579752

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SACXXX10.1177/1206331215579752Space and CultureBiedarieva

Article
Space and Culture
1 ­–11
The Street Artist as Translator © The Author(s) 2015
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DOI: 10.1177/1206331215579752
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Svitlana Biedarieva1

Abstract
In the article, the position of the street artist as translator is analyzed on the basis of the
concept of the semiosphere developed by the Russian-Estonian semiotician Yuri Lotman.
The methodological framework of the Tartu-Moscow school of semiotics is applied to the
phenomenon of contemporary public art. The process of translation between texts in urban
space is illustrated by examples of works of art that use modifications of the same object—a
telephone booth.

Keywords
city, artist, semiosphere, translation, bilingual filter, telephone booth

Introduction
In the latest decades, the growing interest in art in urban space was caused by the so-called spatial
turn brought about by postmodernism. Henri Lefebvre, Edward Soja, Michel Foucault, Ihab
Hassan, and others from different points of view claimed that spatiality became more important
than temporality, which was the main feature of modernism, and space became open and eclectic
(Murphet, 2005, p. 116). According to David Harvey, whereas the modernists see space as some-
thing to be shaped for social purposes and therefore always subservient to the construction of a
social project, the postmodernists see space as something independent and autonomous, to be
shaped according to aesthetic aims and principles that have nothing necessarily to do with any
overarching social objective, save, perhaps, the achievement of timeless and “disinterested”
beauty as an objective in itself (Murphet, 2005, p. 125). Thus, the contemporary focus is put on
the city as the carrier of spatial qualities that avoid representation of the social relations inside it,
which I argue is largely influenced by the semiotic scholarship of the 1970s and 1980s.
Accordingly, in this article a city space is described as a phenomenon that is “neutral” in the
social sense, and the focus is put on the functional interaction inside a city street that plays the role
of an artistic site. A city space is considered as an entity of meaningful spatial elements that form
a “framework” that includes temporal elements in the general structure. These elements can be
described from the semiotic point of view as belonging to various textual layers that provide an
interaction between an artwork and a passerby. An artist is a person who enables this interaction,
being a de facto mediator between a viewer and a work of art in the particular context of a street.
The research proceeds from Yuri Lotman’s semiotic methodology from the Tartu-Moscow
School of Semiotics, and it will focus on the interpretation of the interactions between a viewer,
an artist, and a work of art as a process of translation between a number of languages. For

1Courtauld Institute of Art, London, UK

Corresponding Author:
Svitlana Biedarieva, Courtauld Institute of Art, Somerset House, Strand, London, WC2R 0RN, UK.
Email: svitlana.biedarieva@courtauld.ac.uk

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2 Space and Culture 

Lotman, art in general is a type of modeling activity. A model is an analog of an object that sub-
stitutes this object in the process of cognition. A modeling system is a structure consisting of
elements and combinatory rules that is a fixed analogy of an object’s areas of cognition, percep-
tion, or ordering. A modeling system thus can be considered a type of language.
Art is described as a secondary modeling system, as opposed to a primary system of a natural
language as a primary system. Consequently, art is always an analog of reality translated to the
language of a given system (Lotman, 2002, pp. 274-275).1 These languages might be of various
natures. It is possible to use this classification along with a distinction into discrete and nondis-
crete languages or elements of language. Both typologies were used by Lotman, and they formed
the basis for the idea of intersemiotic translation as translation between different semiotic sys-
tems. This notion that makes a significant contribution to this article was first introduced by the
Russian formalist Roman Jakobson, who can be called a conceptual precursor of Tartu-Moscow
School.
Lotman appropriated other notions elaborated by Roman Jakobson, who distinguished
between discrete and nondiscrete semiotic systems. The two most complicated systems of purely
audial, temporal signals—spoken language and music—have, according to Jakobson, a purely
periodical, “granulated” structure. They are built from discrete elements, in radical opposition to
spatial semiotic systems, which are completely nondiscrete (Jakobson, 1971, p. 701). Inside a
city, the process of intersemiotic translation flows between discrete and nondiscrete texts as inte-
grative elements of everyday reality and artistic reality that are realized through temporal and
spatial channels, respectively. I take this idea as the basis of my research on the role of the artist
in the translation process taking place on a city street.

