(In)dependent Contemporary Art Histories 
Artist-run initiatives in Lithuania

This is the third attempt (1st volume of the book was published in 2011, the 2nd in 2014) to compile stories about the genesis and evolution of contemporary art in Lithuania from the period of cold 1980s, Revival (1987) and the restoration of Lithuania’s Independence (1990) to this day. History unfolds in the critical texts by art critics and artists themselves, as well as in first-hand accounts – conversations with the initiators of art events. Texts are accompanied by abundant visual evidence – the documentation of forty-two years’ worth of events and works of art. The book offers a captivating kaleidoscope of subjective stories about artists’ and curators’ initiatives in Vilnius and other cities in Lithuania as well as abroad.

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Tai trečias bandymas (I tomas išleistas 2011 m., II tomas – 2014 m.) sudaryti istorijų rinkinį apie šiuolaikinio meno genezę ir raidą Lietuvoje nuo šaltųjų 1980-ųjų, Sąjūdžio ir Nepriklausomybės atkūrimo iki šių dienų. Istorija skleidžiasi kritiniuose menotyrinink(i)ų bei meninink(i)ų tekstuose ir liudijimuose iš pirmų lūpų – įvykius ir meno renginius inicijavusių meninink(i)ų, kritik(i)ų ir kuratorių pasakojimuose. Tekstus gausiai papildo vaizdiniai liudijimai – keturiasdešimt dvejų metų renginių ir kūrinių dokumentacija. Knyga patraukia subjektyviomis istorijomis apie menines ir kuratorines iniciatyvas ir savivaldas įvairiuose Lietuvos miestuose ir užsienyje.

Conversations with artists, curators and art critics /
Pokalbiai su menininkais, kuratoriais ir menotyrininkais 

Česlovas Lukenskas, Rūta Drabavičiūtė-Lukenskienė, Ramūnas Paniulaitis, Arūnas Kulikauskas, Aleksas Andriuškevičius, Darius Čiuta, Redas Diržys, Sigitas Krutulys, Benas Šarka, Juozas Milašius, Audrius Šimkūnas, Armantas Gečiauskas-Arma Agharta, Vita Zaman, Mantas Kazakevičius, Tomas Danilevičius, Reda Aurylaitė, Rolandas Marčius, Skaistė Marčienė, Ignas Gleixner, Saulius Paukštys, Rytis Bartkus, Stasys Banifacius Ieva, Inesa Brašiškė, Gerda Paliušytė, Lina Rukevičiūtė, Laurynas Skeisgiela, Milda Dainovskytė, Justina Zubaitė, Tomas Lučiūnas, Simonas Nekrošius, Živilė Lukšytė, Marius Juknevičius, Vilma Fiokla Kiurė, Aistė Kisarauskaitė, Aistė Ulubey, Kristina Savickienė, Robertas Narkus, Evelina Šimkutė, Juozas Laivys, Lina Praudzinskaitė, Jurgita Žvinklytė, Tomas Karklinis, Laura Garbštienė, Elena Juzulėnaitė, Stanislovas Tomas, Gintaras Čaikauskas, Sabina Daugėlienė, Margarita Kaučikaitė, Matas Šiupšinskas, Šarūnas Petrauskas, Svetlana Šuvajeva, Ilja Budraitskis, Vytautas Michelkevičius, Kęstutis Šapoka, Karolina Rybačiauskaitė

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ARCHITECTURAL WORKS BY OFFICE FOR THE 21ST CENTURY: THE INCOMPLETE RATIONALISM OF OFFICE KERSTEN GEERS DAVID VAN SEVEREN.

