Wednesday 18 November, 7pm

VILNIUS COOP exhibition venue

Siarhei Liubimau

Re-branding Space as Re-bounding Space: Creative Clustering and Its Toolkits in Warsaw District Old Praga

Siarhei Liubimau picks the example of the recent multi-level attempts to re-brand Warsaw district Old Praga as a district, where creativity is the dominant constituent for its modernization, in order to think in which way such re-branding means multi-level manipulation of space for tactical ends. The terms of ‘re-branding’, ‘modernization’, ‘manipulation’, ‘new production’ and ‘re-scaling’ [of Old Praga space] – all frequently used in order to signify the processes of the shift to a ‘new’ or ‘creative’ economy within a relatively limited spatial unit – are juxtaposed with the term ‘re-bounding of space’, which promises to give access to more layers of such a shift.

Siarhei Liubimau is teaching at the European Humanities University (Vilnius) and writing doctoral dissertation at the Graduate School for Social Research, Polish Academy of Science (Warsaw). He was trained in the fields of cultural studies (EHU, Minsk), sociology (CSS, Warsaw) and urban studies (Bauhaus Kolleg, Dessau). Currently he does research and writes about spatial forms and practices present in urban units on state borders and on the urban culture and alcohol-based cultural industries. In the year 2007 he was a co-founder of the Laboratory of Critical Urbanism, serving as a platform for the scholars and practitioners interested in urban research.

Wednesday, 11 November, 7pm

VILNIUS COOP exhibition venue

Gediminas Avenue no. 27

Joanna Sokolowska: Another City, Another Life - of the Archives, video screening with introduction

The programme consisting of photo and video works and documentation of artistic actions is conceived as a modified and extended version of an archive accompanying the project Another City, Another Life (www.ancity.blogspot.com), which took place in Warsaw in 2008.

The aim of the archive is to map, how do contemporary artists represent and engage in spatial, esthetical, social and political regimes that have been developed in various cities of East Europe since the decisive changes at the end of the 1980s, early 1990s began.

The archive is constructed loosely around several thematic questions. What are contemporary consequences and potential of the abandoned ideas of the revolution, communism and of socialist modernity, that were implemented in urban planning and collective identities? What kind of new collective bodies, or shared experiences can emerge now in this context? Are there any new possibilities for the “lived”, subjective experiences of inhabiting the cities? How is the dialectic of destruction and building inscribed in diverse material layers of cities related to the memory work and to the processes of constant (re)writing/actualization of history? What is omitted, excluded in historical narrations and current images of the post-socialist cities, what kind of strategies do the artist use to render visibility to these phenomena? How do the artists position themselves within the ambivalent field of cultural production, what role can they play in the economy (symbolical capital), public and political spaces of cities undergoing transformation? Finally can the economical “grey zone”, in which - despite the rhetoric of cultural capitalism - many artists in the post-socialist countries still function, be transformed into an experimental fieldwork offering possibilities to break away from using art for the economic productivity?

The selection will include works by: Chto Delat’?, Skart, Zbynek Baladren, Mona Vatamanu & Florin Tudor, Khinkali Juice, Grigor Khatchatryan, Lusine Talalyan, Tadej Pogacar, Miklos Erhardt, R.E.P., Voina, Angelika Fojtuch, Karol Radziszewski

Joanna Sokolowska, (*1978) art historian, curator, currently at the Muzeum Sztuki in Lodz. She is mainly interested in economies of artistic production in relation to the changes of labour along with the urban transformations in post-socialist countries. Her recent curatorial work includes: “Arbeiter verlassen die Arbeitsstatte” at the Galerie fur Zeitgenossische Kunst in Leipzig and “Another City, Another Life” at the Zacheta National Gallery of Art in Warsaw and in diverse locations in the city.

As a part of Indrė Klimaitė’s project Revival of Lithuanian Canteen Culture lunch excursions to Vilnius’ canteens are organized every Thursday from 12 pm.

Departure (free minibus) from the venue of Vilnius COOP, Gedimino pr. 27.

Registration at Vilnius COOP front desk or ula@cac.lt

Wednesday 4 November, 7 pm

VILNIUS COOP exhibition venue

Gediminas Avenue no. 27

Oksana Zaporozhets

Soviet ‘Obschepit’: from ideologically regulated public places to ideology for sale

The presentation will focus on the metamorphosis of soviet era canteens as representative and ideologically bounded social and cultural spaces. The talk will be based on a study of soviet public eating habits in the late-1950s (including archival research and interviews) and a reflection upon the present state of canteens in Russia. Acknowledging the common histories as well as different ecologies of soviet obschepit, Oksana Zaporozhets will talk about the realization of the basic ideological principals within the everyday life of canteens in Russian provincial cities.