A City as a Semiosphere
Any city forms a semiosphere. According to Yuri Lotman, a semiosphere can be considered as a
unified semiotic space, a system consisting of texts and languages which persist in permanent
interaction (Lotman, 1992, p. 13). In other words, texts of various natures can be translated into
other discrete and nondiscrete languages. A semiosphere thus is a dynamic system of signs and
their combinations, a system in which a permanent process of sign creation (semiosis) takes
place.
No semiosphere is monolithic. It requires the existence of numerous inner boundaries that
cross it and divide it into autonomous units, each one having its own meaning-producing center.
These boundaries “glue together” the core structures of the semiosphere, and at the same time,
they work as bilingual filters that participate in the process of semiosis (Lotman, 1992, p. 14). In
this article, I argue that, art in urban space often plays a role of just such a filter in a city semio-
sphere. The interaction with a living city takes place due to the transformation of an outer non-
message (Yuri Lotman’s notion) into meaningful messages, enabled by the site-specific
connection of the artwork in the “artwork–artist–viewer” triad.
For Lotman (1992), a boundary connecting two various realities requires a person who would-
provide a translation, and as I develop the idea further in this article, an artist receives the role of
such a translator operating on the borderline between artistic and everyday realities. In the case
of performance art, there is a direct connection because the body of an artist becomes an instru-
ment of this exchange. However, in the case of plastic art, the material work provides this kind
of mediation, and the artistic translation is based on the material of an artwork. Lotman (2002, p.
275) underlines that the definition of an artwork as a sign model leads to the realization of it
exceptionally in material substance, so the process of translation in secondary modeling systems
always requires awareness of the materiality of an exchange tool. This materiality is understood
from a holistic perception of the visual language of art as the “ungranulated” essence of its texts.

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Biedarieva 3

Lotman (1992, p. 16) views the border with an alien text as always a site of strong meaning
production. It follows, then, that the strength of urban art lies in its difference in respect to a city
street (if we are talking about such intentionally temporal genres as performance, graffiti, or
installation). The same idea is offered by the British researcher Nick Kaye (2004): “Site-specific
art frequently works to trouble the opposition between the site and the work” (p. 11). So there is
a paradox: to be site specific and at the same time to be recognized as art, a work needs to be to
some extent absurd in relation to the place where it is located. This is relevant to the idea that all
processes of meaning production take place as a result of an interaction between semiotically
different layers of texts persisting in the condition of mutual untranslatability, and from a conflict
between a text and its context.
In his works, Lotman repeatedly speaks about the existence of two worlds: the real or main
world and the one laying on the other side of a border—which is an inverted world, or an anti-
world that has the potential for anti-behavior. He gives as an example a witch, a blacksmith, and
an executioner who must live out of the borders of a medieval city, belonging to and mediating
both worlds at a time. He also compares the trickster to a bilingual translator gluing together two
realities (Lotman, 2010b, p. 266). In a contemporary city, to be able to constitute a paradox of
familiarity and strangeness, an artwork should be the result of a similar anti-behavior by an artist
(not as much in an aesthetic sense, but rather in the sense of opposing the logic of everyday real-
ity and the habitual geography of the place) that becomes the means of effective translation from
the everyday to the artistic reality and back.
The image of the trickster is widely used in philosophy and anthropology. While Russian
formalist Mikhail Bakhtin (1990) referred to the notion of the trickster as playing the key role in
a carnival, Claude Levi-Strauss (1995) gave the following definition of a trickster: “A trickster is
a mediator, and that is why he possesses something from the double nature which he needs to
overcome”(p.201). This may be applicable to the role that is ascribed to the artist whose task is
to integrate his work within a readymade environment. An artist needs to be flexible to the extent
of effectively representing and interpreting texts that belong to both realities. An artist in the
street needs to take both a contemplative and a constructive position in order to relate the work
to its place. This oscillation between the reality of the artist and the reality of the viewer is the
basis for the connection of an artwork to such a complex and multileveled space as the ready-
made space of an urban street. A street artist is a trickster insofar as he needs to avoid any rigid
position of untranslatability in order to be able to overcome the seduction of constructing a self-
contained, decontextualized work. However, a work positioned in urban space necessarily has a
context, which is expressed through all possible channels: visual, spatial, auditory, and
olfactory.
While I focus on street art’s spatial dimension it is important to keep in mind the fact that the
topic of dynamic urban spaces inevitably touches on the temporal dimension. Russian semioti-
cian Leonid Tchertov, following Roman Jakobson, pointed out that the spatial channel of infor-
mation is connected with visual perception, while the temporal channel is connected with hearing.
So the peculiarities of spatial semiosis, an integral part of which is a process of translation, are
dependent on properties of both the external structures of spatial objects and their internal recon-
struction in visual perception (Tchertov, 2002, p. 442).
In the next section, I will explain how artists translate an idea hidden behind the literal usage
of the artwork into a metaphorical visual form, and the medium of an art installation into some
other medium of the audience’s perception: a positional or a spatial narrative.

