Estonia

In The House of Leaking Sky, Merike Estna transforms the exhibition space into an open studio where painting becomes an event rather than an object. Over the months of the Biennale, a canvas slowly awakens under public gaze, extending her attempt to dissolve the boundary between art and maintenance, between the elevated and the everyday. The venue itself – a former church turned community centre, where a frescoed firmament floats above a tiled floor – heightens this unfolding as sacred and civic, private and public quietly collide.

At the heart of the project hovers the pittore senza opera ("painter without works") a fate that haunted many early women artists erased from historical record. Estna begins with a blank canvas; colour seeps in gradually, pigments leak, edges blur, and gestures wander into performance, routine and shared space. Living in Venice with her family entwines the labour of the artist with the labour of the mother, revealing creation as repetition, care and ongoing maintenance rather than a single heroic act.

The House of Leaking Sky offers an expanded understanding of painting as a porous practice rooted in care and attunement, where studio and home, myth and daily labour intertwine. Here, painting becomes both world-making and world-holding, kept alive through the rhythms that sustain life itself.