bases – then still located all around the newly independent Estonia. Through painting, Toomik had gradually found his way to performance art and then to installation art and site-specific art, actually abandoning painting altogether, albeit for a short period of time. His interest in installations marks an important move in his professional career. An art historian, artist and curator Hanno Soans has even suggested that “many of Toomik's fans among foreign curators have not properly digested his early development story, the way the Neo-Expressionist painter converted himself to a modern Post-Conceptual installation and video artist.” The start of his international career was somewhat “symptomatic” to an artist from post-Berlin Wall generation. Estonia regained its independence in 1991; Jaan Toomik has participated in different international art events since 1993. During the first part of the 1990s, he began to create simple conceptual actions that he usually videotaped. A performance and installation video Way to São Paulo (1994) prepared the background for Toomik's eventual breakthrough on the international art scene. First presented in 1994 in Brazil at the São Paulo Biennale, it depicted a peculiar cube mirror floating on three rivers in Tartu, Prague and São Paulo – all cities geographically on the same line. This was followed by Dancing Home (1995), first presented at ARS ’95 in Kiasma, Helsinki, where the casually dressed artist is seen on the rear deck of a ferry dancing to the hypnotic rhythm of the engines (indirectly echoing the Estonia cruise ferry disaster that occurred on 28 September 1994). In 1997, Toomik represented Estonia at La Biennale di Venezia with another of his site-specific installations, a “view corridor” made of bottomless/topless coffins. With Truck (1997), he projected a bright sunny video image taken from the highway in the San Antonio, Texas desert onto the back of a truck driving from Tartu to Tallinn in the darkness of the autumn night. The 200 km drive on the trail of the “video-mobile” was documented from the following car. Among other things, on the video documentation of this work, Sirje Helme (then the director of Estonia’s Contemporary Art Centre) can be briefly seen explaining the art project to the traffic police. In 1998 Toomik’s most celebrated video Father and Son was completed and first presented at City Gallery in Tallinn. In this short video (2 minutes, 35 seconds) the artist is skating naked across the icy cold Baltic Sea,