Metonymy as Deprivation of Function

Working on the boundary, an artist translates everyday reality or the traditional syntactic position
of a place or an object into the visual nondiscrete language of art. Becoming an artwork, the

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4 Space and Culture 

object loses its functionality and gains some metaphorical dimension. However, when an artist
removes the function from the object, metonymy goes hand in hand with metaphor. Lotman
(1998) describes the same process using an example of an apple:

Metaphor: the image of an apple (“I recognize in this combination of colors and lines an apple”)—
presupposes “metonymy”: an apple deprived of everything that is not transmitted by the means of
painting, is an apple. Such metonymy (part is taken as a whole) forms the basis of artistic cognition:
the most important is taken for the whole (for its essence, qualitative determination of an object) [. . .]
To cognize this essence of an apple which is unfolded only in the image, means to compare them, to
take out of the brackets everything equal and to find the difference. (p. 381)

Being completely modernistic in his description of an artwork, as an object placed in a frame,

Lotman (1998) provides here a possibility for interpretations of this idea applied to artistic works
that are integrated into a particular space. In the case of site-specific installations where an artist
works with readymade objects that belong to a street, reworking them into “something more,” it
is possible to speak of a different kind of deprivation from what Lotman mentions. In Lotman’s
example, an apple is deprived of spatiality and everything that is connected with it: a sense of
touch, olfactory potential, or spatial perspective. Only the visual channel remains accessible for
a viewer. In the case of the readymade objects in the street (such as telephone booths; see case
study below), metonymy reveals itself as the deprivation of function when an everyday object
loses its normal everyday function in favor of artistic purposes. Therefore, the process of transla-
tion of the everyday reality into the artistic reality is based on the idea of maintaining spatiality
(possibly transforming the visual channel but not erasing it from the communication circuit). To
explain such interpretation of functional metonymy, I refer to the definition of metonymy in lin-
guistics. Metonymy is a type of trope, on the basis of which association by contiguity lies. These
real relations making two objects logically contiguous to each other may be of different catego-
ries: spatial, causal, and temporal. Metonymy can also be defined as a “concise description.” “To
paint with oil” (instead of oil paints) is a classical example of metonymy (Petrovski, 1925). In the
case of the metonymic deprivation of function, it can be observed when the artistic means replace
the practically meaningful spatial relations of the object. However, the connections with the
street is not lost but is modified according to a new textual layer as a new level of description.
The idea of the “deprivation” of function of an object in the process of translation may call to
mind Jan Mukařovský’s (1996) classification of language’s functions. Mukařovský writes about
three functions of language described by Karl Bühler (1934/1990): representation, expression,
and appeal (p. 35). Mukařovský adds to Bühler’s account the aesthetic function of poetic lan-
guage that is the opposite of all of the rest. Bühler’s three functions carry purely practical mean-
ing; aesthetic function, however, is free from the burden of practicality. It focuses on a sign as it
is. The prevalence of this function in language determines the importance of a context for nomi-
nation (Mukařovský, 1996, p. 139). Thus, in reference to this theory, one more hypothesis can be
expressed: the process of translation between everyday and artistic texts is followed by the sub-
stitution of practical functions by the aesthetic function. This idea is supported by Mukařovský’s
claim: “An aesthetic function, being a dialectic negation of any practical function, everywhere
and always takes the character of the function, to which it is in this case opposed” (p. 136). This
approach legitimizes the use of metonymy that maintains spatial characteristics of art. It should
be mentioned that the aesthetic functionality in this case is completely the property of the artistic
reality, and as a linguistic tool, it belongs to the translated text of an artwork.
Tchertov (2002, p. 442) supposes that on taking as a fact that spatial structures are formed by
relations of coexistence (e.g., symmetry) and have some stability in the temporal stream, they can
be reversible and can allow both forward and backward ordering in relation to their significant
elements. This reversibility is an important notion from the point of view of translation. If spatial

