Exhibition “(Per)forming Scapes”
2018 07 20 – 08 31
The exhibition is open everyday, except Mondays, from 12 to 8 PM
Nida Art Colony of Vilnius Academy of Arts
The opening of the exhibition is on July 20th at 6 PM in Nida Art Colony along with a participatory work-in progress action by Špela Petrič at 6:15 PM
Participants:
Lina Lapelytė
Ona Lozuraitytė & Petras Išora
Špela Petrič (Slovenia)
Anna Romanenko and Björn Kühn (Germany)
Curator:
Vytautas Michelkevičius
The landscape of Curonian Spit is (per)formed, phytocracy is established in Neringa, the exhibition halls become gyms, it is discovered that the local mentality is formed by constant work in a specific landscape, and traditional singing turns into an animalistic snarl and rumble.
It is not an art exhibition, but a visual, audial, performative and interactive narration about the Curonian Spit, where contemporary art serves as a platform for artists and researchers of various areas to meet and present their points of view.
As from May, VAA Nida Art Colony and entire area of the Curonian Spit has turned into a testing ground and a research laboratory where exhibition participants were discussing the relationship between human and nature on various scales: from vast geological landscape to symbiosis with smallest plants, from park and other regulations to psychophysical provisions. Therefore, here meets landscape architecture, geography, biology, sculpture, work ethics, choreography, new media, and performative practices.
Exhibition produces and performs new landscapes, soundscapes, phytoscapes, spitscapes, movementscapes, workscapes, not to forget the multiplicity of meanings of the word „scape“: a leafless peduncle rising from the ground (Botany), the basal segment of an insect’s antenna (Entomology), the shaft of a column (Architecture). The landscape is (per)formed, it becomes perforated, bent and cracked. In order to comprehend it, various zooming, reducing, and grasping tools or roleplaying between humans and non-humans are applied. In it, the spectator becomes a participant, able to experience the landscape with one‘s body, interact with plants and modify one‘s mentality by performing choreographic movements.
If entire national park of the Curonian Spit is an exhibition, how would you perform to a tree or a lichen? How can mentality be developed physically relating to a place and solidified into a monu-mentality? At what point the repetitive movements for carrying out a task turn into a dance? Did you ever try to step on the landscape to see your direct impact on it? How the time slows down and space changes from plants point of view? To whom really belongs the agency in this interrelated web of nature-culture?
All works, research, and experiments were created at the residency of VAA Nida Art Colony for this exhibition.
Exhibition opening will take place on 20th of July, 6 PM. During it, at 6.15 PM, the participatory work-in-progress action by Špela Petrič (Slovenia) will encourage visitors to at least temporarily imagine that Neringa is not governed by democracy, but phytocracy, and we are not ruled by humans, but by plants.
Exhibition is supported by: Lithuanian Council for Culture, Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Lithuania, Goethe-Institut in Lithuania, The Nordic-Baltic Mobility Programme for Culture (KKNORD)
The exhibition is part of The 22nd International Thomas Mann festival