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From reflections on the cultural legacy of the Soviet era in the exhibitions “Unframed: Leis, Tabaka, Rožanskaitė” and “We Don’t Do This. Intimacy, Norms and Fantasies in Baltic Art” to artificial intelligence in “Roots and Wires” and spirituality in “Down the Rabbit Hole”. Ten exhibitions of contemporary and modern art to visit in Vilnius this summer and later.
“Roots and wires”
27 June – 8 August 2024
Gallery “Atletika”, Vitebsko str. 21, Vilnius
Due to our limited sensory perception, we are unable to connect with plants. Plants move too slowly for the human eye to notice, and the chemical and electrical signals they emit are imperceptible. We therefore rely on technological devices that, like sensory prostheses, are able to adapt to the plant’s slower time scale, to detect the signals, to mediate between man and plant.
The exhibition features works by Merle Bergers, Maria Castellanos, Mindaugas Gapševičius, Lerin/Hystad, and Špela Petrič, curated by Katažyna Jankovska.
Since the 1970s, artists have been experimenting with combining technology and plants to create new, hybrid forms of intelligence. Plants have been recognised as “analogue electric computers” capable of transmitting information over long distances, and are considered natural sensors due to their ability to detect changes in their environment. This has inspired new designs for computers, robots and networks, moving from electronic systems and silicon chips to hybrid plant-machines. Now that we are creating artificial intelligence in an attempt to replicate human-level intelligence, the question is whether we could use plants’ methods of collective decision-making, information processing and resource allocation (e.g. symbiotic relationships between fungi and plants) to “feed” data-hungry algorithms. Writer James Bridle asks what artificial intelligence based on a forest would look like.
From AI systems that analyse plant behaviour to biohybrid installations that reveal their sensory abilities, Roots and Wires presents experimental artworks that playfully explore the possible relationships between humans and plants. Rather than seeking to exploit technology for productivity, these works bridge the gap between the human and plant worlds, revealing a hidden dimension. What if we could decipher the secret conversations between plants and fungi? What happens when plants communicate over distance, connected via the internet? How would machines work, devices whose sole purpose is to play with plants?
The exhibition at the Atletika Gallery (Vitebsko str. 21, Vilnius) will run until 8 August.
“Hold me Tender”
19 July – 31 August 2024
Lithuanian Artists’ Association Project Space “Medūza”, Šv. Jono str. 11, Vilnius
The group exhibition “Hold Me Tender”, a group exhibition of Baltic artists, comes to Vilnius from Tallinn Art Centre “Tallinna Kunstihoone”. The works in the exhibition explore human relationships, issues of care, social roles and responsibilities, question the symbiosis of language and ethnicity, and invite a closer look at the duality of vulnerability and violence.
The authors of the works in Hold Me Tender are Bas Jan Ader, Agnė Jokšė, Morta Jonynaitė, Sandra Kosorotova, Keiu Maasik, Maija Mustonen, Marko Mäetamm, Sarah Nõmm, Hanna Piksarv, Mark Raidpere and Elīna Vītola.
According to the curator of the exhibition, Siim Preiman, in the three decades since independence, the Baltic States have made great strides towards a more equal and freer society. “However, our political agenda is still full of complex and controversial issues. Migration, security problems, rising livelihoods, the destruction of nature and changing traditions are a source of fear and resentment. Those populations that do not show a willingness to integrate are beginning to distance themselves from the homogeneous centre, and segregation is increasing in the Baltic capitals at a record rate compared to the European average,” says Siim Preiman, the curator of the exhibition, “Why do we need a pandemic or a war to recognise that our neighbour is also a person? How can we discover each other faster? How can we make this concern part of our daily lives?”
Hold Me Tender is part of Tallinn Art Centre’s ongoing series of exhibitions, which focuses on both the possibility of empathy and ecological responsibility in the face of destruction.
Hold Me Tender will be on view at Medusa Art Space until 31 August 2024.