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Biedarieva 5

relations are reversible, the multimodal translation in space also can be provided in two direc-
tions. This idea is legitimized by Lotman when he defines a boundary as a bilingual filter. It is
therefore possible to also speak about a reciprocal translation, back from the artistic reality (met-
aphorical language, or language of art as secondary modeling system) to the everyday reality, to
the audience of an artwork. And the end product of this translation will be significantly different
from the primary one. The original translation and the second translation back to original will
significantly differ from each other as they pass through functional transformations.
First, the translation will change the medium. While the primary text of everyday reality is a
material object, in its functional context, the final target text is a multimodal narration. This com-
plex includes an artwork in its iconic dimension (mental image), the perceptive chain between an
artwork and an audience (which is also provided by an artist who intentionally puts the emphasis
on meaningful elements), and the co-creation of an artwork by a viewer who appropriates par-
ticular qualities of the newly appearing text.
The primary and target texts of the translation belonging to the everyday, literal reality do not
coincide for the reason that the reverse translation was going through the medium of a nondis-
crete irrational text of an artwork. According to Lotman (2010a), it is impossible to speak about
an exact translation between discrete and nondiscrete texts or, in continuation of his idea, between
two nondiscrete texts. The reason for this is that the solid text is in power, and in that case, it does
not fall apart into signs, and it can be perceived and translated only as whole. It is primary, so the
text can be only isomorphic to a sign or be a sign itself (p. 572). The artwork acquires meaning
due to this gap of interpretation; as already mentioned, it is recognizable for that fact of the
mutual untranslatability of texts surrounding it.

Midway Conclusions
Before going further to the case study, here is a summary of the aforementioned argument:

•• An artistic object situated in the street in a readymade environment is a bilingual filter

between the artistic and the everyday realities belonging to the same semiosphere of the
city. An artist is a translator.
•• These artistic and everyday realities are formed by nondiscrete, visual, and spatial texts,
as soon as they rely on a semantic dimension or on the whole content.
•• During translation from a primary text of the street into art language as a secondary mod-
eling system, mechanisms of metonymy are largely used. If we speak about street instal-
lations based on readymade objects, metonymy means that an object sacrifices a certain
function.
•• Due to the reciprocity of spatial relations, we can speak about the translation between a
primary everyday stereotypical functional text, a metaphorical visual text of an artwork
deprived of functionality, and a complicated multimodal target text of everyday reality,
which is a relational text referring to the network of mental images.

Case Study: Telephone Booths in Translation

The current case study is used to illustrate the theoretical statements previously listed in the
article. All examples refer to a telephone booth as an artwork. This is an intentional choice of
topic, as it may be interesting to discover how an artist reworks and recombines the idea of com-
munication that is ascribed to an object like a telephone booth, and how he symbolically substi-
tutes an auditory channel of information with visual and spatial channels, giving new connotations
to the process of communication and exchange between artistic and everyday reality.

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6 Space and Culture 

Figure 1.  Knit the City Project. The Phonebox Cozy, London, 2009.
Source. Copyright: Lauren O’Farrell.

In the case of a knitted telephone booth created by Knit the City Project (Figure 1), the process
of translation is provided by the colorful knitting spread over the booth. This element attracts
attention and provides intertextual connections to the idea of “home” and comfort as well as to a
hippie style of life and clothing. However, this knitting is already a text in another language, the
layer that is put on an existing text and covers it, as well as the knitting that covers the surface of
the cabin. This “masquerade” transforms the essence of the whole booth. Seemingly, the func-
tionality is kept—you still can call from it—but in fact the attack on its everyday function for the
purpose of artistic expression lies in the act of covering the resistant surface intended to protect
the booth from rain and wind with an obviously purely decorative one.
An occasional viewer looking at the booth appears in the conjunction between two spaces or
realities—the real space of the street and the fictional space of the “home” with all references
implied by it, and these affect his or her perception of the space. On a formal level, the viewer
pays attention to the color, to the texture, to the idea; on a more inner or contemplative level, he
or she creates a holistic perception of the object as something strange, as an absurd combination
of the uncombinable (and fixes it as a mental image). Intersemiotic translation here goes the fol-
lowing way: a stereotypical idea of a telephone booth as a communicative device is translated
into the language of art by means of emphasizing its functionality by, in fact, attacking that

