Oliver Issak

... is a dramaturg and freelance artist whose work in social design and performance art challenges traditional boundaries and activates public spaces through immersive, participatory experiences.

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Plays
  1. tonight (2025)
  2. Bogged down (2025)

Performances
  1. Until they are dead, they shall live forever (2026)
  2. The Dew Point (2025)
  3. How to Look at the Sea? (2024)
  4. Oasis (2022)
  5. Battlefield (2021)
  6. Safe Zone (2018)

Actions
  1. Monuments (2025)
  2. The Embassy of Utopia: Estonian Book 1000 (2025)
  3. The Embassy of Utopia: Radio (2023-2025)
  4. Translation Agency (2024)
  5. The Embassy of Utopia: Happiness for Everyone, Free of Charfe, and Let No One Be Forgotten (2024)
  6. The Embassy of Utopia: Longing for a Different Way of Being (2023) 
  7. The Shadow Council (2022)
  8. 33 Speeches (2021)

Dramaturgical Formats
  1. Two-Room Conference
  2. Senior Citizens' Theatre Club "Avangard"
  3. Dinner at the Dramaturg's
 
Presentations / Speeches
  1. Spatial Dimensions in Heritage | Creative Research Capacities (2026)
  2. International Conference "Dramaturgy – Mapping the Landscapes" (2025)
  3. Baltic Drama Forum (2025)
  4. Estonian Cultural Endowment's 100th Anniversary Dinner (2025)
  5. Riga Performance Art Festival "Starptelpa" | Curators' Assembly (2024)

Texts / Books / Writings
  1. Teatrielu 2025 (editor) 
  2. Artishok Biennale (critic)
  3. Värske Rõhk: How to Write Kindness? 
  4. sss
  5. Publiku kaasamise projekt 
  6. “Teatrielu 2020” (editor)

33 Speeches 

(2021)



In February 2024, the Embassy of Utopia took up residence at the EKA Gallery in Tallinn, leaving it entirely up to the visitor to decide what they were walking into: an exhibition, a performance, a workshop, a meeting, a political-poetic ritual, or something else altogether.

Over five days, open to everyone free of charge, people gathered in the gallery to talk — tracing connections between their own perspectives and the larger troubles of the world they share. At the heart of the space stood a single point of bureaucratic order: a form. Every visitor could file an "Application for Poetic Asylum" — a questionnaire that looked, at first glance, like any ordinary official document, but whose questions slipped somewhere stranger: not name and address, but memory, longing, regret, the people you'd thank, the hours you'd cut loose from your life if you could. Filled out by hand, in silence, at a green table, it turned a bureaucratic form into something closer to a confession or a poem — nearly 250 of them were submitted over the five days.

The action closed on February 24th — Estonia's Independence Day — about an hour after the President delivered the nation's official address at the Estonia Theatre. In answer, the Embassy offered its own "unexpected speech": not written in advance by any single author, but assembled from the words of everyone who had come seeking a moment of poetic refuge over the preceding days.















Authors / Directors / Performers: Margaret Tilk, Jan Teevet, Oliver Issak, Kairi Mändla, Oliver Issak
Photos: Kaisa Maasik, Maria Grünberg

Institute of Meetings and Non-Meetings, Eesti Kunstiakadeemia Galerii,  2024Reviews / Writings

ARVUSTUS | Laua ots on poodiumi algus – PDF

ESSEE | Ankeet kui bürokraatia ja poeesia kohtumispaik – PDF


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