“We Don’t Do This. Intimacy, Norms and Fantasies in Baltic Art”
9 March – 8 September 2024
MO Museum, Pylimo str. 17, Vilnius
The exhibition “This Isn’t Here. Intimacy, Norms and Desires in Baltic Art” will present a new presentation of works by both well-known and still under-appreciated Lithuanian, Latvian and Estonian modern and contemporary artists, reflecting on the culture of sexuality, family relations, gender roles and the transformation of these phenomena in the visual art of the Baltic States from the 1970s to the present day.
During the Soviet occupation, sexuality was fiercely erased from the public sphere – according to a winged phrase that has become a kind of folklore, sex did not exist in the Soviet Union. Why did sex have to be suppressed during the Soviet era, and what form of love was allowed? How do the public notions of intimacy, gender, love and sexuality that prevail in the Baltic region today differ from those of the past? In the exhibition “This is not the case here”, we will set out to find the answer to how the representation of gender, family and sexuality has changed over half a century, and how it has been shaped by the periodic loosening and tightening of norms during the Soviet period and beyond.
Chronologically, the exhibition begins with Khrushchev’s “thaw” period, but it also echoes the ultra-conservative Stalinist era. The exhibition highlights the aestheticised acts and sublime depictions of romantic love of the 1970s and 1980s, the liberatory and hypernormative tendencies of the 1990s and the beginning of the new millennium, as well as the critical interventions of artists working today. Exploring figurative painting, sculpture, drawing and other forms of artistic expression, This Is Us does not rethink canonical works that engage in unexpected and playful dialogues with lesser-known works by artists of other generations and countries. Some of them resist the pressures of their time, departing from official discourses and inherited patriarchal imagery. By grouping the works into thematic swarms, we present a range of both intimate and normative types of representation of gender, family and sexuality, which were subjected to the shifting cycles of norm loosening and tightening during the Soviet period and beyond.
This is not to say that the struggle for political freedom does not in itself guarantee social and sexual freedom, or an equal right to pleasure, security and love. The queerness that exists in everyday life, on the street, in social networks and in new gender studies research encourages a critical look at the heteronormativity of both the Soviet past and the neoliberal present. New works by contemporary artists Kadi Estland, Sasha Kochan, Janina Sabaliauskaitė and Konstantinas Žukov, created especially for this exhibition, show that today there is more space than ever before to resist and deviate from social conventions. If we look at the winged phrase of the exhibition’s title from a different angle, we might see it as a question: how could we practice intimacy, fantasise and create relationships differently?
The exhibition at the MO Museum (Pylimo str. 17, Vilnius) will run until 8 September.
“Unframed: Leis, Tabaka, Rožanskaitė”
5 April – 8 September 2024
Vytautas Kasiulis Art Museum, A. Goštauto str. 1, Vilnius
Vytautas Kasiulis Art Museum Art has received an exhibition presented at the Kumu Museum in Tallinn, dedicated to the work of three Baltic artists – Malle Leis (1940-2017), Maija Tabaka (1939) and Maria Teresa Rožanskaitė (1933-2007) – during the late Soviet era – the 1980s and 1990s. The title Unframed refers not only to the boundaries broken by the works of all three artists, but also to the new horizons of interpretation that each work creates for the perception of the other two. All three artists have created works in which their heroine steps out of the space of the painting and turns her back on the viewer, revealing visual metaphors of exit or penetration into new territory. In other paintings, the artists play with multiple frames, disrupting the sense of a stable and unified reality.
Leis, Tabaka and Rožanskaitė were all exceptional artists in Soviet-occupied Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. The education they received at art institutes in Tallinn, Riga and Vilnius in the 1960s and 1970s was similar in its ideological and aesthetic principles, but they quickly broke out of those principles: they did not necessarily oppose directly the artistic tide of those schools at the time, but they dove into those waters in such a way as to dislodge the seemingly self-evident motifs and gestures, and to submerge the meanings into the spray of obscurity.
