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| South of Riga Dita Birkenšteina, Art critic About the latest in Vilnius and Darius Žiūra’s exhibition SWIM | |
| The most awaited season of the year is here. the greyness of the city has been awoken a little by the greenness of the parks, flowers give off their perfume here and there, the sun provides warmth, and the weather is good for travelling. my choice is to head off for a walk – and to head out of riga, towards the south. even if it’s not far, and even if it’s only on paper. let’s take a walk around vilnius! The first stop on the map is in the north of vilnius, at valakampiai, a fair way from the city and the epicentre of cultural life, where the rupert centre for art and education has experienced a second round of exhibitions. rupert invites you to lia perjovschi’s Knowledge Museum Kit and dan perjovschi’s Time Specific, in which the perjovschi felt-tip marker hasn’t spared anyone as it comments, sneeringly and with a biting precision, not only on lithuania’s local current events but also the global Facebook cult and iPhonisation with all of its dumbing down of society as well as tense current world political events. at the same time, rupert can sometimes be encountered here and there in the centre of the city, where anyone is welcome to meet with someone from his/her circle of professional friends. for example, warsaw curator and writer sebastian cichocki visited the national art gallery theatre in early may in this way and shared his latest ideas and works about art critique as fiction (The Future of art Critique as Pure Fiction) with his presentation Nothing is New, Neither is anything Old. he used the mythologisation of 20th-century avant-garde as an example, and to illustrate this he showed agnieszka polska’s phantasmagorical film Future Days (2013, cichocki also took part in the production of the film). Right there, not far from the national art gallery, is the next stop – the gardens art space. the gardens’ team, having spent a residency at the art in General curator’s residence, has sent its fourth project – marija and petras olašauskai’s exhibition Miss Bird – to new york. but meanwhile, through the initiative of curator alex davidson and jenna bliss, one can watch loretta fahrenholz’s film Ditch Plains (2013) at the gardens’ home, the vilnius planetarium. Ditch Plains was filmed in brooklyn not long after the damage caused by hurricane sandy, which made the city look no less impressive than it does in hollywood catastrophe films, and the boundary between reality and fiction gets smudged, in step with the horror, which is portrayed by the characters in the film. the effect is similar to watching the news – while everything outside the window is quiet and peaceful, exploding bombs and shots appear as real as in any gangster film. let’s go further, to the contemporary art centre. It’s one year before the opening of the 56th venice biennale and still nothing in latvia has been heard about the competition announcement for the selection of its national exposition. but the project for the lithuanian pavilion project has already been selected; dainius liškevičius’ Museum, which was shown at the national art gallery a few years ago, will be heading to the biennale. the vilnius art academy’s nida art colony team – vytautas michelkevičius, rasa antanavičiūtė and daina pupkevičiūtė – has been entrusted with the setting up of the project in venice. every substantial project has a book to accompany it, and Museum, which had its unveiling at the contemporary art centre reading room in early may, also has one. the authors of the publication maintain that an equivalent of 400 kilograms of the Museum burden has been compressed into 1.4 kg of paper: a selection of soviet documents about lithuanian revolutionary art, collected by liškevičius, with which the artist deconstructs myths about art during that period. | |
 Darius Žiūra. From the series Forbidden Fruit. View from the SWIM exhibition Photo: Marta Ivanova and artnews.lt Publicity photo Courtesy of the artist and CaC Vilnius | |
| While those interested in the biennale crowded around in the reading room, one could walk undisturbed through three exhibitions on the second floor: arūnas gudaitis’ Pieces and Parts, vladas urbanavičius’ Standard reservoirs and darius Žiūra’s SWIM. i’d like to look at the last in more detail. let’s stop there. The exhibition has no connection with swimming whatsoever, though one would have thought this from a first glance at its title. instead, SWIM is a known internet acronym for ‘someone who isn’t me’, which is used to avoid revealing one’s participation in possibly incriminating activities. there’s no shortage of someone who isn’t me in forums, in which users exchange knowledge about the selling of illegal psychoactive substances, instructions for their use, the effects of their use and other useful information, because as long as no one is caught red-handed, nobody is guilty. SWIM is Žiūra’s third solo exhibition at the contemporary art centre. here, through the participation of curator virginija januškevičiūtė and anders kreuger, a couple of Žiūra’s projects from the last five to six years – Forbidden Fruit and Faces and Figures – have been joined up under one title. Psilocybe cubensis, pholiota squarrosa, panaeolus sphinctrinus and another unidentified representative of this same species are the forbidden fruit Žiūra offers. more precisely, they are mushrooms – parasites whose life cycle is documented and can be seen in video and photographs that could, due to their visual quality, qualify as portraits. those who aren’t convinced that these mushrooms are as beautiful in real life as they are on video are provided with real proof – there are