Soans said that "Hetk" – the provocative exhibition in Tallinn's urban space – is actually very precise and a finely-focused sting.

"I never imagined that four pictures in an urban space would be enough to wrap a finger around the entire field of the public realm. After all, not only city officials, but also, as far as I know, at least two former presidents have expressed their opinions, and in the ERR program "Pealtnägija" it was even suggested that the motives of Alar Karis' speech on the anniversary of the republic, in which he spoke about war art without mentioning specific works, were also motivated by this work as well," Soans said on Klassikaraadio.

Soans said that the sheer spread of public opinion is interesting in itself, citing the Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan, whose work has often become a media hype. Contemporary art is often based on a little anecdote that spreads through society with tremendous speed, he said, like, "Do you know what this or that artist did?"

Soans said that he did not even look at the images in the city, but only responds to the resonance created in the media, which again illustrates Cattelan's idea.

In addition to the four images installed in public space, the art project also includes a website where images of more locations in the city are presented in the same way, with the actual urban space on one side and the same space digitally manipulated to look as if it had been destroyed or altered in some way by the war, on the other. And not all of these images are of dormitory areas of the city.

Soans said he liked the project overall, but did not want to see it expand to other media from its pure "end result" as installed in urban space. "In my opinion, not a single other shot should have slipped anywhere, other than these working shots [installed in the city]. The working process images [a larger selection presented on the project's website] should have been completely removed from public view," he said, noting that in an Instagram-centric social media world, the process itself often tends to overshadow the end result.

He said the experience of the artwork taps into the worst nightmares of Estonians. "It shows how safely sanitized our media reception regime is, where we have become accustomed to seeing such ruined houses for several years now."

He said he spent hours on the phone at the start of the war in Ukraine, until after a week or a week and a half he realized it was not possible to keep going this way: "I created a soft and thick cushion between the reality of what was happening there, not far from us, and our media space," he said.

"I think what made the exhibition even stronger was that these are not abstract houses in Tallinn, and that in the same view where we see the destroyed house [in the digitally manipulated image], we also see the same house standing intact in real life. It's this cognitive dissonance that works very well here," Soans said, adding that it would not have made sense to show these works in the gallery.

The show's host asked Soans to comment on whether there might be ethical or legal issues with this project, as several people in the art world have suggested, and whether the artists might have had to go house-to-house asking residents for permission to display realistic photos of their homes being bombed next to their actual homes.

"Legally speaking, everything was JOKK, as they say (Estonian: JOKK or juriidiliselt on kõik korrektne, literally means that legally speaking everything is correct but implies that it runs against the spirit of the law - ed.)," he said, noting that the project was approved by the relevant public organizations.

At the same time, Soans, whose own artworks have included performances in public spaces and received a much more negative response, said that society's receptiveness to action art seems to have increased.

"Tolerance, or the ability to think around talking points in the context of public space, has certainly increased. But the artist, in making this kind of intrusive artwork, is still working on the boundaries of where these marks of acceptance would and would not be. We perceive it simultaneously as the collapse of our comfortable social construct, but we also realize that these are just images. They are just photoshopped pictures."

"What we perceive in this exhibition is how reality is doubled and something inside us that we are afraid of is brought before our eyes, but only for a moment," Soans said.

The two artists responsible for the art intervention in urban space came together at the stenography department of the Estonian Academy of Arts, Rebeca Parbus as a third-year student and Estookin Andreen, a guest lecturer teaching digital art and Adobe Photoshop.

Soans, who is familiar with the work of the department, said he didn't see any influences in "Hetk" from the work of the famous Estonian set designer and director who heads the department, Ene-Liis Semper, whose own work is characterized more by poeticized brutality.

"There is none of the autobiographical psychoanalytic mechanism that grinds Semper's mill, which somehow dominates general exhibitions of the department. There always seem to be a great deal of appropriations."

In the case of "Hetk," he said, although there is a Semperian forcefulness to it, it is very different.

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