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 Moving through life... (Kastellaanimaja Gallery, Tallinn, 2026), Honey en Route (nomaadgalerie, Paris, 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, London, 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 Pink Pilled at Baroti Gallery (Klaipeda, 2026), The Poetics of Reconfiguration at A26 (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, France) and Imago Mundi: Estonia/Identity (2016, Italy).
Scroll through to see selected exhibitions
or click on the name:
Moving through life, I saw glimpses of beauty from time to time
Honey en Route
The Eyes of the Skin
A Portable Paradise: What would you pack in your case of emergency kit?
Selected individual works
CV eng
CV est
Contact via E-mail or Instagram
or click on the name:
Moving through life, I saw glimpses of beauty from time to time
Honey en Route
The Eyes of the Skin
A Portable Paradise: What would you pack in your case of emergency kit?
Selected individual works
CV eng
CV est
Contact via E-mail or Instagram
Moving through life
2026
11.03-25.04.2026
Graphic design: Johanna Ruukholm
Photos: Kertin Vasser, Rebeka Vaino
PRESS RELEASE
On March 11, Rebeka Vaino’s solo exhibition Moving Through Life, I Saw Glimpses of Beauty From Time to Time will open at the Kastellaanimaja Gallery.
The exhibition explores themes of memory, fragmentation, and physical presence, examining experiences of trauma, depersonalization, and confusion through fleeting moments of beauty. It is an attempt to find a home within oneself—in the body, in movement, and in matter.
Moving Through Life, I Saw Glimpses of Beauty From Time to Time brings together works created over the past five years in Paris, London, and Estonia, as well as new pieces created specifically for this exhibition. The exhibition features paintings, painting-sculptures, and woven sculptures that expand painting into a spatial and physical experience. The exhibition’s title is a reference to the Lithuanian-born filmmaker Jonas Mekas, whose work repeatedly explores the motif of life’s fragmentation and unexpected moments of beauty amidst mundane and chaotic experiences.
RELATED PRESS:
Echo gone wrong photo reportage
ERR
Edasi.org
Kunst.ee
The unfamiliar and the familiar entwine.
Touch as a map of memory, a guide through longing.
It addresses the human body,
the ephemeral traces left in folds, in smears,
in the dance of light and colour.
The glittering, burning, soothing, violent colours,
that are simultaneously too much and not enough.
Eroticism, uncertainty, madness—
Major reset.
Soften. Erupt. Soften. Erupt.
The horses charge across the canvas,
muscles taut, manes aflame,
anchoring beginnings, home, safety.
The body stretches and folds within canvas and thread.
Knitted forms twist, hold, and expand—
A suit of armour, isolating yet expanding.
The wind rushes against cold windows.
I take my coat and leave—perhaps across your street.
Moments of Acute Awakeness:
the world a hallucinatory dream.
The tactility of the universe, at times precarious, fluid.
Collapse, vertigo, psychosis, skin shedding.
The fire horse rises.
It is hard to speak, hard to stay silent,
on matters of the heart. Hold me, let this moment linger.
Solitude and desire. Depersonalisation.
The sun has not set on the dark red moon of the soul.
Time preserved, projected, played with—
childlike wonder guiding the hand.
You must travel far to return to the beginning.
Roads stretch endlessly,
a flash of a mirage,
then back to reality. All my nerves are exposed.
Navigating unfamiliar mental territory,
on the edge of hysteria,
desperate to keep what is precious safe.
I awoke and there were no walls to protect me from the moonlight.
Fibreglass grids hang in the air, holding their shape with taut tension.
latex veils shimmering,
tracing shadows and light,
surfaces porous, fragile, alive.
Pain and pleasure, gain and loss.
Am I within myself? Am I somewhere inbetween?
Memory cannot be remedied, yet trauma erases all memory.
Still, the body keeps the score.
The psychic trace of trauma:
an interruption at the interface of attention and memory.
Finding your way back, one knitted line, one coloured page at a time.
Moments appear in-between: memory invades fantasy,
control slips, mind refuses play.
I listen to your silence—unbearable, aggressive.
I sit alone at night, reflecting, thinking of you.
I see your love, your descent into your own being,
happiness and pain, terrible loneliness, glimpses of paradise lost and regained.
Every decision creates futures; some are destroyed.
As long as nothing is chosen, everything remains possible.