“We hope that visitors will find it interesting to look at the creative legacy of women artists of the second half of the 20th century, which testifies to the position of the Estonian Leis, the Latvian Tabaka and the Lithuanian Rožanskaitė, who were opposed to the official canon and at the same time reflected the times. For the older generation, the artists are better known from the painting triennials and other joint exhibitions organised during the Soviet era, where their works came together. There were few solo exhibitions by women at that time. Recently, we have seen an increased interest in the work of prominent women, which did not have a timely resonance,” says Ilona Mažeikienė, Director of the Vytautas Kasiulis Art Museum. Although the works of the trio of artists engage in a productive dialogue, or rather a polylogue, they are far from similar. The structure of the exhibition is such that some parts are represented by the three artists in much the same way, others are defined by the work of one of the artists, supplemented by a commentary or an intervention by the other; some of the juxtapositions are based on meaningful similarities, while others are based on intriguing differences.
The exhibition at the Vytautas Kasiulis Art Museum (A. Goštauto str. 1, Vilnius) will run until 8 September.
“Poles Keep Painting: Works from the MOCAK Collection”
6 June – 13 October 2024
Radvila Palace Museum of Art, Vilniaus str. 24
“The Lithuanian National Museum of Art’s international partnerships are opening up more and more unique opportunities for those interested in art. Last year, we presented an exhibition of contemporary Lithuanian art curated by Jurgita Ludavičienė and Evaldas Stankevičius at MOCAK. This year, MOCAK is sending Vilnius an impressive return gift – an introduction to contemporary Polish painting. It is a snapshot of an entire generation’s worldview, directed by MOCAK’s own director, curator and art theorist Maria Anna Potocka,” says Dr. Arūnas Gelūnas, Director General of the Lithuanian National Museum of Art.
“Painting stands out as a very powerful weapon among the arts. In Poland, it is particularly appreciated because, despite its late beginnings, dating back only to the mid-19th century, it has since gained vigour, developed a large number of personalities and established a partnership dialogue with European art history,” says Maria Anna Potocka, the curator of the exhibition.
The exhibition features works by eighteen Polish artists.
The majority of the works on show are from the 21st century. The exhibition is divided into four thematic parts: exploring the object and the word, the human being, symbolic scenes and the density of reality.
The exhibition at the Radvila Palace Museum of Art (Vilniaus str. 24, Vilnius) will run until 13 October.
Rūtė Merk. “Promises”
5 July – 6 October 2024
National Gallery of Art, Konstitucijos pr. 22, Vilnius
How are new technologies changing bodies, their representation and the very notion of corporeality? What is the power of the old medium of painting to reflect the desires and promises of technology in our time? Using the classical genres of portraiture and still life, Rūtė Merk uses oil painting to capture the archetypes of modernity, the shifting boundaries between the material and the virtual, the natural and the artificial, the concrete and the abstract in the contemporary world.
Although Merk’s portraits flirt with the history of painting, they undoubtedly testify to a time of tracksuit trousers and business casual suits rather than the mantle. They are representative of today’s pop culture, fashion and the specific habits of the millennial generation, found in the fragments of the artist’s memory, her impressions and the purposeful archaeology of digital culture. Seamless at first glance, these portraits are made up of a multitude of fragments of different bodies that have been deposited in the artist’s digital image archive. Ariya’s face is borrowed from a character with the same name from the popular TV series Game of Thrones, while the rest of her body is anonymous; Yomanthe is pieced together from different image sources, trying to imagine a typical employee of a successful art gallery, finally naming the painting after her best friend from school; and Yssa is a loosely interpreted portrait of a Belarusian DJ living in Berlin. These figures, hovering in abstract backgrounds, are characterised by their weightlessness – the artist herself describes this as an attempt to “embody embodiment” – and suggest the redrawing of the boundaries of the subject in the face of a constantly mediated reality.
