Vartai gallery launches a new series of annual exhibitions dedicated to contemporary design. The aim of the project, realized in collaboration with Lithuanian and foreign designers, curators, and institutions, is to create a platform for continuous presentation of unique design works in the context of thematic exhibitions.
Alert Objects, the first exhibition in the series, features design projects by ten authors. Many of the participants are alumni of the Design Academy Eindhoven, and their practice shares an approach to making objects as a way to address and influence the broader cultural and social field. The title of the exhibition refers to the logical contradiction evident in our daily life: the things surrounding us are not just inanimate and passive signs of their time and culture, but rather have subjective qualities, impose their order, and shape our self-perception.
This dual nature of objects reveals itself in the exhibition in a number of ways: as a critical response to superfluous production of commodities, inert consumption, and monotony of everyday experience. Although all of the exhibits are furniture items or interior elements with a specific function, they resist passive instrumental usage and demand a performative being-together relationship. They openly manifest their role in the complex field of semantic tensions in which they were created and operate, constantly reminding the user that the aesthetic and functional value of things is inseparable from the ethical motives behind their creation.
Gallery VARTAI is also organizing the talk “What Contemporary Design Can Do?” between the curators Vytautas Gečas, Marija Puipaitė, art historian and writer Koen Kleijn and Assoc. Prof. in Vilnius Academy of Arts and designer Mantas Lesauskas.
The talk will be held on Thursday, 12 December at 4 PM at hotel PACAI (Didžioji str. 7, Vilnius). Conversation will be held in English. Admission is free, please register, because the number of participants is limited. RSVP: galerija@galerijavartai.lt
Exhibition curators: Vytautas Gečas and Marija Puipaitė
Exhibition artists: Bram Vanderbeke (BE), Wendy Andreu (FR), Lucas Muñoz Muñoz (ESP), Paulius Vitkauskas (LT), Martynas Kazimierėnas (LT), Marija Puipaitė (LT), Vytautas Gečas (LT), Satomi Minoshima (JP), Hansol Kim (Studio Sol) (KR), Etienne Marc (FR).