An exhibition ‘In the beginning was the deed!’ is on view at Kaunas Artists’ House (V. Putvinskio 56, Kaunas, Lithuania) until 1st of May. Participants of the exhibition Anastasia Sosunova, Agnė Jokšė, Anton Karyuk, Naglis Kristijonas Zakaras, Goda Palekaitė ir Adomas Palekas, Iza Tarasewicz, Liliana Zeic, and unknown artist from the Grodno archive.
‘In the beginning was the deed!’ were words from Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s “Faust”. The scientist utters these words before making a deal with Mephistopheles, prioritising action over thought and word in changing the world order. These words were used as a slogan by the anarchist group Black Banner active in Białystok, Dnipro and Odessa in 1906, the slogan unambiguously expressing the use of aggressive physical force against the then tsarist government and increasingly powerful industrialists and bankers. The history of this and various other anti-imperialist groups that operated in the territory that is delineated by current borders of Lithuania, Poland, Belarus, Ukraine, Moldova and Russia, was brought to life in 2021 by the exhibition “Na początku był czyn!” held Arsenal Gallery in Białystok. Curators of this exhibition not only opened these archives, but also together with artists (and) activists reflected the context of today’s social, political and contemporary art transformations.
The exhibition “In the beginning was the deed!” organised at the Kaunas Artists’ House continues the narrative started in Bialystok with the history of anarchist movements in Lithuania. By opening the archives, this story turns the exhibition into a conversation about the ways of writing and reading radical collective and personal narratives, about the (im)possibility of resistance to dominant powers and their forms of representation, about the unevenness of the margins of everyday life.
Exhibition curators: Edgaras Gerasimovičius, Vaida Stepanovaitė.
The exhibition is organised by: Kaunas Artists’ House, Swallow (Vilnius), gallery Arsenal (Bialystok). The exhibition is accompanied by research and a discursive program curated by Agnė Bagdžiūnaitė.
Photographer: : Lukas Mykolaitis