Photo reportage from the exhibition ‘It Is, In A Certain Sense, A Nightmare’ by Paulina Pukytė at the Atletika gallery

In the sports hall the competition takes place between dawn and the past, history and fakeness, observation and memory, action and illusion, promise and choice, optimism and inaction, freedom and feeling, inertia and inability, word and sound, propaganda and bullshit, manipulation and complicity.

Employing the specificity of Atletika gallery interior – a gymnasium of a former school – Paulina Pukytė continues her investigation of “manipulated participation” and social stereotypes, with interactive installations from “found” objects and videotexts from “found” words. She began this artistic research two decades ago with site specific works such as Trolley Bus No.3 Named Desire (part of  “Identification”, 1999), Suspicion in the Bathroom Cabinet (part of “Apartment’99”), etc. While in her earlier works she took on social behaviour by making the private public, in this exhibition Pukytė explores the collision of personal action and collective responsibility, collective action and personal responsibility, history and the everyday, inertia and choice, activity and passivity. What is an alternative and does it exist? What is the difference between the freedom of choice and the illusion of freedom? What does it mean to be stuck – in a place, time, identity, status, history, set of rules? How are we still post-, and how are we already others, new?

Here is an entrance and/or an exit, a monologue and/or a dialogue, a promise of the “new tomorrow” and its fake/farcical repetition, a soviet mental hospital window grill that makes you play an anthem – as an unavoidable(?) repetition of an innocent action. Here is a symbolic crossing of the halfway line, a mythical breaking of the vessels, and the trembling crystal that naturally travelled from “independent” to “soviet” and again to “independent” shelves – as (im)possibility of the new and as trivial lightness of repetition of “gentle” aggression.

Paulina Pukytė, artist, writer, curator and cultural commentator, was born in Vilnius. She studied at the Vilnius Academy of Arts and the Royal College of Art in London. She lives and works in London and Vilnius. She makes site-specific interventions and installations, still and moving image, and conceptual projects. She writes experimental literature, poetry and plays. In her interdisciplinary practice Paulina Pukytė uses various strategies of appropriation and up-cycling; her work is characterized by inter- and meta-textuality.

Exhibition opening hours:
10 September, 4–8 pm
11 September, 1–6 pm
15 September – 9 October, Wednesdays to Fridays 4–7 pm, Saturdays 1–5 pm.

Exhibition tour with Paulina Pukytė – 11 September, 3 pm, 8 October 6:30 pm. Duration – 30 min.

With thanks to Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art and Riga Psychiatry and Narcology Center.
Organised by Lithuanian Interdisciplinary Artists’ Association. Information partner – 15min.
Activities of Lithuanian Interdisciplinary Artists’ Association are supported by Lithuanian Council for Culture and Vilnius City Municipality.

https//www.atletikaprojects.lt/ ^[1]
https://vilniausgalerijusavaitgalis.lt ^[2]

It Is, In A Certain Sense, A Nightmare
Paulina Pukytė
Atletika, 21 Vitebsko Str., Vilnius
09/09/2021 – 09/10/2021
Proof of full vaccination required for entrance to all events.

Photography: Laurynas Skeisgiela