From 9th June to June 13th Jonas Mekas visual arts center features an exhibition “Leaving Traces” by Sylwia Kuźnik (Poland) and Elisa Rodríguez (Spain).
Sylwia Kuźnik: We live in a world of traces. With every second there are new ones, some fleeting other permanent. Skyscrapers, houses, blocks, flats are stable traces of human presence. It’s humans’ desire to mark their strength or struggle with nature. In cities the dominant landscape is buildings: grey, uniform, multi-floor. They make up the residential, supplemented by commerce, infrastructure.
Small apartments which are hardly up to do any standard can be compared to cages rather than to a places where people can normally function. Assembly a large group of people in a small area leads to anonymity and deepening them of absence. How the city curtails our presence? Is the abandonment of individualism and hectic lifestyle contributing factor in loss of “self” as well as, closing in the social schemes? Is it the fear of failure and sense of interiority what makes us adjust to the cage rather that fight it?
To what extent the city absorb our presence? I am analyzing the presence/absence of the individual in society, in the context of the city. They are opposites which are mutually dependent, they together create a solid one. In this context I want to examine the individual as a part of society. At the same time, in the forms of painting, I leave the traces of my existence as well as my thoughts and reactions toward the reality that surrounds me. These thoughts and questions are trace considerations that contributed to the urban landscape which is present on my canvases.
Questions still remain without a definite answer, but for each of them the answer has to will be different. For me it is surprising, that only recently I began to wonder what is the relation of the individual not only with the city but also with nature. Living in a city is so absorbing that at some point I stopped noticing that apart from building that surround us there is still some nature. Does the urban environment enables humans’ to show their true presence and allows them to notice other human beings around them?
Elisa Rodríguez: What is a city without language, where the only voice printed in streets is the voice of a synthetic happiness and man-made beauty, plainly hiding materialistic interests? Why the use of the public space for artistic purposes without permission is considered vandalism, and the propaganda and visual pollution -that the constant bombardment of advertising supposes- is not?
On this basis, the Project “Billboards as Free Thinking Space” assumes the legitimate right to take part of representational system through the direct intervention on the advertising space, transforming the publicity messages in different formats (street billboards, magazines, free postcards, coasters, show windows, stickers, flyers, etc.) into thought-practice reservation, considering that the issue goes over legal matters when it comes through the use of humanist logics, as often legalism becomes a self-imposition that breaks any possibility of improvement.
This idea suffered a 180º rotation due to the collision with the Vilnius Academy of Arts, where it was presented as Master Project and the reaction was total rejection. This collision made the project even more interesting and became part of it, leading it to a different language in order to approach the issue of the invasion of the public space: trying to use the legal way to make the advertising part of its own critic. And this, linked to the concern of the collision of the activist artist with some art institutions, brought me to the video “CAUTION”: a collection of concepts, suggested by the ratings I was getting from teachers in Academy’s reviews, the own ratings I wanted to express to them in a situation that I was feeling Kafkaesque, my vision on advertising and manipulation, all combined with the words expressing my personal experience in the country and the current political circumstances.
The result is a series of definitions from dictionary that remind the exact meaning of these words to everybody (including myself), composing a simple guide for basic understanding but with wide enough meaning to let each person give her/his own context to the words, leaving evidence of the difference between the definitions of the same words by the English and Lithuanian dictionaries. Summarizing, an attempt to penetrate the Society of Spectacle and the cultural misunderstandings to explore the possibilities of actual communication.
Continuing the research on how to criticize the system collaborating with it, my project ended up constituting an attempt to create a dialogue between the individual and the society, the passers-by and the urban space, the art and the ordinary people, leaving the issue of the advertising invasion to a surface and little by little getting deep into the most primal but complex structure of the problem. That way, I put the final dot to a one more step in this work in progress that has been constantly evolving, giving new approaches and insights, facing different reactions and consequences.
The exhibition will open on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays and Fridays from 12:00 to 18:00.