Die Publikation stellt die Projekte von OFFICE durch eine kritische Analyse auf der Grundlage von Archivdokumenten vor und rekonstruiert den Einfluß der kreativen Prinzipien von OFFICE auf die neuen Architektengeneration. Die OFFICE-Projekte wurde in den frühen 2000er Jahren erstmals wahrgenommenund erlangten als neue Formen der digitalen Collage mit kulturellem Engagement große Bekanntheit. Der Autor zeichnet die Entwicklung ihrer frühen Ideen, die als Papierarchitektur entwickelt wurden, bis hin zu den heutigen Gebäuden von erheblicher Größe und Präsenz nach. Das dem Buch zugrunde liegende Argument zeigt die Fähigkeit von OFFICE, in jedem Projekt den Funken einer theoretischen Konstruktion zu bewahren, die in den meisten Fällen nach einer rigorosen Ökonomie der Mittel ausgeführt wird. Selbst die neuen Denkmäler für öffentliche Einrichtungen werden weiterhin von einer kreativen Spannung radikaler Überlegenheit erhellt. ***** This book presents OFFICE projects through a critical analysis based on archive documents. It also reconstructs the influence of OFFICE’s creative principles among the new generations of architects. The OFFICE projects appeared in the early 2000s and gained prominence as new forms of digital collage with a cultural engagement. The author traces the evolution of their early ideas developed as paper architecture to the current buildings of a significant scale and presence. The underlying argument of the book demonstrates OFFICE’s ability to preserve in every project the spark of a theoretical construction, which in most cases is carried out according to a rigorous economy of means. Even the new monuments for public institutions continue to be illuminated by a creative tension of radical superiority.

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HaFI 018 reprints a document containing the script of Skip Norman’s film On Africa (1970). Norman, born in Baltimore in 1933, had left the U.S. in the early 1960s to study German, theater, and medicine in Göttingen. In 1966 he moved to Berlin to join the newly founded German Film and Television Academy (DFFB). By 1969, he had made the films Riffi (1966), Blues People (1968), Cultural Nationalism (1969) and the graduation film Strange Fruit (1969). He shot On Africa together with Joey Gibbs after graduating from the school. The filmmaker about his film: “The starting point is the relationship between Europe’s prosperity and Africa’s poverty; Europe’s destruction of societies and cultures, and the simultaneous use of Christianity and racial theories as justification for a massive exploitation of the colonized.” On Africa was first shown at the Festival in Mannheim in 1970 and then broadcast on television by WDR in 1972.
The script is accompanied by images from the film, and followed by five short commentaries by Sónia Vaz Borges, Madeleine Bernstorff, Marie-Hélène Gutberlet, Tom Holert, and Volker Pantenburg.

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Das Heft enthält das Skript für Skip Normans Film On Africa (1970). Norman, 1933 in Baltimore geboren, hatte die USA zu Beginn der 1960er Jahre verlassen, um in Göttingen Deutsch, Theaterwissenschaft und Medizin zu studieren. 1966 zog er nach Berlin, um an die neugegründete Deutsche Film- und Fernsehakademie Berlin (DFFB) zu wechseln. Bis 1969 entstanden die Filme Riffi (1966), Blues People (1968), Cultural Nationalism (1969) und der Abschlussfilm Strange Fruit (1969).
On Africa entstand gemeinsam mit Joey Gibbs nach Normans DFFB-Abschluss. In Normans Worten: „Der Ausgangspunkt dieses Films ist das Verhältnis zwischen Europas Wohlstand und Afrikas Armut; Europas Zerstörung von Gesellschaften und Kulturen, und gleichzeitiger Einsatz von Christentum und Rassentheorien als Rechtfertigung einer gewaltigen Ausbeutung der Kolonialisierten.“ On Africa wurde am 7. Oktober 1970 bei der XIX. Internationalen Filmwoche Mannheim in der „Informationsschau“ aufgeführt; 1972 lief der Film im WDR.
Das Skript wird begleitet von zahlreichen Bildern aus dem Film und kontextualisiert durch fünf Kurzessays von Sónia Vaz Borges, Madeleine Bernstorff, Marie-Hélène Gutberlet, Tom Holert und Volker Pantenburg.

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Please join us for the opening of Manuel Sékou’s I Lost My Gems exhibition.

