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17/12/2009

Two exhibitions

Contemporary Art Centre - CAC, Vilnius

The Contemporary Art Centre (CAC), Vilnius is pleased to present two exhibitions by Lithuanian artists to complete its 2009 exhibition cycle: POST ARS_20_CONTEXTS and Kristina Inčiūraitė Survival.

The two exhibitions foreground the work of two generations of Lithuanian artists: the former celebrating twenty years of collective activity by POST ARS one of the groundbreaking artist-groups who emerged in the 1990s at the moment the new nation was forming; and the latter by an artist in her thirties who is coming to prominence internationally in recognition of her video and installation practice charting new territories in discourses about women in Lithuania.

Curated by Daiva Citvarienė, POST ARS_20_CONTEXTS is a retrospective of the POST ARS group’s oeuvre spanning two decades and presented on five screens and a digital catalogue. Though the group’s exhibitions, performances and actions were predominantly recorded on amateur camera this material represents a significant body of documentation of POST ARS high years of activity and an important passage within contemporary Lithuanian art history. ). Daring to escape from enshrined theoretical categories the group developed a wide field of practices, including; installations, actions, performances, happenings, land art projects.

Their work is characterised by its elusiveness, provocativeness, its improbability, its surprising nature, its temporality, its use of entropic materials (earth, water, fire, glass, litter) and, often, the use of the artists’ own bodies as expressive medium. The exhibition is relevant, and fascinating, as both an artistic event and as an archive recording an evolution of Lithuanian culture. The exhibition also includes a digital catalogue of the group’s work. This format is not yet popular in Lithuania, but its capacity to hold vast amounts of digital information and filmed footage is of great value and utility. The catalogue features biographies of the members of the group, their portfolios, interviews, other artists’ comments as well as many photographs and video fragments.

The exhibition Survival presenting the latest works by Kristina Inčiūraitė (including drawings, photographs and a video) reflects upon the current financial/social crisis and people‘s reactions towards it and focuses on their reappraisal of the material and spiritual values. The themes of the exhibition are principally socially related and the graphic opposition of black and white present in the exhibition reveals the contrasting reality of the crisis. For the project Inčiūraitė has produced six new collaborative works with four different social groups (with a focus on women).

Working with a group of students from one of Vilnius special art schools she has created both a large-scale mural-drawing and a suite of portraits based on interviews with the students about their heroes – as a measure of the times. In the video that gives the exhibition its title, Survivors, Inčiūraitė interviews two women who were members of the political reform movement that delivered Lithuania to its independence about their opinions of current day Lithuania – marked by financial crisis and its social fallout – and their predictions for the future.

Turning to her hometown one element of the project considers the ghostlike spaces of the extraneous shopping centres built in the boom-times as well as the fortunes of workers in large, and long-established, industrial companies in these times. Finally, she turns to a group of successful business women to ask their prognostications... only to find they ring hollow when 'success' is so abstracted. The analysis embodied in Survival is timely and offers an inspiration to the audience to consider their situation and measure it against the plight and purpose of the nation-state.

Images: Kristina Inčiūraitė. “Survival” (video still) 2009
Kristina Inčiūraitė in cooperation with pupils from the Vilnius Justinas Vienožinskis Art School. “The Days of Anxiety” (wall drawing) 2009. Photograph by Sarune Zurbaite (2009)

Press and promotion
Renata Dubinskaite: +370 5 2608960, mob.: +370 687 85713; renata@cac.lt

Opening: Friday 18 December, 18.

Contemporary Art Centre - CAC
Vokieciu 2 LT- 01130 Vilnius Lithuania
Opening hours
Tuesday - Sunday 12:00 - 19:30
Full price 8 LTL
Concession - 4 LTL

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