(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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Part performance transcript, part conceptual writing exercise, this project works from an extract from Sam Riviere’s poem Miserable I hope you do too. The original text was rewritten and recombined into multiple possibilities of form and content. The variations of this text were then recited – from memory – in a semi-improvisational way over a four hour performance that took place at Black Box Theatre in Oslo. Focusing on the meditative pace and rhythmic intonation of the original poem, various alternative possibilities for the poetic narrative were imagined and explored, creating a generative palimpsest of poetic experience that was shared with the audience. Here, the text from the performance is transcribed, allowing the poem to further mutate and shift from the realm of the voice back onto the space of the page.

With an introduction by the original poet, Sam Riviere.

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Diese Publikation vereint Quellen, Referenzen, Bildmaterial und den Rohtext des Theaterstückes hexen flexen, das im August 2021 am Theater Basel uraufgeführt wurde.

Sie stellt eine Vernetzung unserer gemeinsamen Recherche über Hexen dar und bildet eine Kontextualisierung der künstlerischen Arbeit, indem sie zwischen akademischer Herangehensweise, künstlerischer Forschung und intuitiver Vernetzung changiert. Wir bezeichnen die Verben hexen und flexen als eine Praxis, die mit Überschreibungen spielt und in der es explizit um Rückeroberung von Raum, Begriffen und Körpern geht.

Die Publikation hat kein Ende – sie stellt einen Ausschnitt aus der andauernden Recherche von Louisa Raspé und Jana Furrer dar, welche mit Johanna Schäfer und Mona Mayer geteilt und weitergewebt wurde. So ist eine Art Gewebe entstanden in weitreichender Kompliz:innenschaft; mit all jenen, die vertreten und auch nicht vertreten sind.

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Photo courtesy of Agnė Juodvalkytė

Please join us for the book launch of ANSKA with author Agnė Juodvalkytė and a performance by Tania Elstermeyer.

Friday 17 February 2023
from 6 pm

Motto (im Hinterhaus)
Skalitzer Str. 68 
Berlin, 10997

Agnė Juodvalkytė (b. 1987, Vilnius, Lithuania) is a visual artist currently living in Berlin and Vilnius. Her practice is focused on abstract painting and textiles mostly. She received BA in Painting at the Vilnius Academy of Arts (2010) and studied Visual Arts in Spain at the Universidad de Castilla La Mancha (UCLM, Cuenca) (2009). Her recent shows include solo exhibition Tools for the Future (ANSKA) at Galerie Bernau, Bernau bei Berlin (2022); Sweet Dreams Foundation at Nida Art Colony, Nida (2022); ‘Gathering’ at Atletika, Vilnius (2021); ANSKA at Blake & Vargas, Berlin (2021); group show Audra at Pamario gallery, Juodkrantė (2021); Terpė at (AV17) gallery, Vilnius (2020).

Tania Elstermeyers textual compositions bring registers of lyrical writing to mind, which are performed in alliance to a distinctive kind of music beyond established genres. During her performances, sceneries resemblant of theater backdrops are created, ultimately by operating with a vocabulary that is minimalism. Her work slivers traditional outlines of narrator and spectatorship by luring oneself into spaces of intimacy that attract interest and cause discomfort. (Text by Oliver Wellmann)

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Agnė Juodvalkytė
Tania Elstermeyer

Photo courtesy of Philippe Gerlach

ANSKA

Authors: Agnė Juodvalkytė
Publisher:
Year: 2023
Pages: 224
Dimensions: 17 x 24 cm
Language: English
ISBN: 978-3-00-074288-0

Edited by Philippe Gerlach and Agnė Juodvalkytė
Design by Marijn Degenaar
Texts by Brad Feuerhelm, Juri Marian Gross, Marija Repšytė, and Nele Ruckelshausen

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Through photographs of the studio process and visual sketches the first publication ANSKA by artist Agnė Juodvalkytė offers an overview of the artist’s studio practice from the past years while creating a sensory world of recollection. The book marks the conclusion of the ANSKA cycle in her work.

