She has examined psychoanalysis and its impact on gender representation in visual culture. Recently she has been focusing on gendered work in the context of paradigmatic changes in labour policies.

Monko has had solo exhibitions in Tallinn and Helsinki and participated in several group exhibitions, such as Manifesta 9 (Genk, Belgium, 2012), curated by Cuathémoc Medina, and the Biennale of Young Artists in Tallinn (2007), curated by Rael Artel and Anneli Porri. Monko currently teaches in the Photography Department at the Estonian Academy of Arts, and is a member of the feminist reading group The Elfriede Jelinek School of English Language.

www.margemonko.com

The interview with Marge Monko was conducted by Sven Spieker in Tallinn in May 2012.

Sven Spieker

Sven Spieker teaches at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and specializes in modern and contemporary art, aesthetic and critical theory, and global and transnational art and art history. Spieker is the founding editor of ARTMargins and a co-founder of the Working Group Cultures of World Socialism. His book publications include The Big Archive. Art from Bureaucracy (MIT Press, 2008); Destruction (ed., MIT Press, 2017); Akusmatik als Labor: Kultur/Kunst/Medien (co-ed., Königshausen&Neumann, 2023); Art as Demonstration: A Revolutionary Recasting of Knowledge (MIT Press, 2024). Forthcoming: Socialist Exhibition Cultures. International Art Exhibitions in the Socialist World, 1950-1990 (ed., Toronto University Press).