Rebeka Vaino
Rebeka Vaino (b. 1995, Tallinn, Estonia) is an artist based in Paris. She recently completed her MFA Fine Art at Goldsmiths, University of London (2025).
Her process based work moves fluidly between painting, sculpture, performance, photography and installation weaving together personal and collective experience, synthetic materials with naturalistic – connecting the binaries, creating webs of complex human existence.
a metamorphic body landscape as an agent of pleasure, mystery, depersonalisation, liberation, transformation and safety.
Vaino has presented several solo exhibitions, including Honey en Route (nomaadgalerie, Paris, France, 2025), A Portable Paradise: What Would You Pack in Your Case of Emergency Kit? and The World Is Spinning Too Fast, I Need Something to Hold On To (both at Goldsmiths, 2024), as well as Sveta Presents: Rebeka Vaino at the Tallinn Biennale (2020).
Her work has also been featured in group exhibitions internationally, such as The Poetics of Reconfiguration at A26 art space in Beijing(2025), Embodiment in Nature at Broadworks, London (2025), The Eyes of the Skin, a two person show with Alfred Worrall at Gallery DaSein, Shenzhen (2024), and Lusted Men at Paris Photo (2022). She is published in the books Lusted Men (2024, Paris) and Imago Mundi: Estonia/Identity (2016, Italy).
She has an upcoming solo show at Kastellaanimaja Galerii in Tallinn, Estonia (March, 2026).
Honey en Route
2025
Curator: Eliza Ramza
Graphic design: Johanna Ruukholm
Photos: Juan Garcia Couder
Supported by Ene Grauberg Foundation, Estonian Embassy in Paris
Now I’m covered in the weight of distance.
Following the thread like many before,
Scale pointer sinks into infinity with all my memories dissolving in time
We are flaneurs in the heights of repeating history,
Keeping records of broken weaves,
Tiny grain in my shoe, mapping the roads of my soul.
Taste of plastic on Your lips,
When was the last time you lost track of time?
I will cover You one more time,
Rays of changes glowing on my wing.
Wrapping in the wind, I’m carried to the next stop.
Immersed in webs of invisible, emerge from Your tangled self
As you depart, don’t forget your protective charm
Multiple Le Galop crescendo
Multiple Le Galop crescendo
As untangling yarn, the twisted world is knitted into different forms. Each one must shape it, forging a grid out of otherwise chaotic reality, weaving natural with artificial into a resilient coat of protection.
Crocheting, knitting and protective amulets resonate deeply as folkloric codes in Baltic culture, once serving as talismans of warmth and endurance for generations who survived wars, occupations, and scarcity. How to keep up the lightness, when ethos of today’s media lies heavy on us? What do we let through our cocoon layer of self? In Rebeka’s practice, these ancestral gestures are transfigured into soft yet rigid sculptural forms, rendering time tactile, each element serving as preservation of memories – comforting yet elusive, light but vigorous.
Being tangled in a constant grid of connection, moving from city to city for work and leisure - motion itself becomes a condition of being. As much as linked as divided, searching for a state of belonging in the vast web.
Somewhere in between Nicolas Bourriaud’s prediction of “portable cultures” and Marcel Duchamp’s portable museum La boîte en valise, Rebeka invites the visitor to depart Honey en Route with a portable emotional k[n]it—a protective charm for contemporary Existence.
Text by Eliza Ramza
A Portable Paradise:
What would you pack in your case of emergency kit?
2024
Goldsmiths MFA degree show
from our summerhouse
and she brough me a grip of it
now its my paradise
I keep it in my pocket,
nailed to my wall
or under my pillow
I trace its ridges
and smell its seaweed smell
hum the sound fo the waves
and when life gets too much
I empty it on my desk
run my fingers through its grains
and keep holding it
‘til I fall asleep.
- RV
after A Portable Paradise by Roger Robinson
after A Portable Paradise by Roger Robinson
A Portable Paradise: What Would You Pack in Your Emergency Kit? brings together sculpture, painting and live performance in an immersive installation that moves between interior and exterior spaces. Drawing on practices of knitting and crochet, Rebeka Vaino creates sculptural forms cast in latex, resin and acrylic, embedding them with sand from her summer home and fragments of traditional Estonian lace and crocheted linens collected across the country. These materials carry traces of domestic labour, care and inheritance, holding personal and collective memory within their surfaces. The installation unfolds in dialogue with Vaino’s paintings and the architecture of the exhibition space, responding to shifting daylight and reflections inspired by the Ring Spa in Tallinn’s Õismäe district.
A second chapter extends outdoors, where Vaino performs The World Is Spinning Too Fast, I Need Something to Hold On To. Using a hand-made carpet beater based on Soviet-era designs, the performance weaves together childhood play, disciplined movement and endurance, combining post-dance techniques with ballet and gymnastics. Across sculpture, painting and performance, the exhibition asks what we cling to in moments of instability, and how notions of refuge, nostalgia and resilience can be carried, improvised and reimagined.