Three Estonian institutions have joined forces for a programme that turns a searching lens on Estonia's own cultural history. The Estonian Museum of Art, the Estonian Academy of Arts in Tallinn and the Estonian National Museum in Tartu present two exhibitions at Kumu, the flagship of the Estonian Museum of Art, alongside a conference reflecting on Estonians' longstanding engagement with the Finno-Ugric and Sami peoples.

At Kumu, Expedition: Finno-Ugrians and the Power of Images examines how Estonians boosted their self-image through interest in kindred peoples, asking why ethnographic research into other peoples became the form that Estonian self-exploration took. Alongside it, no beginning, no end: Decolonial Gestures in Sami Worldbuilding, curated by Ann Mirjam Vaikla, foregrounds Sami artistic practices as a means of asserting indigenous agency. Together the shows pose an awkward question: how does cultural solidarity slide into asserting one's own identity at someone else's expense?

The Sami show draws on well-known names from the Sami contemporary canon, including embroideries by Britta Marakatt-Labba and maps by Keviselie, the artist also known as Hans Ragnar Mathisen, alongside a hybrid landscape-painting-and-fringed-shawl by Outi Pieski and pieces by Carola Grahn. A four-part installation by Jenni Laiti and the Invisible Flock collective addresses the ban on fishing Arctic salmon in the Deatnu river on the Norwegian-Finnish border, while a new video and installation by the Snowchange Cooperative maps the homeland of the Skolt Sami expelled from the Petsamo region after it was ceded to the Soviet Union.

The programme also confronts a harder history. The first ethnographic expedition of the Estonian State Art Institute went to the Lovozero district on the Kola Peninsula in 1978, and Estonian companies later built roads and workers' settlements that made Siberian oil and gas exploitation possible, with some contracts running more than a decade after the Soviet collapse. By placing admiration for Khanty closeness to nature beside that complicity, the exhibitions argue that solidarity with distant kindred peoples has always carried self-interest within it, and that recognising the contradiction is part of the work.