Ulla Juske is an artist, curator and a researcher from Estonia, living and working between Tallinn and Linz.
She has a background in sculpture and semiotics. In her practice, Ulla has focused on themes related to her place in the world, home and family history. In 2019, she and Reet produced together the exhibition The Daughter of the Huntsman, which dealt with the story of Ulla’s grandfather and Reet’s father. In August of this year, Ulla curated together with Liisi Tamm the exhibition From Mother to Daughter, from Daughter to Mother dedicated to Reet.
Since 2022, Ulla has been working as the administrative manager of the Centre for Semiotic Applications at the University of Tartu, and since the autumn 2025, she has been a junior researcher at the same department. Ulla’s doctoral thesis examines the meaning-making potential of personal objects left behind by the deceased.
STATEMENT
My work explores personal objects as companions to emotional lives and as provocations for thought. I work with personal belongings—some everyday, ordinary objects, others inherited and left behind by those no longer present. I am interested in how they carry traces of lives once lived, mediating between past and present and holding multiple temporal layers at once.
Through them, memories, stories, and fragments of experience emerge—sometimes loosely connected, yet forming ways of understanding close relationships and, through them, ourselves.
My practice combines an ethnographic approach—interviews and conversations—with autobiographical reflection on my own family archive. Through installation, video, and sound, I create situations where personal memories become shared, allowing viewers to recognise fragments of their own lives.