In every city, there are a few moments when you can see it naked. In some cases, the nudity is almost constant, while others cities keep their dress code unbroken. Vilnius is a thickly dressed city. The layers are necessary to survive the harsh winters, and on top of them come the scooter wheels, the photographic wallpaper, the beards of dukes. However, that too can be taken off: at times, the city’s nipples flare in the occasional pits, the pipelines, or a cat’s eyes. Just like always when facing nipples, it sometimes feels nice, at other times, like nothing, and sometimes, just awkward.
Gediminas G. Akstinas’ exhibition Nudes uncovers new layers each time you visit it, until you seem to run out of words. If we imagine an exhibition as a body, institutions are like a membrane: they give protection, create distance, distinguish relationships, and allow for the possibility of only a controlled touch, but they also protect the softest organs from bleeding out on to the street. Just like a big part of Akstinas’ creative work, this series was first presented in non-membrane spaces—the Paneriai Sculpture Park, private interiors, and a publication. Akstinas tends to question the everyday, yet not as a phenomenon bursting with spiritual mystery, but as a habit in which we all still believe. This method locates his creative practice in a complex emotional space where neither laughing nor crying seem adequate, as if faced with a truth that is still impossible to accept today. At the Radvila Palace Museum of Art, this emotional space thickens even more; the institutional membrane tightens, enveloping each artwork’s tone, and barely holding back the piercing light and the pulling depth. The exhibition’s body is beautified by its “street” origins and its pure intentions—even the map of the exhibition hall is hung at the very entrance.
There are several new series presented in the exhibition. Apart from the aforementioned Nudes, there are four Papercuts exhibited on the ground floor: sketches of clothes for animals, with pine fibre paper growing over them through the practice of a special restoration technique. Unaffected by technology, paper should not act in this way, since our power is limited to the use of glue and scissors only. The history of art, written by people with their own techniques and motives, could not accept such a non-collage, just like it once did not accept women or dogs. From Documenta to farmsteads in Dzūkija, today we are looking for various ways to bring back dignity and the rightful place to species that might soon leave us. An animal’s nudity is a non-existent phenomenon, and yet a piece of clothing is a layer of love that we put on our close ones that have long since abandoned nature. To protect them from the cold and from suffering, and so that they make us happy—the fused Papercuts legitimise this fragile feeling and our convulsive, irrational relationship with life.
Ticking in the museum’s basement are two Clocks—projections of changing pure colours based on the colour scheme of Kenji Hieda’s desk clock, as presented in Sanzo Wada’s Colour Dictionary (one of the first ‘cheatsheets’ of colour studies). One of the colour cycles envelops the basement wall as though clumsily attempting to persuade it to change, while the other seems to be almost burning the bottom part of the column, simultaneously thickening the darkness of the basement and the remaining memories of the club that used to operate here. It is precisely in the nocturnal city that we find colours that do not await the sun—the colours of billboards, lasers, and lipsticks. On the world’s night, Pantone has chosen the colour of the year as Viva Magenta, a rich pink, the shade of blossom rather than blood. The clock of colours is ticking faster than we can heal, spring comes before we stop mourning the dead. Meanwhile, the stack of Louis Ghost chairs nearby reminds us of a time that is no longer countable but frozen in virtuality—baroque, postmodern, idealist, and the one that has long since been erased from human memory.
When talking about his exhibition, Akstinas refers to Ted Chiang’s science-fiction texts, such as Exhalation, which delves into the second law of thermodynamics through a collective breathing practice—something that does not and could hardly exist. It seems that these precise solutions are now needed more than ever in the dead-ends that we are caught in these days; dead-ends of visualisations and construction work, or visions of an increasingly unaffordable life that are built alongside new parks, flats and neighbourhoods; dead-ends of expectations when half the windows remain dark and the “market” seems more like a cult for the chosen, supported by construction cranes sprouting all over the city. Throbbing, caring bodies try to build their lives between the plasterboards and the steel profiles that Akstinas collects on the construction sites around the gentrified neighbourhoods of Vilnius. His plastering technique undresses another crucial element of the Nudes, namely the work that allows the speed of ambition to materialise, transforms asset classes into physical buildings, and generates someone else’s profit. It also reveals another kind of work, necessary to the daily choosing and maintaining of a truth that may be still impossible to grasp today but must nonetheless be already protected.
Walking home at night, I can see the city naked for a few minutes. Its nipples are showing through the construction tarpaulin fluttering nearby, under which future lives are gradually layered, and a new detail in someone else’s story is being slowly screwed on. The truth that protrudes from underneath it is that life will soon flow even into this darkness, having learned to gnaw through the layers of wool and plaster, having carved out a place for itself under the ice of capitalism. The tarp flutters so loudly I can hear it through the windows. When I finally undress myself, I feel as though I’m falling asleep wrapped in it. In my dreams, I sometimes feel nice, at other times I feel nothing, and sometimes, I feel simply awkward.
Photo reportage from the exhibition Nudes Gediminas G. Akstinas at the Radvila Palace Art Museum [1]