Sometimes it makes sense to fall silent in order to be heard. This familiar phrase comes to mind after visiting the 19th Tallinn Print Triennial (21 June – 31 August 2025).

Curated by Marika Agu, the exhibition at the Tallinn Art Hall Lasnamäe Pavilion brings together works by 14 artists. A scholar of cultural theory, art history, and semiotics, Agu encourages viewers to explore different visual modes of communication—ranging from legible and illegible inscriptions to clouds, symbolic systems, and light itself. “Let us decelerate, pause, and carefully observe the artists’ visual notes,” she proposes. “There is one key distinction between language and image: language strives for precision, whereas images, by their very nature, are ambiguous and open to interpretation,” the curator notes.

While the vast majority of artists featured in the Triennial are our contemporaries, one stands apart: an artist who passed away in 1970, but whose work continues to evoke deep emotional and intellectual responses—Ülo Sooster.

We invited Tenno Sooster—artist and head of the Sooster Foundation—to comment on the works by his father included in the exhibition:

“Lembit Saarts, my father’s friend and fellow student, once recalled how they constantly discussed art—at Pallas, in the dormitory, in cafés, and even in prison. Later, Yuri Nolev-Sobolev, a close friend and collaborator of my father, observed that this ‘speaking-through-art—articulating oneself within art and creativity’ became a totalizing and genuinely new phenomenon within avant-garde circles. That’s why I see the drawing Dialogue as a humorous, caricature-like reflection of those endless conversations. The rest of the graphic works embody a range of movements and fascinations—mediated through science and the conscious mind, but equally through the unconscious and abstract.”