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Biedarieva 7

Figure 2.  Brad Downey. La Somme de L’Oxygéne Dans une Cabine Téléphonique, Paris, 2008.
Source. Copyright:Brad Downey.

functionality. The naive idea of knitting a piece of clothing for the booth asserts itself in the mind
of a viewer, which tears it out of its existing environment. However, it also puts stress on the
specific qualities of a real booth (red color as a convention, hard and durable outer surface, and
resistant to time, wind, and rain). This establishes the position of the “real” booth in its place,
making it even more real in contrast. And this idea is transmitted to the viewer through the inner,
almost proprioceptive, sense of absurdity of the received image. This absurdity is even empha-
sized by the comic visual contest with Big Ben tower on the horizon. The symbol of London here
appears overshadowed and belittled by the booth as a result of the visual competition. However,
while the photo flattens the perspective, in the real space of the city, this contest would not be so
obvious. This comparison is nothing less than one of the translator’s powerful tools, taking the
phone booth from an everyday functional narrative to the text of a “home” that belongs to artistic
reality and then back to everyday reality and the contest of power inside urban space.
In the case of the second telephone booth (Figure 2), which is the work of the artist Brad
Downey, the artist refuses to let the booth fulfill its function. It is filled with colorful balloons,
which on one hand limit access to the telephone and on the other stress the contrast between the
real surface and the artistic material through the permanence of the real and the transience of the
artistic (also evident in the first example). There is also a contrast with the second, working booth
that is inseparable from it, both spatially and visually. The mechanism is the same: first, by means
of metonymy, the artist translates the idea of how the booth works and its function into the lan-
guage of visual and spatial relations. Here the spatial component is represented by a cloud of

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8 Space and Culture 

Figure 3.  Banksy. Murdered phone booth, London, 2006.

Source. Copyright: Banksy.

balloons and the visual by colorfulness versus gray walls. The viewer’s iconic (mental) image is
fixed as a contradiction of the empty “normal” space and the filled “pathological” one. This con-
tradiction between “empty” and “full” is key to understanding the process of translation here. To
provide a translation, the artist makes two texts belonging to different areas of the semiosphere
collide. These areas are separated and at the same time united by the common boundary. The wall
between two booths is the physical as well as a strong metaphorical representation of such a
boundary.
The woman inside the second booth becomes another artistic object. In the image, she does
not play the role of a user of a telephone booth, but she creates the necessary visual balance for
the opposite cabin filled with balloons. In this installation, everything works on mutual contra-
diction: gray–colorful, empty–filled, functional–aesthetic, “normal”–“pathological,” and so on.
Such inner conflict of the artwork is justified by the intention of the artist to refer to both realities
at the same time through the alternative interpretation of a photographic image itself, which
forms a kind of external or “gluing” metatext that merges both realities into one.
The third case, the artwork of Banksy “murdered phone booth” (Figure 3), is different from
the first two examples. It is not based on readymade materials because the artist changed the
shape and the spatial position of the cabin. It is already an autonomous work, and it is perceived
in fact as less integrated with the surrounding environment. It partly lost its site-specificity as
well as its spatial opposition. Here the object of art does not express the particular “booth” idea
but focuses instead on the specific artist’s attitude, which can be expressed verbally as “London’s
red booths irritate me, because they are so habitual, boring, and all the same.” The artist thus
attempts to make one of the phone booths more alive, even to the extent of becoming human-
like—and, by paradox, he decides to “kill” it. This act brings in diversity, expression, movement,
and an additional emotional relation between the passerby and the artwork. This is a translation
of a certain discrete verbal text into a visual one, and it refers not only to a mental iconic image
of the viewer but also to a certain verbal response of “Yes” or “No” in acceptance or refusal of
his position (even if it is not pronounced). This work is intelligible to a higher degree than the two
previous works, so it is more flexible in operation with discrete primary and final texts, although
there is still much transmitted within its nondiscrete layer. The work carries a purely aesthetic
function, as there is no hint to its everyday functionality, the work is perceived as a sculptural
object inside a city space. Instead, the booth gains anthropomorphic characteristics, and this

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Biedarieva 9

imitation of a “crime scene” enables its translatability to a viewer, provoking an emotional

response.

