The exhibition title is an onomatopoeic reference to an event – a basketball slam dunk – around which multiple threads of meaning are woven. In exploring them, artist Martynas Gailiušas employs an (auto)ethnographic approach, drawing on the anthropology of political imagery and cultural analysis to examine basketball as a phenomenon with a long and complex history within both Lithuanian and global contexts.
As a powerful and culturally significant phenomenon, basketball unfolds a broad psycho-geographic map whose point of origin lies in the artist’s own childhood memories, shared by his generation. Images etched in memory: makeshift backboards, stolen nets, red Coca-Cola bikes tossed beside pothole-ridden courts, Chicago Bulls logos carved with blue pens into school desks, the ever-playing anthem “Three Million”, team merchandise colours, and most vivid forms of banal nationalism typical of the post-Soviet sphere. The piercing noise of matches blaring from thick, blue-tinted CRT screens; the squeak of sneakers on the court; the undying legend of Kaunas Žalgiris’ victory over Moscow’s CSKA – a team representing the Soviet army – still echoing as a symbolic triumph over an empire of evil; or crowds of drunken fans pouring beer over the roofs of screaming cars.
This entire cultural stratum surrounding basketball is documented in the exhibition through an exploration of more intricate, often invisible psycho-political processes – entangled knots whose unravelling reveals hidden local and global histories, threads of influence and meaning embedded within the phenomenon. The unfolding narratives raise questions of national identity and the forces that blur postcolonial subjectivities; of belief in the suddenly imported ‘American Dream’, which encouraged trust in the mechanisms of wild capitalism; of the perceived possibility for upward social mobility; or the uncanny spiritualization of the sport, its transformation into a ‘second religion’. Basketball appears alternately as a tool for intensifying ideologies and as a ritualised event – a spectacle of ceremonial consensus that draws wandering masses out of a history of tumultuous transformation. This is a history marked by the collision of old systems undergoing modernisation, the lingering remnants of foreign and oppressive regimes, the traumas and lacks they produced, and the promises, hopes, or disillusionments offered by the newest ones.
In Boom Shakalaka, Martynas Gailiušas juxtaposes repeated object scales, game lines, functional elements, and iconic signs with the broader frameworks of higher-order systems – economics and capitalism, politics and values, power, colonialism and imperialism, corporate governance, identity, the body, and biopolitics. Through these overlapping registers, the artist reveals basketball – a phenomenon of sports culture – as a synecdoche of the totality of civilizational operations.
Martynas Gailiušas (b. 1992) is an interdisciplinary artist, designer, and researcher whose approach merges methods and practices shaped by his BA studies in Product Design at the University of Bradford and his MA in Contextual Design at the Design Academy Eindhoven. His work spans a long-standing engagement with engineering, film and theatre prop-making, as well as furniture and digital design. Through sculptural and installation-based approaches, Gailiušas explores contemporary global conditions, their historical and anthropological roots, and the causes behind them. His practice focuses on the ways political and ideological paradigms manifest within material culture, as well as on the formations of identity at both individual and national levels.
Martynas Gailiušas
BOOM SHAKALAKA
Pamėnkalnio Gallery (1 Pamėnkalnio St., Vilnius)
11 July – 8 August 2025
Opening reception: 11 July, Wednesday, 7 pm
Curator: Linas Bliškevičius
Graphic design: Monika Radžiūnaitė
With sincere thanks to Gudrun Havsteen-Mikkelsen, Žilvinas Landzbergas, Aistis Kavaliauskas, Arvydas Samalius, Gabija Tarabilda, Jurgis Tarabilda
Organiser: Pamėnkalnio Gallery
The project is financed by the Lithuanian Council for Culture, Vilnius City, Vilnius Meistarnė