The two portraits of Aki Ross, one of the first virtual film actresses, presented in the exhibition, demonstrate a change in the artist’s drawing. In Spirits Within (2018), in contrast to the expressive, gestural brushstrokes in Greta (2015), the colouring, visual effects, figure modelling and composition are more reminiscent of the images generated by digital image editing software and designed for screens found in video games and 3D manipulations. The melting, hazy, out-of-focus, strangely uncomfortable abstractions of the backgrounds of Merk’s paintings are also intended as if for the eye of a machine rather than a human. The exhibition invites us to think not only about what but also how we see in the light of the screens.
The exhibition at the National Gallery of Art (Konstitucijos pr. 22, Vilnius) will run until 6 October.
Žilvinas Kempinas. “Windswept”
15 May – 1 October 2024
Vilnius Cathedral Bell Tower, Cathedral Bell Tower, a. 2
The bell tower of Vilnius Cathedral has been open to visitors for ten years. To celebrate the anniversary, on 15 May, the installation “Windswept” by artist Žilvinas Kempinas, created especially for the site, will open. This work is the first dialogue between contemporary art and the old tower.
“In autumn 2023, I was invited to create a work in the bell tower of the Cathedral. Although the building is very complicated due to its wooden slabs, stairs and open windows, I could not resist the temptation to make a site-specific installation in such a special space. It was important to me that the work did not interfere with the character of the bell tower itself – that it didn’t compete with it, didn’t overwhelm it, didn’t obstruct the view of it. The aim was to create a complementary harmony, where the work highlights the architecture and the architecture highlights the work,” says Kempinas.
“Windward combines ideas of height, verticality, light, time, materiality, temporality; taming the wind of the city, it employs it to fan the magnetic bands and create a snarl the likes of which the walls of this tower have never heard. The glossy black bands bring out the ancient architecture – after all, the bell tower’s ground-floor brickwork dates back to the 13th century. The kinetic sculpture, 700 (+1) vertical magnetic bands, like the grooves of a tree trunk, represent the years of Vilnius, merging into a single physical body: both monumental and ephemeral.
The installation will be on display in the bell tower of Vilnius Cathedral (Cathedral Bell Tower, a. 2) until 1 October.
Monika Radžiūnaitė. “And I’m Only Human”
31 January – 2 October 2024
Kazys Varnelis House-Museum, Didžioji str. 26, Vilnius
Monika Radžiūnaitė (b. 1992) represents the young generation of painters working in Vilnius. The artist’s style is characterised by irony, transformation of historical and cultural plots – not appealing to the factual, chronological or thematic reality of the past, but rather, exploring new connections between symbols, allusions and images.
The starting point of the work is the Kazis Varnelis House-Museum exhibition – an installation based on the aesthetic and meaningful consonances of exhibits from different epochs, a space of timeless museum sacredness beyond the limits of the everyday. Varnelis’s conception of space has been strongly influenced by his long-standing practice in the field of church art, but there are no direct references to sacred art in the museum.
The gallery is the birthplace of a new religion of contemporary images, one that is still unknown to us. What image, which has always been a faithful servant of religions, could complement sacred texts today? And what new religion would be born from today’s image culture? This is a play on images that arise in the viewer’s consciousness, inviting an exploration of subjective visual experiences. A museum exhibit – a monstrance case – appears at the core of the exhibition. In a physical and museum sense, the empty object becomes a metaphor for Radžiūnaitė’s creative strategy – forgotten iconographic motifs in the paintings are filled with new meanings and create their own semantic system.
The exhibition at the Kazys Varnelis House-Museum (Didžioji st. 26, Vilnius) will run until 2 October.
“Down the Rabbit Hole”
11 April – 3 November 2024
MO Museum, Pylimo str. 17, Vilnius
The exhibition “Down the Rabbit Hole” presents works by artists from the Baltic States and explores the phenomena of paganism, spirituality and conspiracy theories. The exhibition proposes to look at paganism and spirituality as a romanticized historical refuge, and also to address its contemporary cross-over, as spirituality increasingly takes on conspiratorial and commercial elements.