four glass boxes right in the middle of the hall, in which one can follow the mushrooms’ development throughout the month of the exhibition. all of these mushrooms are more or less poisonous; however, only one is hallucinogenic, which is why it is illegal (it is a paradox that the law has turned against the mushroom about which almost everything is known – how it should be prepared, how much should be used, the length and characteristics of its effects, etc. – instead of its unidentified relative, the ingestion of which would poison a person much more quickly). the law doesn’t forbid taking photographs of and showing images of illegal mushrooms, but, to get your hands on them, you have to find the mushrooms first. this requires a bit of prior knowledge, especially if the specific species of mushroom cannot be found at specific latitudes. it’s not stated that forbidden ‘magic mushrooms’ are really being grown at the exhibition; but, for safety’s sake, it’s better to indicate that someone who isn’t me is taking part here. in any case, someone has found some mushrooms, someone has grown them in testtubes, and someone has photographed them. In exactly the same way, someone has also photographed the second part of the exhibition – bodies and faces that blankly gaze at the viewer from lit-up boxes. the poisonous mushrooms aren’t the only forbidden fruits in which Žiūra is interested. for many years now, the artist has been working on a project portraying vilnius’ prostitutes. The text in the exhibition publication tells how it all began. through a short commentary by kreuger and a letter by Žiūra in which, having been inspired by a discussion with art critic raminta jurėnaitė, he outlines how he became an artist. Žiūra talks about how his interest in art came about, his studies, about the ideas with which he’s worked, and in the final pages he also admits to a creative crisis ten years ago, which in the end turned out to be essential for his path to SWIM. the artist writes that at the very beginning of spring in 2008 he had tried to find advice at a psychologist’s office but understood soon enough that it was all just a kind of theatre, and he abandoned any further sessions. he wandered the city, thinking, until he came to a realisation at the train station, where streetwalkers are not difficult to find. so it happened that one agreed to pose for the artist for a fee. in this way, Žiūra got to know nataša, or the swimmer, whose sporting career, family and creative talents were now already in the distant past. the only thing that she still considered of value was heroin. the encounter with nataša was the start of a longterm project.1 Up till now, Žiūra has photographed about forty women, but after long reflection and doubt, he decided to put only a small proportion of them in the exhibition – just a few anonymous photo-portraits and a few pictures of semi-nude bodies. only photographs portraying those who are no longer among the living ended up in the exhibition. those who actively followed the latest news on the contemporary art centre’s home page had the opportunity to view a video of the more complete project in the cinema hall. this was only shown publicly a few times without much advertisement. supposedly, the majority of women who agreed to collaborate can still be found right there near the station, and such a decision is, therefore, only human, for if one of them tried to change her way of life, she could still sign with SWIM about all she’d previously experienced. a string of faces quietly opened up from the big screen in the approximately 30-minute-long Faces. the portraits weren’t as attractive as those of the mushrooms. it was difficult to read the emotions – all of them had glassy eyes. it was very exhausting if you looked into them for any length of time. it seemed as if maybe the filming had been long or uncomfortable; but later, in Žiūra’s text, i read that not only nataša but nearly all of his models were drug addicts. SWIM isn’t easy material for either the viewer or the author. all of the women volunteered to take part in the project. however, knowing about their addiction, it’s difficult to make judgements on the validity of their decision. the narcotics with which they’ve tried to compensate the giving up of their bodies swiftly and inevitably destroy them, taking their minds as well. what’s portrayed in the photographs contains enough ethical considerations and dilemmas that the exhibition may not even have taken place. to do this in a small city is quite a provocative gesture as well. the exhibition required some daring from both the artist as well as the curators. it’s one thing to take a photo and keep the picture, but it’s something completely different to share it publicly. it’s the same thing with those mushrooms that have to be grown by someone. how do you draw parallels between both series of photographs? do poison mushrooms illustrate intoxicated women, or do the women illustrate the mushrooms? and as for SWIM, what is it? the author of the idea, a body separated from consciousness in a photograph, a viewer or all of these together? the abbreviation is so artful that it could just as well turn out that everything is the reverse, and it’s someone who is me, with nobody hiding, a candid confession, all equal. in the same way that the girls at the train station confessed and revealed much more to Žiūra than what was shown in the exhibition, and then i thought maybe that’s the reason why that forbidden mushroom is growing in the exhibition hall. Translator into English: Uldis Brūns 1 Žiūra d. nuo ko viskas prasidėjo/leidinys skirtas darius Žiūros parodai “swim”. vilnius: Šiuolaikinio meno centras, 2014, p. 65. | |
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