“In Agnė Juodvalkytė’s work, the weave that is bound by cloth, ash, dirt, and dye, invokes memory, utility, and hand-infused labor. The stains, folds, and strained fraying edges of her chosen material are also infused, caked, and distressed to provide new readings of production. There is something familiar in her use of textiles. Each fold of fabric is detailed by a weave birthed from the center spiraling out in an obstinate mosaic of emotion wrought from the plunder of self.”
— Brad Feuerhelm

“I’m Not Sad, The World Is Sad” is an autotheoretical, semi-fictional account of a performance artist who lands a part-time job as an Embedded Artistic Researcher in an art institution. Invested in queer theory and institutional critique, she sets out to perform the artist “differently” through a process of negation and passivity, inadvertently causing her relationship with the institution’s curator to grow increasingly speculative and paranoid. Louwerens’ labor as tour guide, security guard, artist, hostess and researcher at different institutions begins to overlap and blend under the name of “performance.” “I’m Not Sad, The World Is Sad” is a fragmented story of paranoid and reparative reading, script and utterance, exposure and vulnerability.

Pia Louwerens is a performance artist and researcher from the Netherlands, living in Brussels. Her research revolves around the becoming of the artistic subject, the I who writes, speaks and makes, in relation to the (institutional) context. From 2019 – 2020 Louwerens was working as embedded artistic researcher at a big research project, for which she was embedded in an art institution. Through this research she attempted to perform or practice the artist, and thereby the institution, differently. Her work usually takes the shape of a performance in which she speaks, switching between registers of the actual, the possible, the professional and the anxious artist.

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Kapriole is the debut album by Zurich- and Hamburg-based artist Leo Hofmann– after working in music theatre, sound art, and performance contexts. Central to the album, which refers in its title to a joyous jump, is the ambition to translate an ephemeral practice into recorded matter. Fixed but never static, Kapriole is informed by intimate and detailed listening situations and sound practices like ASMR or the acoustically sheltered world of noise cancelling headphones. And while it is apparent that Hofmann has a deeply rooted understanding of technology and its abundant possibilities, Kapriole is a tender and almost analogue feeling affair. The human voice occupies a central role in the musical configuration of the album: quirky repetitions, hushed fragments and poetic statements, circling topics like communication, mobility, and immersion occupy the album’s eight tracks. The result is a sonorous sensation, which, in its scarcity, paves the way for meticulously crafted and delicate soundscapes.

Written, recorded, and produced by Leo Hofmann.

Mastering: Stefan Betke (Scape Mastering Berlin)
Graphic Design: Karan Kobel

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Rehabilitation of Ancestors is an artist’s book based on the media research of Vienna-based artist Yoshinori Niwa. In recent years, Niwa has tried to diversify his approach by using different media forms, from direct interventions in the space, such as performances and happenings, to public campaigns using traditional media. For example, in the work “Dragging Adolf Hitler out of Private Space” (2018), he dared to place an advertisement in a daily newspaper, which is now considered as an old media, and planned to contact the elderly generation in order to get to know their ancestors who lived during the Nazi regime, which casts a dark shadow over Austria. Web works such as “Having a Birthday Party for Someone” (2019), a week-long random viewing of more than 600 videos of private birthday parties uploaded to YouTube but left unseen by most people, are an example of how people socialise in the age of social media. (2019), which was inspired by the way people socialize in the age of social media. In this age of high performance visual media, which are now easily accessible to everyone, the artist is determined to grasp a new image of humanity and to move society forward in the face of these changing roles.

Planning: Yoshinori Niwa
Editing: Mika Maruyama
Text by: Beatrice Forchini, Curatorial Assistant, Thyssen-Bornemisza Foundation for Contemporary Art (TBA21), Jeremy Epstein, Gallerist, Eder Asanti, Takahiro Okuwaki, Curator, Aomori Museum of Art, Sebastian Cichocki, Chief Curator, Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw Chief Curator, Museum of Modern Art), Ana Maria Montenegro Jaramio) (Artist, Curator of the 45th Salon Nacional de Artistas)

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désirer, ne pas voir

Joachim Perez

Performance with Morphena

19.08.2021

6-8pm

@ Motto Berlin