“Running Lines” is a themed exhibition organised by the Vilnius Academy of Art’s (VAA) Department of Photography, Animation and Media Art, representing the youngest generation of media artists, students and recent graduates. Exhibition presents a series of works that originate from a word, a text or a quotation that have been found, overheard, uttered or written down.
There are two exhibitions held paralelly in 2021: “Running Lines” („Bėgančios eilutės“) at the VAA gallery "Academy" and “Soap and Water” („Muilas ir vanduo“) at the VAA gallery "Artifex". They seek to emphasise two prevailing reactions to our changing world observed within young contemporary artists’ works: an increasing distancing towards the textual and virtual worlds, and a backwards look that evokes distant and often traumatic past experiences.
Despite the multitude of ways they have been expanded or embodied – the means of expression vary from textual to visual, material to virtual – that is both the starting point and the reflection on our changing reality in each of the pieces.
All artworks were conceived during the quarantine and were developed as separate, though parallel, monologues. However, once the works unexpectedly “meet” in a common space, it becomes clear that most of the artists have been interested in secondary realities, the questions of identity and one’s relation to the environment, which have been particularly stressed in the face of mass-scale restrictions.
Justina Jaruševičiūtė delves into the notion of an “artist”, however, the dictionaries can only offer a language that is rigid, out-of-date and “dead”. Alternatively, Agnė Poškutė pays attention to the matter-of-fact language used by the professors at the academy and takes down the vivid, poetic, sometimes absurd vocabulary that they use to describe creative processes, art or works of art. Meanwhile, Adomas Žudys layers his two years worth of study notes into a contemplative and barely graspable shape of a pupil of an eye, wherein the notes’ content is hidden.
Salvijus Misevičius’s piercing camera eye wanders across the facades of empty shopping centres and offices in Vilnius, observing both the emptiness and the reflections of our fragmented and banal existence. Liucija Teodora Mikučionytė attempts to ease the city’s fate by cutting the black energetic holes out from its landscape in order to avoid potential cataclysms. Žilvinas Baranauskas’s eye merges with a virtual one as it glides through Vilnius as though it was a map, and then through a map as though it was a city, into a “real”, endless and inexhaustible universe for building alternative realities.
The simulated closeness of an exceptionally empathic Gailė Cijūnaitytė’s double helps those troubled by anxiety or lost in a(nother) reality. Softly and intimately she whispers to your ear “Just relax, everything is ok”.
Artists in the exhibition “Running Lines”:
Adomas Žudys
Agnė Poškutė
Justina Jaruševičiūtė
Gailė Cijūnaitytė
Liucija Teodora Mikučionytė
Salvijus Misevičius
Žilvinas Baranauskas
Exhibition opens at 6 pm, 26th October at VAA gallery "Akademija", Pilies str. 44/2, Vilnius.
Exhibition is open until 13 November 2021.
Special event:
In collaboration with the Martynas Mažvydas National Library of Lithuania, artist Salvijus Misevičius will be presenting his video works on the 11th of November, at 6 pm and 7 pm. Both screenings will take place at the library's cinema hall.
Curated by Irma Stanaitytė-Bazienė
Poster design by Pijus Chraptavičius
Image (used in the poster) by Adomas Žudys
Translation by Austėja Masliukaitė
Special thanks to Algirdas Jaruševičius, Laura Grigaliūnaitė, Viktorija Balkutė, Margarita Valionytė
The parallel exhibition “Soap and Water” at the VAA gallery "Artifex" will open the same day at 5 pm, 26th October.
