Jaanika Peerna
Jaanika Peerna was born in Tallinn, Estonia, and has been primarily based in New York for over 25 years. She currently holds a studio also in Lisbon.
Working across drawing, performance and installation, Peerna’s practice emerges from the rhythms and movements of the body: whether through gestural mark-making in drawing works on semi-translucent Mylar or through movement in space, as in her Glacier Elegy performance works. Channeling a deeply felt engagement with the climate crisis (particularly the loss of glaciers), Peerna employs ice as a totemic representation of strength, beauty, and environmental fragility in her performances—as well as a medium of erasure, flow, and transformation in her drawings. The artist’s wall installations add new layers to this process, slicing, twisting and unfolding her drawings into three dimensional forms that often cascade across the gallery walls.
Peerna’s work has been presented at galleries and museums internationally including Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington DC; Zuccaire Gallery, Stony Brook University, NY; Real Art Ways, Hartford, CT; and Espronceda Center for Art and Culture, Barcelona, Spain. A major monograph on the artist’s work, Glacier Elegies, was published by Terra Nova Press in 2022.
Recent solo exhibitions include at Korea Foundation Gallery in Seoul (2025) and at at ARS in Tallinn (2026).
"I create drawings, installations and situations. My elements are line and water; my materials pencils, vellum and time. I am a vessel gathering subtle and rapturous processes in nature, using experiences and impulses to make my work. I capture ice turning into water. I let gravity of the melting ice dissolve drawn lines. I swim through thousands of layers of gray air and mark each one down.
Some of my work is born in the solitude of my studio. But often participatory performances, such as my "Glacier Elegies" project, draw me out from the safe silence of my studio and expand my practice with sound, movement, and chance. With these public performances I make a space for people to co-create and then witness collectively the loss of what has just been created—not unlike humankind who is currently witnessing the loss of vast amounts of glacial ice.
The question I ask to the audience often is: What would you do if you were handed the last piece of natural ice on Earth?”
— Jaanika Peerna
Glacier Elegies
Terra Nova Press 2022
Much of Jaanika Peerna's recent work is a lament to glaciers and natural ice. Her ongoing project Glacier Elegy forms the central core of this publication. The book presents an in-depth look at this iconic work, through essays, images of works and performances, and the artist's own words. In doing so, it shows how a contemporary artist in her prime addresses the climate emergency.
"Whether in her large-scale gesture drawings on Mylar that become expansive installations, her smaller sculptural pieces that become receptacles for delicate inscriptions of light, or her videos and performances, at the core of Peerna’s work is a concern for the embodied, sensorially engaged subject in dynamic relation to the spatial and material world."
—Taney Roniger
272 pages
7 in x 9 in
100 color illustrations, 6 b&w illustrations
Storms and Silences
The first art book on the work of Jaanika Peerna, featuring over 100 pages of photographs of her works and essays by Heie Treier and Fiona Robinson. Designed and produced by Martin Pedanik, printed at Tallinn Book Printers, Estonia. The book can be previewed here.
"Jaanika Peerna does not offer answers, she asks questions. Her work provokes debate both in herself and in her viewers and it is constantly evolving and changing like a river flowing towards the sea."
-Fiona Robinson