Loss occurs at the breakdown of attention and memory.
There are many ways to get lost.
Where have I been?
Where should I go?
Welcome back. Your room is unchanged, untouched, waiting.
You are home.
But I am still hanging—where my brain split,
where you left me.
I cannot escape.
Text by Rebeka Vaino
Honey en Route
2025
Curator: Eliza Ramza
Graphic design: Johanna Ruukholm
Photos: Juan Garcia Couder
Supported by Ene Grauberg Foundation, Estonian Embassy in Paris
RELATED PRESS
ArtTerritory
Echo gone wrong photo reportage
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
Eyes of the skin
2024
07.01 - 16.03.2024
The Eyes of the Skin is a two person exhibition of Rebeka Vaino & Alfred Worrall taking inspiration from “The Eyes of the Skin” by the Finnish architect Juhani Pallasmaa as a point of entry, not intending to discuss the relationship
between the body and architecture, but rather seeks to juxtapose the corporeality and visual variations through Rebeka Vaino and Alfred Worrall’s works.
Link to the exhibition page of the gallery:
The Eyes of the Skin, Gallery DaSein
Interview with Rebeka Vaino
Alfred Worrall's realistic expressionist paintings draw from objects sourced on eBay, reassembled in the studio and freed from their original proportions to produce new, defamiliarised narratives. Everyday scenes become layered collages of vectorised time and space, evoking video game fragments where presence and absence, closeness and distance, uneasily fluctuate. Whether these scenes reflect the artist's own memory remains deliberately uncertain.
Rebeka Vaino's work traces the physical and linguistic transformations of a gendered body — fingernail scratches, dried latex, handcrafted wooden strips, trembling post-hangover lines. Fluid between painting and sculpture, her practice dissolves the boundary between self and world through the simultaneous pull of vision and sensation, building intimacy while inducing unease.
Together, the works invite us to move beyond the narrowing quality of literal sight, toward a perspective that extends throughout the body's inner and outer realms. The eyes of the skin represent an invisible tactile connection between the conscious and unconscious — the body enriched by memory and dream, the senses superimposed. As Cézanne suggested, we can see the odour of things.
- Gallery DaSein
The Poetics of Reconfiguration
2025
08.03 - 07.04.2025
Link to the exhibition page of the gallery:
The Poetics of Reconfiguration, Gallery DaSein
Throughout the course of literary history, female figures were, for an extensive period, mere
fantasies crafted by male writers. Gothic literature assigned women the designated role of
"femme fatale" – creastures who destroy men through excessive femininity, both feared and
fetishized by men, existing as antitheses to saintly purity and maternal virtue. Whether idolized or
reviled, women were fundamentally exiled or imprisoned in the patriarchal fantasies.
The exhibition presents works by four young female artists – Nancy Allen, Beatriz Santos, Rebeka
Vaino, and Xie Ziyu – who collectively seek to establish a "mythological" context rooted in their
unique political and physiological experiences. Their practice resonates with Ovid's narrative in
Metamorphoses, where a woman discovers her transformation into a date palm: I imagine myself
as the tree, roots nailing me to earth, soft bark creeping upward to seal my legs. Reaching for my
hair, my hands sprout leaves. These self-expressions are manifestations of the artists'
engagement with the world—fragmented narratives that unfold through murmurs or even
abandoned utterances, with which, the gradual metamorphosis as one form transforms into
another, all unfolding in the present moment.
/.../
Rebeka Vaino's work confronts the immediacy of the corporeal. Through
twisting, interlaced, and gradients of pink, colours mutate beyond decorative function into
declarations and guiding. Vaino fearlessly deconstructs her creations, shaping them into forms
that oscillate between anatomical specimens and nascent organs. In her video works, she
intertwines her personal experience of pole dance with the architectural remnants of her
homeland, creating a meditative fusion of feminine power, desire, memory, and the political
climate.
/.../
"Ah, how often you emerge from ocean's vast swells, mountainous and overwhelming,
conquering waves with your obsidian arch breaking the surf—graceful yet awe-inspiring in your
solemnity!"
- Gallery DaSein
A Portable Paradise:
What would you pack in your case of emergency kit?
2024
Goldsmiths MFA degree show
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.
Photos: Ted Fetherstonhaugh
RELATED PRESS:
Postimees
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