Artūras Raila. Overture. 2012
This is the first time that a single work has been exhibited in the main hall of the National Gallery of Art. It is the Lithuanian premiere of the new project of the contemporary artist Artūras Raila – the film installation “Libretto for Mærsk Mc-Kinney Møller. Synopsis”. The film is projected on to a 40-by-three-metre screen, using eight synchronised beamers. The architecture is filled with Darius Čiuta’s “noisescapes”. Having hand-drawn 1,600 images according to his own libretto, Raila has animated a controversial social event in the public space, observed and instantly processed by the mass media. “We will capture the moment and it will make us rich,” say the chorus of photographers featured in the film. The line between the “real event” and its staging is relative here, while the viewer is encouraged not only to recognize but also to analyze the actions and the characters he sees. A text stitched from phrases that the media bombard us with, presented on a screen in the installation’s entryway, boosts the sense of artificially condensed reality. It is a critique of the society of the spectacle delivered in the language of the spectacle itself, a libretto.
Exhibition curator Lolita Jablonskienė
Exhibition architect and designer Darius Čiuta
Technical consultant of animation Žydrūnas Česnauskis
Coordinator Giedrius Gulbinas
Exhibition organisers: Vilnius Academy of Arts and National Gallery of Art, Vilnius
Sponsors: Lithuanian Ministry of Culture, Lithuanian Council for Culture, Expobalta, Exterus
Media sponsor artnews.lt
