This exhibition explores the meanings of Lithuanian modernist architectural design in the Soviet era. It comprises three installations. The photograph shows fragments of the installations The National Pavilion (a spatial structure containing photographic and graphic images) and Exposures (10 words chiseled in the floor of the Contemporary Art Centre as its original layer of stone and concrete mosaic was opened up).
This video, which is a documentation of a staged art history lesson/guided tour, addresses the issues of institutionalized power and effects of national identity. The art school teacher and the students play their usual roles: they analyze paintings by 20th century Lithuanian artists.Yet the lesson takes place in the Government Palace of the Republic of Lithuania. In The Place of Art, the lesson is a form of intervention that allows for discovering the contradictions lying at the heart of culture and activate them for change that can be anticipated in the film’s culmination, as the students have a discussion with the Prime Minister about a painting by K. Šimonis hanging in his office.
The video is based on the author’s performance in Trakai. In the course of the latter, the author put a table in a place popular with tourists, sat at it and ate cepelinai, a Lithuanian national dish, and kibin, a Karaite national dish. In this work, folklore elements are invoked in order to re-approach the issue of national identity in a hyperreal consumerist context.
An installation of ten yellow green red flags (Bolivia, Ethiopia, Lithuania, Guinea, Congo, Senegal, Benin, Mali, Cameroon and Burkina Faso). Installation dimensions 450 x 170 x 285 cm
Three photographs with the views through the windows of the offices of the President, the Prime Minister and the Chairman of the Parliament of the Republic of Lithuania.
VIP Sightseeing Tour of Vilnius uses footage from the Presidential press service archive. This footage captures the walks around the Old Town of Vilnius taken by the President of Lithuania and visiting foreign dignitaries – Chancellor of Germany Gerhard Schröder, King of Norway Harald and his wife Sonja, Secretary General of NATO George Robertson, and President of France Jacques Chirac. The video reveals the city as a hierarchical space and the procession as a theatrical ritual of marking power.
14 hats of Vilnius beggars, metal, 250 x 250 cm
artistic research, critical spatial creative work, the interaction of art and architecture, the social, the political, national identity, installation, video