56h Venice Biennale 2015

Lithuanian Pavilion

Dainius Liškevičius

Museum

Curator: Vytautas Michelkevičius

Palazzo Zenobio, Fondamenta Soccorso, Dorsoduro, 2596, Venice

‘Museum’ is a new artistic project from Dainius Liškevičius, where he opens up the concepts of creativity and creation for wider discussion. A democratic discussion, in counterbalance to dictatorship and conformism, appears as one of the key conditions for (creative) freedom.

In proactive imitation of the principles of museum operation and the status conferred by the institution, and by drawing parallels between two historic Lithuanian personalities (who embody forms of resistance to the Soviet occupation and political protest) and the artist’s own personal life and career, he establishes the idea of protest as an act of creation.

Part of the project is a bilingual book (in Lithuanian and English) that hosts the 400 kg weight of the ‘Museum’ project compressed into 1,4 kg of paper.

According to the art critic Narušytė, the book traces a deconstruction of the Lithuanian art history myths that were established during the soviet occupation: “this book contains items, publications, works of art, photographs, and other documents from the Soviet period that have been collected by the artist. They remind us of that complex time and help to sense the creative power of the culture which created those artefacts. Historical events, knowledge about art and the memory concealed in things all mix up in the imagination of the artist, inspired by that cultural milieu. His story about three revolutionary personalities whose acts of protest to the artist seem to have been the triggers for the vanguard art, gives space even to traveling J.P. Sartre and punk-rock.”

The project will be organised by Nida Art Colony of Vilnius Academy of Arts team (dr. Vytautas Michelkevičius, Rasa Antanavičiūtė and Daina Pupkevičiūtė) and partially supported by The Lithuanian Council for Culture.