Opening: Fri 16 Dec, 19h00 – 23h00
Exhibition open: 17 – 18 Dec, 11h00 – 17h00
Closing event – an open studio session with Toby Paul: Sun 18 Dec, 13h00– 17h00
NEVERNEVERLAND is excited to present “A Desire For Things To Work”: the first solo exhibition by Gerda Paliusyte in The Netherlands and the premiere of her new film under the same title.
“During the Isolation of The Great War, I came across a number of the English Strand Magazine. In it, among a number of fairly pointless contributions, I read a story about a young couple who move into a furnished flat in which there is a curiously shaped table with crocodiles carved in the wood. Towards evening the flat is regularly pervaded by an unbearable and highly characteristic smell, and in the dark the tenants stumble over things and fancy they see something indefinable gliding over the stairs. In short, one is led to surmise that, owing to the presence of this table, the house is haunted by ghostly crocodiles or that the wooden monsters come to life in the dark, or something of the short. It was quite naïve story, but its effect was extraordinarily uncanny.”
This personal story of Freud was included in his famous 1919 essay ‘The Uncanny’, and has been haunting various discourses ever since. While the story is given as an example of the estrangement from the familiar, which is haunting, but strangely attractive, the focus of Gerda Paliusyte in this exhibition is more on the crocodile figures than on the concept of the uncanny as such.
Displayed in a temporal architectural setting, the exhibition presents two of her recent films: ‘A Desire For Things To Work’ (2016) and ‘The Road Movie’ (2015). The show celebrates the motion of aesthetical forms, the way they shift in relation to the outside (such examples could be different usages of the same combination of colors or universality and transformative power of hip-hop), the desire of belonging (Freud’s crocodiles?) and the overlaps and encounters that follow.
Gerda Paliusyte (b.1987, Vilnius) is a Lithuanian artist and curator, currently residing in Amsterdam. Her practice is focused on the shifts and delays of representation, the way it is dependent from the social needs and time. She has been searching for an individualizing gaze – doing so through the films, events and temporal institutions.
Her films were recently presented at XII Baltic Triennial and the Kunstraum gallery, London.
A Desire For Things To Work by Gerda Paliusyte is supported by the Amsterdam Fund for the Arts.
NEVERNEVERLAND
Frans de Wollantstraat 84
Amsterdam
