Exhibition

In Laura Põld’s new textile and ceramic works presented at Eva Kahan Foundation, Põld continues to work with her longstanding interest towards rehearsing alternative modes of knowing, shifting aside from the dominant assumption that thought begins with human perception and instead granting intelligent agency to fungal and vegetal life. Her large hand-tufted rugs, and ensembles of ceramic works are populated by fungal bodies, proliferating rhizomes, and apertures that behave like vigilant orifices, interrupting the persistent fiction that cognition is a human monopoly. 

The organisms in Põld’s works appear vaguely familiar, yet they carry an element of uncanniness. Figures we are accustomed to reading as passive, or simply too slow, too distant from our linguistic and perceptual frameworks to register as agents, are here endowed with their own authority. In their dispersed, non-human-centred presence, they gesture toward what Michael Marder terms “plant-thinking”: a form of thought that unfolds without the familiar coordinates of human cognition, imagery or intention. Põld’s exhibition explores a practice attentive to more-than-human entanglements, where co-composition replaces representation. 

The exhibition is curated by Lilian Hiob-Küttis 

 Laura Põld (b 1984) is an interdisciplinary artist working within an expanded field of sculpture, where ceramic and textile-based works bridge sculptural form and pictorial surface. Drawing on mythology, folklore, and environmental history, Põld explores interspecies entanglements and forms of embodied knowledge, foregrounding practices of care, shelter, and survival within unstable contemporary conditions. She holds a BA in Ceramics from the Estonian Academy of Arts, an MA in Painting from the University of Tartu, and an MA in Sculptural Conceptions and Ceramics from the University of Art and Design Linz. Põld currently works as a Visiting Associate Professor at the Estonian Academy of Arts, Department of Installation and Sculpture.

Lilian Hiob-Küttis (b 1991) is an independent curator and art advisor, and artistic director of Foto Tallinn Art fair 2026. She holds an MA in Art History and Visual Culture from the Estonian Academy of Arts. Hiob-Küttis is a guest lecturer in curatorial studies at the Estonian Academy of Arts and teaches at the university’s Open Academy.

 

Laura Põld - Beautiful Pulsating Web
March 18th – June 29th 2026
Kahan Art Space Vienna | Große Pfarrgasse 7, 1020 Vienna

Opening times: 
Wed – Sat 6 – 10 pm - and by appointment
admission is free