VAA Nida Art Colony will turn a century-old water reservoir into a temporary gallery

2016 04 29 — 2016 05 15 at Nida Art Colony
Author Echo Gone Wrong

Vandens_rezervuaras

VAA Nida Art Colony’s project Climbing Invisible Structures has approached the exhibition stage. The last participating artists returned home from residencies in Lithuania, Norway and Iceland in the end of the last year. This year Nida Art Colony will organize the first presentation of their creative results on April 29 – May 15.

The exhibition of the project, which explores the hidden causes of our present-day behaviors – the new daily rituals, will take place in a water reservoir in Vilnius, invisible to the passers-by, rather than the usual gallery space.

The reservoir built close to Vilnius’ neighbourhood of Liepkalnis during WWI, 5 metres deep and 25 metres in diameter, is covered by a dome supported by 8 reinforced concrete columns, and it is possible to walk down the concrete steps to the bottom of the round space with exceptional acoustics. Yet the reservoir was chosen for the project’s first exhibition not only because of its spectacular architecture. This place also reflects how the invisible structures which determine our interaction with the environment have changed over the century. For instance, today high-speed internet connection has become a communal amenity that is just as important as the water supply was back then, while the units of measuring volume have transformed from cubic metres into kilobytes. Furthermore, this year the reservoir and the whole of Vilnius’ modern water supply system turns 100 years old.

The reservoir exhibition will feature five out of ten artists who took part in the Climbing Invisible Structures project: Saulius Leonavičius and Robertas Narkus from Lithuania and three Norwegian artists – Kristin Tårnesvik, Tanya Busse ir Victoria Durnak. The show will present new works created exclusively for this project. For instance, Saulius Leonavičius, who spent two months at the Nordic Artists’ Centre Dale (Norway), has created a universal costume for contemporary meditation rituals, while Victoria Durnak made a film inspired by stories found on the exboyfriendjewelry.com website during her stay at Nida Art Colony. The exhibition and the whole of the project is curated by Eglė Mikalajūnė (Vilnius) and Samir M’Kadmi (Oslo).

All ten of the project’s works will be presented in other exhibitions in Lithuania and Norway: in May-June in the new hall of the reconstructed building of VAA Nida Art Colony, which celebrates its 5th anniversary this year, in July-August at the Residency Centre YO-YO in the Žeimiai Manor, and, finally, in February-March 2017 at the Akershus Art Centre in Lillestrøm, Norway.

Climbing Invisible Structures. Ritualised Disciplinary Practices in Social Life is a curated visual arts residency exchange and exhibition programme organised by Nida Art Colony of Vilnius Academy of Arts. It is organized in collaboration with the Office for Contemporary Art and Nordic Artists’ Centre Dale in Norway, Skaftfell Centre for Visual Art in Iceland, and Residency Centre YO-YO at the Žeimiai Manor in Jonava district, Lithuania. The programme is financed by the European Economic Area Financial Mechanism 2009–2014 and Lithuanian Council for Culture.

We are grateful for being able to use the water reservoir space to JSC Vilniaus vandenys and the www.pamirsta.lt project.