{"id":400045,"date":"2001-11-11T23:00:00","date_gmt":"2001-11-11T23:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/exindex.hu\/?p=400045"},"modified":"2001-11-11T23:00:00","modified_gmt":"2001-11-11T23:00:00","slug":"imagined-community","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/exindex.hu\/en\/kritika\/imagined-community\/","title":{"rendered":"Imagined Community"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Concerned about the series of mega-exhibitions organized from the early 90s that tried to redefine the contemporary art of Europe\r\naccording to its shifting borders and horizons, the curators of The Baltic Times,<\/i> Branka Stipanèic & Tihomir Milovac,\r\n\u201edefinitely did not want to mount a show based on European cultural geography\u201d, but decided to create a \u201emeeting point\u201d, or a \u201eplatform of\r\nsorts\u201d connecting \u201esimilar professional and private experiences\u201d.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

The exhibition initially shown in the Museum of Contemporary Art – Zagreb in May 2001 travelled to the Škuc Gallery in\r\nLjubljana in September 2001. It presents a selection of artists and groups now active in Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, most of whose\r\ncarriers have developed during the 90s. Based on thorough research and a relatively objective approach, the exhibition tries to capture the\r\ndiverse artistic production of the last 10 years of the Balticum, but manages only to highlight some significant phenomena and production.\r\nOne can meet names and works that have already been part of prominent thematic shows and have been acknowledged by the international\r\nart world, and if I can paraphrase Anders Kreuger’s words taken from the quite puzzling email interview with Liutauras Psibilskis in the\r\ncatalogue, the art we see is more about the \u201ewhat\u201d and the \u201ewhere\u201d , than about the \u201ehow\u201d and the \u201ewhy\u201d. In fact, going through the show,\r\nthe lack of a linking narative, theme, or concept is further confirmed, so that the only possible point of departure that we are left with is to\r\nrely on our own different perceptions and comprehensions.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

>From the works reflecting the radically changed positions and strategies of artists and the notion of art in these states, the most\r\nsuccessful are the ones communicating the basic parts of the process with a quasi-documentative character, attempting to keep a fragile\r\nbalance between the subjective and the objective approaches. The bitter, and occasionally close to the absurd, video, The Girl is\r\nInnocent<\/i> (1999) by <\/i>Art\u00fcras Raila, is an unedited and fragmented account of an evaluation\/discussion that took place in the\r\nfine art academy in Vilnius. The discussions and arguments clearly show the diverse character of the crisis that has emerged in art\r\neducation after the liberation. The piece that was shown last year at Manifesta 3 presents a puzzling mixture of personal, political and\r\naesthetical issues and judgments reflecting the frustration and confusion of a generation who lived through the Soviet regime, finally\r\nfinding itself with nothing left to hold on to anymore.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

In For Aesthetic Reason <\/i>(1999), a video made by Marko Raat, the protagonist, a young architect-historian, Anders Kurg,\r\nexpresses his wish to settle down in Denmark purely for aesthetic reasons. He loves Danish post-war Modernism and would like to live in\r\na house designed by one of its most prominent architects, Arne Jacobsen, surrounded by the designs of Bang&Oluffsen. While we are\r\nguided through some of the significant Modernist buildings by Kurg, we parallelly follow his attempts to get in touch with city officials\r\nand the proper authorities to find a solution. The only practical advice given, and the only remaining possibility, is what the Lutheran\r\npastor suggests with an apologetic smile hiding his uneasiness, to marry a Danish girl, since families are not taken apart. The film which\r\n\u201ebursts upon the stale and stuffy Estonian documentary film scene\u201d(Andres Maimik) is influenced by the filmmaking experience of Dogma\r\n95.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

Deimantas <\/b>Narkevièius, whose recent films are said to capture the \u201efundamental themes of contemporary social\r\ndiscourse in Lithuania\u201d (Jonas Valatkevicius), with his 16 mm film, 54\u00b0 54′ – 25\u00b0 19\u201d <\/i>(1997), is more to give a silent and a rather\r\nmelancholic account of the rural and urban landscapes 20km from Vilnius. Largely deprived of people and action, we travel through a land\r\nwhich, albeit marked as a distinct geographical unit, still retains a certain time-and-space-lessness.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

Technically and contentwise, these observing chronicles range from the seemingly unmanipulated to the indiscreet and the\r\nprovocative, making manifest a range of contradictions and existential struggles of this geopolitical-cultural context.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

Introduced as one of the most crucial issues in the Baltic republics in the 90s is the conversion of the influences of the socio-\r\npolitical enviroments and the outcome of the changes (in the way identity is reflected, in the relation between artist and institution, in\r\nfemale representation – just to mention the most significant phenomena) into an approporiate visualization. A rising number of\r\nprojects were more to be based on collaboration and communication, like the works of ATG (Academic Training Group) formed in 1992 in\r\nLithuania, or the joint project the Riga Dating Agency <\/i>(1999) of Monika Pormale <\/b>and <\/b>Girts Gabrâns. <\/p>\r\n\r\n

Ly Lestberg deals with the issues of sexual identity in her photograhic works: both in the series of Insomnia <\/i>(1999) with its\r\nlife-sized studio photos, and What do you read My Lord? <\/i>(1999\/2000) with its fairytale-like coloured images depicting the\r\nconflicting relationship between biological identity and spiritual interpretation.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

Eglë Rakauskaitë’s <\/b>Chocolate Crucifixies<\/i> (1994-2000) and an early series of photographs, Hairy<\/i > (1994), her personal and intimate <\/b>references to body experiences, are more of a mix of religious, cultural, aesthetic and\r\nsensual apearances hidden behind the temporality of organic materials.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

There are more autobiographical works to act out existential anxieties on a more distanced level ranging from parody to poetics, like\r\nKai Kajlo’s first, and still most well-known, video Loser<\/i> (1997), or the magic piece, Father and Son<\/i> (1998), of Jan Toomik.\r\nA certain similarity can be traced in the bare visual appearance and pictorial language between his more recent work He Said<\/i>\r\n(2000), showing a man under some influence speaking to us in a distorted voice, and Ene-Liis Semper’s Fundamental<\/i> (1997),\r\nwhere the artist with bleary eyes and smudgy make-up recites lines from the Bible in a drunken, semi-conscious state.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

Even if the objective was to make the various levels of consciousness interact, The Baltic Times<\/i>, although intelligently\r\nexecuted, failed in creating a platform and remained a safe overview set in a geographic framework. It is flexible and (inter)changeable in\r\nmeaning, easily adaptable to the different spaces it travels to, reinforcing the stereotypical view of the Balticum as an \u201eimagined\r\ncommunity\u201d.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

The Baltic Times<\/i> will be on view at the Galerie im Taxispalais in Innsbruck in April, 2002.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  Concerned about the series of mega-exhibitions organized from the early 90s that tried to redefine the contemporary art of Europe according to its shifting borders and horizons, the curators of The Baltic Times, Branka Stipanèic & Tihomir Milovac, \u201edefinitely did not want to mount a show based on European cultural geography\u201d, but decided to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":630045,"parent":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-400045","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-kritika"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/exindex.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/400045","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/exindex.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/exindex.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/exindex.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/exindex.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=400045"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/exindex.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/400045\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/exindex.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/630045"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/exindex.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=400045"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/exindex.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=400045"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/exindex.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=400045"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}