Group exhibition, titled ‘Living Ornament’ will be opened at ‘Atletika’ gallery (Vitebsko Str. 21, Vilnius) this Friday, 21st February 2020 at 7 pm. Curated by Yates Norton, this exhibition will invite to reconsider the notions of ornament and decoration. ‘Living Ornament’ will be on view until 16 March 2020.
‘Candles, cushions and vases do really well in times when money is tight’.
As Emily Gordon-Smith (head of fashion at the consultancy Stylus) suggests in this quote, the legacy of the 2008 financial crisis can be felt in the boom in affordable homeware products in shops like H&M Home, Zara Home etc. Gordon-Smith was also making a point about how ornament and decoration are not only symptoms of changing social, cultural and economic relations but also the agents used to negotiate and reconfigure them. From this perspective, the exhibition ‘Living Ornament’ takes decorating and ornament seriously, asking why they have been and continue to be simultaneously dismissed as frivolous and condemned as dangerous.
Thinking together with the artists in the exhibition, ‘Living Ornament’ considers how we can expand our ideas of what ornament and decoration are and can be. Even if the artists have not produced ornaments and decorations per se, the exhibition looks at how their approaches to their materials and topics of concern can be thought of in these terms, while imagining ornament and decoration not just as things, but as practices, moods, methodologies, ways of living and ways of looking. ‘Living Ornament’ also considers how exhibition making itself might be thought of as a practice of decorating.
Bringing together a range of artists, ’Living Ornament’ explores how ornament and decorating are often marginal but not unpowerful sites where hidden histories can be uncovered and subversive and fantasy worlds can be dreamed, imagined and made.
Artists: Eli Cortinas, Isora x Lozuraityte, (Ona Lozuraitytė and Petras Išora), Ona Juciūtė, Thomas Laprade and Aaron Lehman, Goda Palekaitė, Iain Woods, Anastasia Sosunova
Curator: Yates Norton
Opening reception at “Atletika” gallery (Vitebsko 21, Vilnius) 21/02/2020, 7 pm
Exhibition opening times 22/02/2020 – 16/03/2020 Wednesdays to Fridays 4-7 pm
Organised by Lithuanian Interdisciplinary Artists’ Association
Partly supported by Lithuanian Council for Culture and Vilnius City Municipality