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TIMELINE

Exhibition at the library of the Estonian Academy of Arts

07.11.2025 – 19.12.2025

Artist: Sven-Aleksander Mantsik (MAKK24) Curator: Camille Laurelli

My first solo exhibition Timeline consists of autobiographical sketches on receipts, pinned to cork plates. Most of them were made during the past 7 years while I was working as a cashier, drawn for escapism while depicting real events. Besides the exhibition is a selection of books I recommend from the EKA library. 

The word “timeline” has various definitions – an order in which events happened / a social media feed / a plan / a theoretical branch of a multiverse / or in animation or video editing software, the long horizontal window which holds all the video clips or frames of animation and other media elements, visualizing where everything is placed in time. 

The works here follow a kind of emotional chronology: arranged not by when the drawings were made, but by the memories they represent, from childhood memories to sketches made very recently about recent events. 

I picked pin colors by whether the memory or sketch stresses me out or not:

Red – sadness and anger

Yellow – slightly less painful emotions

Blue or green – memories and sketches that make me smile

White – extra insignificant pins for holding up the sketch better

I make comic sketches because there are things that can only be written, not said. There is no way to make sense of my life other than through drawing and writing.