Conclusion
This article is an attempt to integrate theories of Yuri Lotman into the complex context of art in
public space and, particularly, the space of a city. This is a complicated task, taking into consid-
eration the quite “modernist” approaches of Yuri Lotman to art. For instance, when Lotman
speaks about art, he usually means painting, which carries certain frames and limitations of the
genre and represents a particular object. Thus, the current attempt to apply the theories of Lotman
to nonrepresentational site-specific art is legitimized by the need to introduce new approaches
into existing semiotic methodological frameworks and terminologies. This responds to the post-
modern interest in space as an agency as well as the creation of a new integrated theory of medi-
ated translation between the everyday and the artistic. This approach allows one to consider the
position of a viewer as being included in a dynamic triadic relation “artwork–artist–viewer” and
to see a viewer as a co-creator who is on the “other side of the barricades,” or in other words,
behind the bilingual filter that enables the process of semiosis.
The process of translation in site-specific street art is very diverse. It depends on the type of
the text, its “granulated” structure, its intelligibility, and means of presentation. It also depends
on the particular position of an artist who forms an ideology of space and artwork and organizes
the artwork in its relation to primary and final “everyday” texts. Intersemiotic translation pro-
cesses flow between discrete and nondiscrete texts of the given semiosphere and are performed
in multiple semiotic layers. Translation is done by an artist who stays in-between two realities:
everyday reality and artistic reality. The process of translation is reciprocal, which means that we
deal with a mutual exchange between source and target texts. At the same time, the target text of
an artwork (spatial, visual, verbal, etc.) has the potential to become a source text for the further
translation back to the language of everyday reality.
The process of translation takes place due to the existence of a bilingual filter that simultane-
ously establishes the boundaries of the semiosphere and “glues” them back together. An artwork
can become such a filter, or boundary, between everyday and artistic realities. The function of
this boundary is based on spatial characteristics. It is similar to the role of an “embassy” as a
formal foreign territory situated at a particular place. The boundary is thus a space of transition,
which requires a particular attitude and has its own rules. It is also no one’s space as well as a
space for everyone who accepts the rules (and thus enters into the process of translation).
An artist takes the role of a translator belonging to both realities. He also can be considered a
trickster, a person existing between two worlds as defined by Mikhail Bakhtin and Claude Levi-
Strauss. The artist works on the border between discrete or nondiscrete texts of various textual
layers. As a result, the process of translation uses mechanisms of metaphor and metonymy to
translate an original text into a different medium. The mechanism of metonymy in the conditions
of a readymade space of the city requires removal or deprivation of a practical function of an
object that is used as a basis for an artwork. This idea is the most relevant in the situation of
installations and other three-dimensional constructions that involve certain objects from the
everyday text of the street.
This article explains the characteristics of translation in examples of artworks that involve
telephone booths as a central object. The three examples share the concept of an artwork created
on the basis of an everyday object completely belonging to a city street. The questions of func-
tionality and changes in signification are considered as standpoints for the translation process.
Linguistic tropes used by artists for interaction with a viewer help form an iconic image of an
object that is “alien” and, at the same time, connected to a city street. The viewers, who find
themselves located in this gap of meaning, share the co-authorship, if not of the original, then at

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10 Space and Culture 

least of the translated text. This kind of experience allows them to challenge the placement of the
borderline and to distinguish an art object from a nonart object.
The reciprocal translation “everyday–artistic–everyday,” where the original everyday text dif-
fers from the second translation back from an artistic text and forms the scheme of the viewer’s
acceptance and interpretation of artistic expression, occurs due to his or her perception of an
artwork as an artificial obstacle for the interaction with a readymade space of the city interpreta-
tion of artistic expression, occurs due to. The artist manages this process, transforming the func-
tionality of the object.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or
publication of this article.

Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Note
1. Here and further translated from Russian by the author, unless otherwise stated.

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Author Biography
Svitlana Biedarieva obtained her MA in Semiotics from the University of Tartu (Estonia) and MA in
History of Art from the Courtauld Institute of Art (United Kingdom). Her dissertation at the University of
Tartu, which focused on the semiotic characteristics of interaction between an artwork, an artist, and a
viewer, provides the methodological framework for this article. She is currently working on her PhD
research in History of Art at the Courtauld Institute of Art.

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