22 September 2023
from 7.00pm

Motto Berlin
Skalitzer Str. 68
10997 Berlin
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After the heist of historical jewellery and art objects out of the Green Vault in Dresden, the case has been reported worldwide. The reports and narrations around spectacular incident quickly drifted into peculiar vocabulary, provoking projections and prejudices against the city of Dresden and its citizens. The discrepancy between personal experience and conveyed attributions about Dresden do manifest the initial point of the project I LOST MY GEMS. Manuel Sékou– raised in Dresden and the artist behind the venture – directs his perspective back to his hometown and youth within the years of the 2000-10s, to confront dynamics of the inner-German history in relation to his own socialization and thus to carve out dispositions of socio-political patterns of behavior induced by collective uncertainty: interference of adolescence with shadows a collapsed system…Sampling in parallel to the investigations of the Soko Epaulette(special commision) the project seeks for treasures of memory and collects potential pieces of evidence of hidden symptoms of the past in the present.To decode the X-Factor of Dresden beyond the mediated image through the mode of visual language.

https://ilostmygems.net
https://instagram.com/i_lost_my_gems
https://ilostmygems.bandcamp.com

Browse I Lost My Gems here

À la mort de son père, Juif d’Oran naturalisé français puis israélien, Ariella Azoulay découvre dans un document que sa grand-mère portait le prénom Aïcha. En deux récits mêlant autobiographie et théorie politique, l’autrice serpente entre les catalogues de bijoux, les photos trouvées et les collections d’objets pillés, pour déployer par fragments l’histoire de sa famille et mettre en parallèle les colonialismes français en Algérie et sioniste en Palestine. Entre ces projets impériaux, elle saisit bien des continuités, à commencer par la volonté obstinée de détruire l’enchevêtrement séculaire des mondes juifs, arabes et berbères, un entrelacs qu’elle revendique pour mieux le restaurer.

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Ariella Aïsha Azoulay est écrivaine, chercheuse, cinéaste expérimentale et commissaire d’archives anticoloniales. Née en 1962 dans la colonie sioniste de Palestine, elle est professeure à l’université Brown où elle enseigne la théorie politique, la résistance aux formations impériales et les imaginaires anticoloniaux réclamant le retour, la restitution et le tikkoun olam, la réparation du monde. Autrice d’une dizaine de livres parus dans de nombreux pays, elle a publié entre autres Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism (Verso, 2019) et From Palestine to Israel: A Photographic Record of Destruction and State Formation (Pluto Press, 2011). Inédit, La Résistance des bijoux est son premier livre traduit en français.

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“Healing The Museum” is a mid-career monograph looking at Grace Ndiritu’s diverse practice over the last twenty years, which encompasses performance, film, shamanism, social actions, painting, publications, textile work, and collection research. The large selection of artworks included in the publication are in a dialogue with each other, further enriched by in-depth conversations with Brook Andrew, Gareth Bell-Jones, and Philippe Van Cauteren, and written contributions from Ifeanyi Awachie, Ann Hoste, and Hammad Nasar. The monograph’s publication coincides with the eponymous exhibition at S.M.A.K.–Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst in Ghent.

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The question that motivates this issue is simple: how come so many of us outside the settler colony called the United States of America, are so deeply influenced by and interpret our own contexts through the political ‘software’ created by U.S.-based academics and activists? The goal here is less to disqualify this U.S. political framework, than to demonstrate that the successful ways through which it analyzes its own context may not be as useful when analyzing other situations. Throughout the issue, we aim to reflect on U.S. exceptionalism, including in its own anti-imperialist critique (Zoé Samudzi), on what Blackness misses when it is mostly centered on African American espitemologies (Cases Rebelles), on transfused U.S.-forged concepts of “brownness” or “BIPOC” (Sinthujan Varatharajah), on illusory attempts to translate struggles into (U.S.) English (Bekriah Mawasi), on the complete blind spot casteism constitutes in this U.S. ‘software’ (Shaista Aziz Patel & Vijeta Kumar), on the need for a pluriversal approach of queerness (Rahul Rao)… Even within the U.S., the political framework that categorizes all people (from Indigenous people to white settlers) coming from the south of its border as “Latinx” needs to be problematized as settler colonial creations (Floridalma Boj Lopez). With this issue, we aim at doing just that: not letting go of the precious epistemologies U.S.-based thinkers have brought us, but simply decentering them to favor the pluriversality of our influences.

The cover was created for us by Michael DeForge and the News from the Fronts section brings us reflections on Taiwan (Szu-Han Ho & Meng-Yao Chuang), Cameroon (Ethel-Ruth Tawe), the Ainu (Kanako Uzawa) and Fusako Shigenobu’s political legacy, a few weeks before her release from prison in Japan (May Shigenobu).

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