The works in the exhibition, dating from the 1970s to the present day, reveal the intergenerational relationship and how, in the social and political contexts of different eras, artists’ experiences have been, and continue to be, expressed through the prisms of escapism, empowerment and the conspiratorial – or conspiratorial spirituality.
The artists in the exhibition are Līga Spunde (b. 1990), Anastasia Sosunova (b. 1993), Viktorija Daniliauskaitė (b. 1951), Darja Popolitova (b. 1989), Aistė Ramunaitė (b. 1957), Vita Zaman (b. 1976), Katrīna Neiburga (b. 1978), Laura Põld (b. 1984), Nijolė Valadkevičiūtė (1944-2020), Gertrūda Gilytė (b. 1992)
Most of us deep in our hearts want to feel harmony and unity with nature, but at the same time we are trying to understand the complex political and social forces that shape our lives. As the pandemic and other recent global processes have shown, the idea of returning to nature is often used in narratives created by the far-right, in the construction of alternative worldviews or even conspiracy theories. In addition, neo-paganism has become increasingly popular in recent years, both in terms of infiltration into mass culture and in terms of conspiratorial beliefs.
This confluence of ideas is a fertile ground for prophecies and promises made by charlatans, spiritual wellbeing experts or social media gurus. Paradoxically, various self-help techniques that promise a return to the “natural” order are exploited by a corporate culture that encourages toxic productivity and rampant consumption. How can one word be used to describe what is so contradictory?
The exhibition Down the Rabbit Hole introduces the phenomenon of conspirituality – or conspiratorial spirituality – coined by sociologists Charlotte Ward and David Voas. The term refers to a movement that has spread rapidly in recent years, mainly online, fuelled by disillusionment with political systems and a growing interest in alternative lifestyles. Conspiritualism is based on two fundamental ideas: the belief in the existence of a secret group controlling society, and an alleged change in human consciousness – or so-called paradigm shift. Conspiracy theories and esoteric views are united here by a common axis: the desire to uncover hidden truths and to gain secret knowledge.
The exhibition at the MO Museum (Pylimo str. 17, Vilnius) will run until 3 November.
“Pakui Hardware”. “Virtual Care”
19 June – 1 December 2024
Radvila Palace Art Museum, Vilniaus g. 24
“Pakui Hardware’s work explores the movement of capital through bodies, technologies and materials and how it shapes our reality. Over the past few years, the duo’s work has often explored issues related to contemporary medicine, imagining potential futures where physical boundaries are transcended through the decomposing, multiplying and reconstructing of human and non-human bodies. Distant Concern explores another layer of the digitalisation of modern medicine and health that is increasingly relevant today: robotic surgery and telemedicine.
The historic hall of the Radvila Palace is transformed into an environment reminiscent of a clinical surgery or hospital room, where human presence – apart from the visitor’s own body – is replaced by technology. In a space suspended between the physical and the virtual, between the corporeal and the digital, transparent heat-formed “bodies” are abstracted into sculptural biomorphic forms. Inspired by the paintings of the artist Maria Teresa Rožanskaitė in the 1970s and 1980s, technology, drapery, organic and synthetic materials merge into abstract states in the sculptures.
As Jeannette Pols, a researcher in the anthropology of care, health and the body, observes, there is no pure dichotomy between the ‘cold’ technology and the ‘warm’ human body, but rather a subtle and complex interaction between these poles. “Virtual Care” is not understood here as something inherently threatening, but as the result of the intricate relationship between man, technology and economy. The idea for this installation was conceived before the COVID-19 pandemic and its aftermath hit the world, when telemedicine was still more of a niche way of caring for patients. However, with the onset of the pandemic, virtual care has become the predominant form of access to medical care. The new everyday reality has thus become uncomfortably intertwined with artists’ visions.
The exhibition at the Radvila Palace Museum of Art (Vilniaus str. 24, Vilnius) runs until 1 December.