Residency project in Nida and exhibition "Between Time and History" in "Titanikas" gallery, Vilnius

November 28, 2013
Author Echo Gone Wrong

Goethe-Institut, Institut Français in Lithuania, Nida Art Colony of the Vilnius Academy of Arts, and independent curator Julija Čistiakova are pleased to present residency project “Between Time and History”, dedicated to the 50th anniversary of the Élysée Treaty* and European integration development. The result of collaboration between three artists from Germany, France, and Lithuania is presented at Vilnius Art Academy exhibition hall “Titanikas” until November 30th.

Klaipėda region, full of historical and geographical shifts – once belonging to Prussia, German and Russian Empires, and Soviet Union, – is a perfect example of how power can change the flow of the history and how political decisions can affect people’s life and expectations, landscape and territory, memory of the past and present. Looking back on the history of the three countries we can trace how different alliances and treaties – The Triple Alliance (1882), The Triple Entente (1907), Treaty of Versailles (1919) and Élysée Treaty (1963) – affected the geographical changes in Europe and in Klaipėda region.

Three artists – Martin Neumaier (Germany), Dominique Blais (France) and Žilvinas Landzbergas (Lithuania) – spent almost two months in the residency in Nida. They were employed to think about history’s bearing on the present in this particular small piece of land. It is important how the artists percieve the history that has been changing people’s consciousness and have nostalgia of the things that will never happen. M. Neumaier focused on the question what does it mean to be a German? How future and the past can be bound together and why it is important for him to find the answers to his questions. Ž. Landzbergas’s personal mythologies, which consist of tiny details important only to the artist, of his feelings on the seaside during the residency, are resulting into the site-specific installation that refers to Lithuanian traditional mythology and has many symbolic meanings. In his works, D. Blais has been researching the ideas of solitude and isolation as well as contraversion between East and West in a figurative and literate sense. The time and political contexts are changing, but certain landscape elements remain the same.

The artists were encouraged to navigate real and imagined territories and times – geographic, political, economic and social by revealing how the forgotten personal and communal construct the nostalgia of/for the future. The show functions as an archive of parallel micro-narratives, expanding on the notion as a means of touching upon local chronotops. The exhibition strives to formulate an unstable and fragmentary cartography where spatial and time collisions often result in conditions close to a pseudo-modernist melancholy. Finally, it reveals how cultural mythologies are inscribed into a personal Time-Space/Landscape-Memory equation.

Exhibition will run through 30 November 2013 at the “Titanikas” exhibition hall, Maironio Street. 3, Vilnius, Lithuania.
This exhibition is a result of the residency project “Between Time and History” curated by Julija Čistiakova. Every year there are 50 artists residing at the Nida Art Colony. During their residencies the artists are free to make any artistic research; during thematic or curated residencies artists produce works within a particular theme to be presented in exhibitions or publications. In 2013 Nida Art Colony hosted two more curated residencies: Critical Tourism and Techno-Ecology.

Julija Čistiakova (b.1979) is an independent curator living and working in Paris. After finishing higher school of curatorial studies Ecole du Magasin in Grenoble, France, she curated numerous exhibitions in Belgium, Canada, France, Russia, and Lithuania, and collaborated together with Hans Ulrich Obrist on the “Brutally Early Club” project. Her most significant exhibitions include a co-curated show for Performa’09 in New York, “Prestige: Phantasmagoria Now” (2012) and “What Is Missing?” (2013), both held in Klaipeda Art Center, Lithuania. Julija is also a co-author of the book “Harald Szeemann. Individual Methodology” (JRP|Ringier, 2008).

*Élysée Treaty for German-French cooperation was established by Charles de Gaulle of France and Konrad Adenauer of Germany on January 22, 1963 for reconciliation between the two countries.

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