News
2022-05-25
Exhibition "Parallel Time" at Vytautas Kasiulis Museum of Art
On May 26 the exhibition "Parallel Time" will open at Vytautas Kasiulis Museum of Art. The idea was born in the autumn of 2018, when photographer Arūnas Baltėnas visited the USA and met New York–based artists Kęstutis Zapkus (b. 1938), Žilvinas Kempinas (b. 1969), Vytenis Jankūnus (b. 1961), and Julius Ludavičius (b. 1969). Later in Paris he also visited Paris-based artists Rūta Jusionytė (b. 1978) and the duo SetP Stanikas (Svajonė b. 1961 and Paulius b. 1962) and had a chat with them.
Visitors attentive to the contemporary art exhibitions will not find these artists a novelty. Yet this event brings into museum space not only artwork, but the people behind it, the individualities, life stories and careers of the famous artists living outside Lithuania. Among them, only Kęstutis Zapkus experienced an enforced exile. Most of these artists, though, are voluntary experts of migration who chose to live in foreign countries seeking a broader context, attracted by the power of the international art centres, traditions and influences, inspired by the prospects different from their home country. Their art is now produced ‘between’ the two, ancestral and their current, worlds. The artists live in ‘parallel time’, both here and there, as once was put by Žilvinas Kempinas. Or ‘neither here, nor there’, but in their studio, according to Rūta Jusionytė.
The exhibition includes contemporary work from the collections of the Lithuanian Expatriate Art Foundation, the Lewben Art Foundation, MO Museum, the Lithuanian National Museum of Art, the Arts Bridge Gallery. The agglomeration of different media – texts, interviews, documentary photography and visual works functions as a multi-layered narrative about Lithuanian artists in the world and sets the scene for revisiting of the concepts of émigré and exile, of diaspora and new traditions.
Organiser – LNDM Vytautas Kasiulis Museum of Art
Partners: Lewben Art Foundation, Lithuanian Expatriate Art Foundation, MO Museum, "Menų tiltas"
Curator – Birutė Pankūnaitė
