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.

CV
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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 Bureau (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
  1. Teatrielu 2025 (editor) 
  2. Artishok Biennale (critic)
  3. Värske Rõhk: How to Write Kindness? 
  4. sss
  5. ss
  6. “Teatrielu 2020” (editor)

How to Look at the Sea? 

(2024)





“God! he said quietly. Isn't the sea what Algy calls it: a great sweet mother? The snotgreen sea. The scrotumtightening sea. Epi oinopa ponton.”
/James Joyce, Ulysses/

The sea is.

There is the Adriatic Sea and the Sea of Azov, the Bering Sea and the Bay of Biscay. And because Theseus, having slain the Minotaur on the island of Crete, forgot to exchange the black sails for white ones on his return to Athens, King Aegeus leapt into the sea — and so, alongside the Ionian, Ligurian, and Tyrrhenian Seas, the Mediterranean also holds the Aegean Sea.
And even if it seems counterintuitive to some, there is indeed a Black Sea and a Red Sea, a Yellow Sea and a White Sea. And there is the South China Sea, once called the Boiling Sea instead, and the Arctic Ocean, which is in fact not a sea at all, but an ocean.

The sea is.

Neither politicians nor poets doubt the sea, let alone biologists and winter swimmers. But the fact that no one doubts it also means that the sea is at once political and poetic, biological and physical. As much timeless as it is time-bound, as much boundlessness as it is a boundary.

"How to Look at the Sea?" was a performative observation by the Institute of Meetings and Non-Meetings, one that turned its back on Tallinn's sprat-tin skyline and let the sea flood over our eyes instead. What did we actually see, looking at the sea — and what did the sea see, looking back at us?



















Authors / Directors: Jan Teevet, Oliver Issak, Jan Kaus, Mirtel Pohla
Performers: Jan Teevet, Taavi Teevet, Jan Kaus, Mirtel Pohla
Photos: Alex Brjalin, Oliver Issak

Institute of Meetings  and Non-Meetings, 2024

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