The necro-romantism of S&P Stanikas, living and working in Paris, is related to a certain context of degenerating late sovietism and a later shifted socio-political and socio-cultural context, as well as to iconography of the classic Western art. However the necro-romantism of S&P Stanikas stands out in the Western context as well as in the Lithunian contemporary art context. This time S&P Stanikas presents a site specific mini installation „Trip to Mars“, created specifically for the space of „Malonioji 6“, disclosing bodily and spiritual (classic) rhetorics as well as major controversies of contemporary art, balancing out the „old“ and the „new“, the „spiritual“ and the „profane“.
April 2000: THE THIRD EXPEDITION
The ship came down from space. It came from the stars and the black velocities, and the shining movements, and the silent gulfs of space. It was a new ship; it had fire in its body and men in its metal cells, and it moved with a clean silence, fiery and warm. In it were seventeen men, including a captain. The crowd at the Ohio field had shouted and waved their hands up into the sunlight, and the rocket had bloomed out great flowers of heat and color and run away into space on the third voyage to Mars! Now it was decelerating with metal efficiency in the upper Martian atmospheres. It was still a thing of beauty and strength. It had moved in the midnight waters of space like a pale sea leviathan; it had passed the ancient moon and thrown itself onward into one nothingness following another. The men within it had been battered, thrown about, sickened, made well again, each in his turn. One man had died, but now the remaining sixteen, with their eyes clear in their heads and their faces pressed to the thick glass ports, watched Mars swing up under them.
“Mars!” cried Navigator Lustig.
“Good old Mars!” said Samuel Hinkston, archaeologist.
“Well,” said Captain John Black.
(Ray Bradbury “The Martian Chronicles”)
Exhibition open 6‒16 December 2014, Wednesdays and Saturdays 6‒8 pm or by appointment tel. +37063190615
For more see artists’ website.
