Exhibition “Running Lines” presents a series of works that originate from a word, a text or a quotation that have been found, overheard, uttered or written down. 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Jaruševičiūtė delves into the notion of an “artist”, however, the dictionaries can only offer a language that is rigid, out-of-date and “dead”.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”.'
Curator: Irma Stanaitytė-Bazienė
Artists: Adomas Žudys, Agnė Poškutė, Justina Jaruševičiūtė, Gailė Cijūnaitytė, Liucija Teodora Mikučionytė, Salvijus Misevičius, Žilvinas Baranauskas
Photo documentation: Laurynas Skeisgiela
