Eastern Visions
*Tomorrow is the last chance to catch this exhibition by a crop of Lithuania's leading artists. It's being hosted by Cracow's mecca of contemporary art, the Bunkier Sztuki. The show is sponsored by the Fund for Support of Culture and Sports of the Republic of Lithuania and The Ministry of Culture. Click on the Source Link below for more info and pics!*
The Others Are Me: Social Instinct in Lithuanian Art (til Sunday 10th October)
Video art will dominate the exhibition of Lithuanian art hosted by BUNKIER SZTUKI. The main focus of the exhibition are the problems resulting from social and political changes currently taking place in Lithuania, concerning mainly the complex process of determining a balance between the European and the national identity. As the curator of the exhibition says: discovering trails for art in other people’s behaviour, in historic materials, in social convention or bias, in symptoms of maladjustment, may prove a great inspirational resource. It takes ability to sense meanings generated by reality to fully recognize it. One has to stop listening to oneself and start listening to others. The Lithuanian artists have turned this transfer of insight into a very sensitive tool of interpretation.
The problem of otherness, or of the Other, touched upon in the title of the exhibition, has been taken up by artists from almost all cultures. Otherness as a reason to be afraid, or simply a field of study or interest has become one of the most popular topics in art. It comes as no surprise that also Lithuanian artists have adopted it. But the title of the exhibition suggests a singular understanding of otherness, i.e. a mirror reflection that gives a better position to observe oneself and one’s surroundings. This is a strategy that helps the artists – via the use of video interviews or film coverage – show the changes occurring in the mentality and everyday life of Lithuanian people after the critical year 1990. It was also a turning point for current art, represented first of all by two big centers: Soros Center for Contemporary Art (since 2000 Information Center for Contemporary Art by the Lithuanian Art Museum) and Contemporary Art Centre in Vilnius. Both these institutions promote Lithuanian art abroad as well as invite artists and curators from all over the world to come to Lithuania. Erika Grigoravièienò says: the origins of contemporary art in Lithuania are to be traced in the process of integration and globalization of cultures which became especially intensive at the end of the previous century. However, the exhibited works primarily show great sensitivity to social problems.
Talking to the Lithuanian artists one cannot avoid using the term "interdisciplinary art", meaning both rejection of traditional media and areas of art, and appreciation of amateur approach to art, but also closer collaboration between artists and theoreticians of various sciences: psychology, sociology, psychiatry, as well as music or feminist and gender studies. Thus, the artists object to formalist tendencies and the decorative aspect of art. Erika Grigoravièienò emphasizes that the ability to communicate with an "object" is a strong point of current artists, who concentrate mainly on messages and the conceptual character of their works. This might explain why, as their favourite forms, the Lithuanian artists list interview, conversation, discussion, and they believe the very process of creation to be synonymous with social interaction that uncovers truths about oneself. The dominant medium of the exhibition is video. The works, however, are not only thematically miscellaneous.
Evaldas Jansas’ film Dujis, whose first screening caused a political and public scandal in 2001, is a truthful account of the life of Lithuanian drug addicts, a chronicle of the addiction from the preparation, via the injection to the passage of the drug through the organism. Gintaras Makarevièius’ work is very different stylistically, it combines two interweaving tracks. One of them is an official report on the prime of the Electricity Meters Plant, the other a film about a meeting of former and present workers of the plant on the occasion of an anniversary. The real people are juxtaposed with their historical masks from the archival tapes.
Similarly, Audrius Novickas’ video includes fragments of official political visits. It is a refined but ironic story about conventions that diplomatic protocol is riddled with, which reach us in our homes through television reports, in this way drawing us into this play of appearances.
In Arturas Raila’s film art proves to be a litmus test of political and social state of affairs. There is no judgment or excessive didacticism in his presentation of neo-Nazi groups in Lithuania. The members of the groups and their opinions are shown objectively as the artist believes that this way will best uncover the superficiality and shallowness of their activity and beliefs.
A different strategy was adopted by Eglò Rakauskaitò in her Gariunai. The artist, who explored her own corporality in the previous works, focuses on a social "body" now whose metaphor in the video is a market.
Laura Stasiulytò’s Nadieuda is a film that borders on static photography. This is a story about a woman working as a watchman, nostalgic and full of female dreams with incorporated picturesque slides of Crimea which the artist was given by her grandmother. The work is suspended between dynamic travel and static memories as well as passive lifestyle.
The longest video to be shown is Darius Ziura’s film, a fragment of forty-hour material recorded in the spa Po©¯©ˆga. Leisure time activities are a perfect metaphor of modern life. Noise and turmoil act like speed causing people on holiday to disregard conventions and inhibitions of the place of work and everyday life. The exhibition will also include a display of highly aesthetic photographs of empty theatre and opera houses taken by Dainius Liskevieius from the stage. The interiors that are full of life, words and music in the evenings become mysterious due to silence.