The reappraisal of feminism and feminist art has been a hot topic of 2007 in international academic, art, and publishing circles. The CAC is pleased to be lobbing into the discussion with its new season of exhibitions of art made by women:
Chicks On Speed: Shoe Fuck! 7 September - 28 October
Among Us: six Lithuanian women artists in their thirties 14 September - 28 October
The Joy Is Not Mentioned: Egle Budvytyte, Goda Budvytyte, and Ieva Miseviciute 14 September - 28 October
Four Decades of Videoart 12 – 21 October 2007
Each of the exhibitions looks towards a different decade--the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s--for its conceptual impetus and considers its affects from a new millennial perspective. In their largest-scale gallery exhibition to date the all-girl band, performance ensemble and artist collective the Chicks On Speed reprise a number of strategies associated with art and music hailing from the 1970s and Punk. Punk was a movement and moment when women started rocking for themselves, incorporating explicit post-feminist political and performance strategies into their stage-personas, costuming, and stage-productions; high among them being raw sexuality, nudity, inflammatory language and sloganeering. It’s all on show in Shoe Fuck! including one of the symbols of late-capitalist women's empowerment--a classic Chanel pump--being put to the test in the exhibition's eponymous work. Part full-throttle commodity fetishism and part transgressive act the work, and the exhibition as a whole, questions whether space for political activism/resistance exists for women in the age of consumerism.
Music is also to the fore in The Joy Is Not Mentioned the latest installment of the CAC’s ongoing 'young Lithuanian artists' series. The three artists ask "what if the 1980s never happened?" And their answer is; "no Hip-Hop and no street-culture" (that entered mass culture during the decade). Or at least a national pop-culture having difficulty coming to grips with one of the world's dominant cultural and musical forms. This is the predicament of Lithuania--and of all the former soviet-states. To remedy the situation the artists will be re-staging the Hip-Hop and Street Dance 1980s in Vilnius for the duration of the exhibition. Two radio stations will be broadcasting special programs, and the artists, with the participation of members from the local street-culture community as well as trained dancers, will be turning up with boom-boxes, mics, and rolls of vinyl at street-corners and hang-out spots around the city. It’ll be the Bronx in the Baltic.
Among Us presents newly commissioned work by: Jurgita Remeikyte, Alma Skersyte, Irma Stanaityte, Laura Stasiulyte, Vilma Sileikiene and Kristina Inciuraite. The exhibition compares and contrasts coincidences and divergences in the artists' practice, set against prescient developments in Lithuanian art and society since the 1990s. It was at the end of the decade marked by independence from the USSR (1991) that a higher number of women started entering the field of contemporary art; as part of a broader entrance of women into public life--including the fields of business and politics. The exhibition's title, Among Us, was inspired by a series of discussions between the participating artists that identified the exhibition's salient and shared concerns; collective historical memory and the recent transformations of Lithuanian identity. The artists analyze visual codes that have come from the past and question whether they are still recognizable, if they are still b eing exploited or if they've already been forgotten? They study the influence of increasingly dynamic lifestyle on identity, and the collective unconscious in work that reflects upon their personal experience and environment.
Chicks on Speed will perform at the opening of their exhibition at 8.00pm on Friday 7 September In association with The Joy Is Not Mentioned, dance floors will be formed on the streets of central Vilnius between 8.00pm-1.00am on Thursday 6 and Friday 7, September
Goethe’s institute together with the Contemporary Art Centre Vilnius presents the exhibition Four decades of video art which is dedicated to preserving and nourishing video heritage. The exhibition introduces German video art from 1963 to the present.
Hardware for storing electronic data is not durable. Museums and collectors across the globe face the dilemma of ‘white noise’ being noticed whilst screening videos. There is the possible horror of the total loss of digital data and consequental loss of work. Many artists work with video tape, which they use for recordings, installations or projections, and also therefore increases the number of people who would like to solve this problem. Though the classic meanings of video art today don’t have such a big impact as they did when the media was first used, we may, however, question what influenced the success of this specific media? The project "40jahrevideokunst.de-Digitales Erbe" ("Four decades of video art - digital heritage") was initiated by Cultural foundation of Federation of Germany. It seeks to preserve the heritage of video art – one of the most important art forms of 20th century. For the first time in Germany five museums initiated project which latter was transformed into the art exhibition. The project was led by Karlsruhe Art and Media Technology Center and North Rhine-Westphalia Art Museum K21 in Düsseldorf. Other partners are: Art House of city Bremen, München Lenbachhaus gallery and Museum of Figurative art in Leipzig. For this reason, the Museum of city Düsseldorf, North Rhine-Westphalia K21 Art Museum held symposium in which authors of unknown video works were successfully ascertained, copies of works were compared, evaluated and preserved in high quality digital media. This allowed the beginning of restoration of selected video tapes.
