Swallow: Palydos. Something Something Something

You feel like saying something. But you can’t quite put your finger on where to start. It is probably outside, most likely on the tip of your index finger, somewhere on the margins. Where the house martin nests, also known as the swallow, a common visitor in these parts. Right at the entrance, where Martin Ebner’s crown of reeds, which decorates the rear facade of the new contemporary art venue, greets and escorts you inside. Go on, pick up the fallen stalk of a drying wreath, like an olive branch, the omen of a peaceful entrance. The show is already shedding its skin for you, even before you set foot in it! Lead the way to, and for, something, something, something.

Take a good look at Ebner’s 11:11, from the inside this time. The wreath is like a lacey eye-patch that covers the right eye of the gallery. On a windy summer afternoon, the green, soon-to-be-yellow, stems edge their way towards the left one like unruly eyelashes. What you love about this transient work, and kudos to Martin, is that the bunch of plants that come from various lake sides in Lithuania do what they were born to do, except on this occasion hanging upside down. That is, flowing in time and space, untethered by the concerns of 2020. They undulate and diffract the daylight, allowing the sun to play its games on the freshly painted walls of the gallery, embroidering the other works in light and shade. It soothes and pleases the eye, the ear, and even the nose: how about that!

Propelled by the plant curtain of 11:11, the warm gusts of wind get embraced by the sails of the silky fabrics of Juciūtė’s work Weekends. You would prefer to watch them flutter while sitting in that beautiful Bruno Mathsson Pernilla chair, but you cannot. It’s too delicate, too precious. Like a mouth without teeth but with two tongues, it gapes at you from its bed of regal scarlet folds. The chair is truly an impressive artefact in terms of its materiality. It features predominantly silk fabrics, which complement intelligently the Windysilk video. It is erotic, and mildly sinister. That bloody colour, the little gold straps, and especially the bigger leather ones at the back of the chair, suggest some sort of bondage and lack of movement. In tandem, they hold the chair in a sort of tenuous corset, firm, yet not too tight. On the other hand, the flappy red bands (those loose tongues) at the front of the chair, in addition to the timely placed porous little white nets covering the niches below the elbow-rests, breathe a sense of comfort, privilege and idleness. Juciūtė’s reworking of Mathsson’s icon emanates connoisseurship and aristocracy, and adds an unexpected Baroque motif to the show, which, rather than being exalted, feels a little naive and even humorous, especially when seen in conjunction with the video work.

Why not observe them both: 1) a headless-legless man being relentlessly sculpted by wind in the video, and 2) a piece furniture that mimics and at the same time invites the curvature of the human body on to its lap. The two pieces are very tactile, and create an interesting juxtaposition, which results in the fragmentation of the visible and the suggested human body. Split between two very different media, Juciūtė’s subject floats in limbo between a high-hanging television screen and a low-squatting armchair. The nameless man in the video, of whom we only get to see a third, has his back turned to us. He holds himself awkwardly, with his arms hung low and rigid, as if recently taken out of plaster, still unable to move properly. He is easily outclassed by the forceful and freely flowing movement of his silk shirt. The figure on the screen embodies the opposition between constriction and fluidity, which was earlier identified in the Pernilla chair. You would like to think of the anonymous YouTube character as a metaphor, or a representation of the chair, rather than the other way round. There is a backbone, an axis, here. Yet you are not entirely sure if it’s the one that Juciūtė’s work hangs from.

Moving your gaze, and yourself for that matter, up and down is common in Swallow’s inaugural exhibition. First of all, the gallery space is positioned between two floors; hanging, floating, it occupies a transitional domain. The stairs and the corridor that lead to the exhibition space from opposite sides provide multiple vantage points and pathways for the eyesight. The curators used little vistas that provide different viewpoints creatively, as in the case of Laura Kaminskaitė’s neon work Something Something. The words that bear the artist’s signature handwriting can be seen moving up and down your eyeline on the far wall, depending on where you find yourself in the gallery. It is the title phrase, if you just got up the first flight of stairs from the ground floor; but it is the ending sentence or a postscript if you are standing in the middle of the gallery, and it’s something something else if you are viewing it from the corridor that connects Swallow to the rest of the Sodas2123 complex.

Kaminskaitė’s work does not adhere to a fixed location, it constantly travels across the gallery wall as if on a sheet of paper; which feels somewhat appropriate considering the work’s open-ended character. The two-word phrase, the shortest of poems, is Laura’s go-to title for all her works before she comes up with something something more appropriate, or before she decides to leave them untitled. It is the John/Jane Doe of the first Swallow show, a humble but bright monument to a nameless artwork, which, ironically, is self-titled. ‘Scribbled’ just below the right window in which Ebner’s 11:11 looms, Laura’s yellow neon casts its shine on it, as well as other works in the vicinity, making them gleam, metaphorically speaking, in different hues. To bathe in its light is to consider what it means to give something or someone a name, a problem cleverly navigated by the artist herself, whose fellow work in the show is entitled Untitled (Classics). You probably wonder if the latter work was once called Something Something early in its existence, before it acquired the more fitting Untitled (Classics). Some things are better left unsaid.

