Opening: 2020.08.29 18.30 pm
Participating artists: Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė, Ieva Lygnugarytė, Rūta Vėbraitė and Sofia Bordin, OFF2Ensemble, Domas Noreika and Enrika Stanulevičiūtė, Urte Kat.
Curator of the exhibition: Eglė Ambrasaitė
Line up of the exhibition opening:
18.30-19.15 p.m – Urte Kat, “Chronic Fairy-Tale”, fashion show/performance.
19.30-20.30 p.m – Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė (video), OFF2Ensemble (short film), Rūta Vėbraitė and Sofia Bordin (video), Domas Noreika and Enrika Stanulevičiūtė (experimental, cognitive installation).
20.30-21.30 p.m – Ieva Lygnugarytė book’s “An Ode to Me and My Unborn Child” presentation/performance.
Apie/ around 22.30 p.m – late summer dances with DODOMUNDO (https://soundcloud.com/dodomundo) and Antanas Lučiūnas
More information: https://www.zeimiudvaras.lt/
“Enchanted Landscapes”
Once, lived a man who suggested to one other man in higher societal rank that it is more beneficial to reign being feared than loved. Patriarchal ruling and private partition blossomed. Tenderness withered away. Do we tend to love one another, do we tend to relate to one another, between humans, non-humans and other earthy creatures with such a perspective? I do agree with Hardt that “most times when people talk about regimes based on hatred, they in fact are based on a certain kind of love” (Hardt 2014). But as he mentions, it is a horrible kind of love, love that is grounded in sameness, where one loves only the one who is like them. Such notion of love washes off the differences to create a unity, a unity like, for example, white supremacy, nationalisms and various religious fundamentalisms and keeps the social, economic, political relations that mushroom from these intact. Society seems to be deprived of something essential, not even aware of what it is it misses. Hence, what is that, or does one need to ask – other kinds of love, what is a relation of affection between (not implying a separation) bodies, minds and souls, interconnected, intermingled in interspecies way? Is “the enchanted island”, how Bourdieu once called love, “a closed and perfectly autarkic world which is the site of a continuous series of miracles” and “can be snatched from the icy waters of calculation, violence and self-interest”? (Bourdieu 2001:109).
The curator of this exhibition has no answers. How can I prescribe one with the description of what can be felt only? Love is a different experience for all of us in all its subtlety, an immeasurable journey, which seems to flower without a cause, in unknown directions..
Once you try to open up the question of love – it’s like a storage – felt data, neverending archivum in/of clouds. There is a figure of a mother and a father, visions of homelands and landscapes, machines, guns, rapes, deadly wars and illnesses, dusts of laughter, ephemeral touches, broken hearts, ghosts. There is language. Scars. Consumption. There is magic too, gentleness, tenderness, forgiveness, hope.
I touched you while you were unaware, while most vulnerable, while sleeping. I watched our hands wrapped, bodies mingling; gently moving my fingers, I stroked your hair, your skin in zigzags, feeling the warmth of your breath, I murmured without uttering the non-corporeal promise of ‘I love you’. I disengaged with what I thought you should be, depersonalizing myself too. You could not observe this process. It flowed like a river, it was a constant becoming.
In doing away with the sentimentality and romanization of love that, to the reader, still might seem to arise from these words, the curator of this exhibition, believes love to be an ontological condition, an ontological power that changes you, and through the relationship with others, as a mode of action is able to reorient the society too.
Hence, keeping love as a main thread for the group exhibition “Enchanted Landscapes”, I invite you to see the “different, unique, unrepeatable, unstable and foreign” (Badiou 2012) perspectives on love, relations and intensities coming from different journeys, different experiences, from different artists. Let’s try to experience love, and all that surrounds it, together, in differences.
The opening of the exhibition will be held on 29th of August, 2020, 18:30 pm. Later on, the exhibition can be visited every Saturday-Sunday (from 30th of August to 27th of September) or on other days if agreed via +37061002855 or dngartinstallation@zeimiudvaras.lt.
Architect of an exhibition: Domas Noreika
Coordinator of the exhibition: Rokas Vaičiulis
Designer of the exhibition: Gailė Pranckūnaitė
“Enchanted Landscapes“ is part of the project “Invisible Man’s Cinematheque 2020: intensities”. It is partly financed by Lithuanian Council for Culture.
