On 21st May, 6 pm Jonas Mekas Visual Arts Center (Gynėjų St. 14, Vilnius) opens Kristina Inčiūraitė’s exhibition “Nameless Hour” in collaboration with Elena Dapkūnaitė, Gabrielė Labanauskaitė, Virginija Popovaitė, Ieva Turevičiūtė and Eglė Visockė. From 6.30 pm to 7.15 pm, a performative action involving the audience will be carried out (limited number of participants).
In her new contemporary art project, Kristina Inčiūraitė attempts to relate a women’s community with cinematographic space and the space of the venue where the project is set. “Nameless Hour” is a collision between the present and the past, a stretch of time, when illusory and physical space become fused and modified. During this “nameless hour”, the fate of a film’s character is changed (the project contains references to the 1948 crime drama “Sorry, Wrong Number”, directed by Anatole Litvak), or the coordinates of Yvonne Rainer’s hand movements are extended (a look back to the 1966 avant-garde film “Hand Movie”).
The participants in the project are several members of the basketball team of the Lithuanian LGBT community. The hand and its movements, which are so important on the basketball court, are transferred to an art project. However, the emphasis on the hand movements aims to bring out the sound or the touch related to this movement. In “Nameless Hour”, a hand dances, draws a curve of memory/thought, and embodies a sound wave. The coordinates of the hands connect different parts of the contemporary art project. The project consists of several works in different media: a three-part experimental film, photographs, a sound project, and a performative action involving the audience at the opening.
For more than a decade, Kristina Inčiūraitė has been applying certain feminist strategies in her contemporary art practice: she seeks to criticise the models of a disciplinary gaze, mainly by presenting videos in which the characters are women, although they are not seen on the screen. To be precise, having found themselves in the field of patriarchal power or a panoptic view, social relations become hierarchical, and binary structures establishing differences between genders and subjects are formed, which inhibits becoming and change. Hopefully, the “lack” of women’s visibility, and their refusal to represent identities consciously emphasised by the artist in this project, will open up a new horizon for different scenarios of experience and alternative coordinates of time and space.
The contemporary art project “Nameless Hour” is part of the scholarly and artistic project “Invisible Communities” (2013–2014), implemented by Vytautas Magnus University, Lithuania.
