Kristen Rästas (*1992) is an Estonian artist based in Berlin. Rästas is an interdisciplinary artist whose recent work incorporates video, conceptualism, virtual reality, and mixed media sculpture. Classical landscape imagery inspires his art projects, which the artist attempts to represent through digital technologies, creating artificial environments that create connections between contemporary human alienation and different explorable realities. Rästas has been participating in public exhibitions since 2012 and has organised or exhibited at solo or group shows in Estonia, Germany, Lithuania, Iceland and Belgium. He is one of the artists working under the pseudonym Robin Ellis Meta and a co-founder of post-gallery.online web-based art gallery.

In the current exhibition he is exhibiting his VR 3D-video artwork titled “Look up. Look up in the sky” (2023), which places the viewer onto an ambient summer landscape which symbolises times of innocence. There, an audiovisual narrative unfolds, questioning time, space and personal wellbeing.

The work took its first shape during the time the world just started to open up again. Due to this, it addresses a certain spatial-spiritual self-location as well as the need for freedom for personal development. The digital sphere can offer an essential room to be, communicate and express, yet it carries a dystopian atmosphere in itself. In the moment the human kind destroys the planet’s assets, these spaces will be our only realm of daily escapism. Rästas unfolds his immersive experience within these tensions and asks multilayered questions regarding the reality we are living in, our past and future.

The artwork reflects such ambiguous times and questions as if these feelings are now forever lost or just locked in the back of our minds and demands to broaden our perspective by looking deep into our emotional structures.