Continue to swallow with your eyes and notice the high-low motion in the artworks. Ebner’s and Juciūtė’s pieces are good examples of that; however, Nicholas Matranga’s contributions Untitled (Tariffs) and Tops and Bottoms are even better. The drawings on the left wall seem to be positioned slightly higher than normal. This small increase in altitude expands the use of the gallery space, inviting you to look up, and creates subtle curatorial synergies with the works nearby, such as Something Something, which is now wiggling at your feet. The ups and downs are encoded in the titles of the drawings, yet you can only guess what the actual paintings, or structures, for which these studies were made could look like. It is in this vacuum, between the imagined high-hanging ceiling and the low-lying floor, that you find yourself, figuratively speaking, trying to grasp something that is only hinted at. The untitled and the unknown making their way into the exhibition in the most abstract of guises, contributing nicely to the mood of the show.

Alongside the quartet of drawings stands a five-tier vitrine containing unglazed earthenware. Each layer, except the first, of this transparent cake in itself contains a pile of connected ‘chain links’. Each pile in its own private room, invisible to its kin, unless they were able to turn their eyes 180 degrees upwards or downwards. Even though it seems static at a glance, the overall structure suggests movement. After taking a longer look at the ceramic intestines in the glass body, you begin to notice how their serpentine bodies start to coil and squirm. Their trick is to trick the eye, not only with their shape but also with their texture, which at first manifests as rough leather rather than brittle stone. Secondly, to observe the work properly, you need to circle around it like a satellite. In order to appreciate the ceramic bodies inside the glass, you need to move your own body parallel to it. Finally, notice the movement upwards and downwards across the tiers; it’s like taking one of those see-through elevators. Each floor is a representation of a different phase or stage of the chains’ objective existence. An evolution of sorts. The most intriguing and somewhat daunting thing about this implicit transformation is the fact that the ground floor of the glass structure is left vacant and uninhabited. Perhaps in the beginning there was nothing, maybe just a word. Or perhaps you are reading it the wrong way round.

If 11:11 and Windysilk are children of the wind, Honies by the artist duo Viltė Bražiūnaitė and Tomas Sinkevičius, are offspring of the sun.[1] ^[1] As you have observed more than once before, in ‘Palydos’, the cheerful, funny and naive walk hand in hand with the eerie, alarming and uncanny. Honies shows more than meets the eye, literally. The UV camera portrays the most zealous of the sun’s disciples, the clockwork sunflowers that religiously follow it with their heavy heads, soaking up a cocktail of nurturing and poisoning light. The UV radiation illuminates the flowers’ bony bodies, painting them a shade of green. Their majestic black crowns eclipse the yellow petals like hungry eyes. Frail and sickly, they serve their master and its purpose, allowing the bees to transform the guiding UV rays into delicious honey. Deathly yet so sweet. The three Honies act as a sobering reminder that there is a deeper primordial structure lurking beneath the blue skies and yellow flowerbeds. As if you somehow forgot that that was always the case.

Now. It feels like you and I need to talk about that one painting by Stanislovas Bohušas-Sestšencevičius. Children of Vilnius was painted in 1917, and today can be seen at the National Gallery of Art in Vilnius. It’s worth asking why and how the piece from more than a hundred years ago contextualises and informs Swallow’s inaugural show. The lingering uncertainty that permeated Vilnius and Europe during the First World War seems to be back on our doorstep. The decision to have specifically this painting to act as a front image of the exhibition, which is primarily made up of contemporary works that differ in media, as well as conceptual, visual, performative and technological qualities, seems to point at some universal, perhaps even timeless, ideas about human nature. For one, it makes the viewing of those sophisticated, intimate and aesthetically brilliant, but also humorous and occasionally clumsy, artworks, look surprisingly more dramatic, as if charged with hope or some unspoken promise. Gathered on the margins of 20th-century Vilnius, Bohušas’ children peer into the unknown, beyond the boundaries of the plane of the picture. They stand at the frontier of whatever comes next. We know what awaits them. But what about the new cohort of Vilnius’ children? Where do they lead us? Somewhere. Else.

[1] ^[2] Throw Matranga’s earthenware into the mix, and you will pretty much have what constitutes the natural world order, save for a drop of water.

You can find full photo reportage from the exhibition ‘Palydos’ at Swallow here. ^[3]