Ersatz Strata presents a fictional archaeological site undergirded by a shifting narrative framework that seeks to play with how meaning is produced through display. Desires and projections embedded in historical storytelling manifest here as life-size human figures from a speculative future-past, as cast reliefs embedded with economy-driving fossil fuel materials, and as works that embody the slippage between cultural imagination and speculative paleoanthropology. A model rollercoaster embedded in the wall links the genesis of industrial excavation and leisure culture while serving to frame the site as a haunted loop of meaning-making; a microcosm of any given civilization projecting its myths and anxieties onto the artifacts it inherits. This temporal confusion mirrors how fossil fuels collapse time—ancient organisms powering future industry—while reflecting how humans borrow from both the distant past and the near future. As interpretations accumulate, history can begin to resemble a stratified fiction: layered, unstable, and continually rewritten.

The exhibition is accompanied by “The Amusements”, a short story written by Jaakko Pallasvuo.  Read the full text here

Klara Zetterholm (b. 1991, Stockholm) lives and works in Stockholm. She graduated from the Royal Institute of Art in 2022. Working across sculpture, décor painting, installation, and assemblage, her recent practice focuses on bas-reliefs that mimic and forge materials and histories through patina, motifs, and surface treatments. With a background in scenography and prop-making, Zetterholm employs techniques from stage and set design to construct fictional narratives that echo archeological and natural history displays. Her work engages with notions of non-linear time, mythology, and human evolution, often conjuring a sense of uncanniness and negotiating binaries such as the ultramodern and the prehistoric, the prosperous and the apocalyptic.

Zody Burke (b.1991, NYC) is an American multimedia artist and musician currently living and working in Tallinn, Estonia. Informed by her perspective as a New Yorker displaced by the city’s economic inaccessibility, Burke creates cyphers through sculpture and sound through which to cartograph the complexity of American identity within late capitalism, exploring how this mutable identity is refracted and transfigured through the mirror of other cultural spatiality. She is interested in interfacing world-building with geological time, and visualizing a diffusion of boundaries between distinct countries & their national mythologies by the omnipresence of what lies beneath. Her material practice ranges from high-relief to experimental music, large-format sculpture, video, illustration, and printmaking.

Special thanks: Eesti Kultuurkapital, EKKM, Dan Edelstein, Gert Gutmann, Gregor Sirendi, Taylor Tex Tehan, Liz Howard & Jerry Edelstein, Roberta Staats & Chris Burke, Helen Tago, Liisa Kruusmagi, Alexandra Margetic & EKAGDMA, Nora King, Lilian Hiob, Tuletorn & Karjase Sai