Canteens will be described as specific public places ideologically constituted as ‘places for refueling not socializing’. The consequence of this mono-functional orientation of canteens, declared in the official documents, and shaped by their spatial organization, temporal regimes and strengthened by the privileged position of the canteen’s staff, was the regulation and manipulation of the socialization of the urban populace, who were intentionally linked by their profession than to their 'friendly' peers. And the range of functions that the canteens could fulfill were strictly limited (no parties). Despite the strict regulation, everyday practices violated some rules especially in ‘staff-customer’ communication: flirting, gossip, and salesmanship were commonplace.

Nowadays, the long-lasting effects of soviet obschepit might be experienced in thematized ‘areas of nostalgia’ or [re]visiting canteens that still operate on soviet principles. The presentation will include photos from Russian archives and newspapers of late-1950s canteens (both as ideal and in operation

Oksana Zaporozhets is a participant in the Laboratory of Critical Urbanism (European Humanities University, Vilnius) and an Associate Professor in the Sociology Department, Samara State University, Russia.

Zaporozhets' lecture is held in relation to the ongoing visual research of contemporary Lithuanian canteens by Indre Klimaite, presented in the Vilnius COOP: gaps, fictions and practices project in a photographic series, a Vilnius and Kaunas canteen guide, and weekly Thursday lunch excursions to Vilnius canteens.

As a part of Indrė Klimaitė’s project Revival of Lithuanian Canteen Culture lunch excursions to Vilnius’ canteens are organized every Thursday from 12 pm.

Departure (free minibus) from the venue of Vilnius COOP, Gedimino pr. 27.

Registration at Vilnius COOP front desk or ula@cac.lt

Wednesday 21 September, 7 pm

Vilnius COOP exhibition venue

Gedimino ave. 27

Jekaterina Lavrinec

City as a playground

Working with the concept of “urban games” both as a researcher and a practitioner, Jekaterina Lavrinec discusses the role of urban games in reactivating and reanimating urban places. Every urban place provides its bodily dynamics and scenarios for social interactions, and is being shaped by our rhythms, gaze rituals, loudness of voice, gestures. Urban games, such as contact improvisation, tracing, street performances and flash mobs, street installations are an active reinterpretation of routine rituals. Considering city as a playground, urban gamers reveal and actualize the potential of urban places, keeping them alive. In the presentation the speaker will provide a number of joyful cases.

Jekaterina Lavrinec is a Vilnius based urban researcher (Laboratory of Critical Urbanism), she received her PhD in philosophy from Vilnius University in 2008. She teaches at the European Humanities University in Vilnius and Vilnius Gediminas Technical University. In her urban research she combines theoretical studies with practical experiences of the city and performative strategies often in collaboration with specialists from other fields. In the project Vilnius COOP: gaps, fictions and practices Jekaterina Lavrinec together with photographer Julius Narkūnas present their ongoing Vilnius’ project Street Blog (http://web0.wordpress.com/) and participates in the quest for Vilnius’ storytellers.

Thursday, 15 October, 7 pm

Mykolaičio-Putino g. 4, the residency of Norwegian Ambassador

(near the Vilnius Wedding House)

Joanna Warsza: Autobiographical lecture-performance on the image of Vilnius as lost homeland and the Polish colonialism

Joanna’s family comes from Vilnius and left the city in 1945 with so-called repatriation trains gathering Poles to Poland after the Second WW. The autobiographical lecture prepared especially for Urban Stories will take place in the former family house, today a residency of Norwegian Ambassador Gil Steinar. Joanna will speak about her upbringing with the image of Vilnius as lost homeland, the process of conscious raising of the sleeping panslavism, the notion of tuteishians (being from here) and the lack of the debate on Polish-Lithuanian past and present. Even today there is no direct train between Warsaw and Vilnius.

Wednesday, 14 October, 7 pm

Vilnius COOP project venue, Gedimino ave. 27, Vilnius

Joanna Warsza:

Shifts in the structure of the real: Public art projects in the derelict Stadium in Warsaw and A Walk Through the Ghetto led by Public Movement – on the Israeli Youth Delegations to Poland

The 10th-Anniversary Stadium was built in 1955 from the rubble of war and preserved Communism’s good name for forty years. In the early 1990s it fell into ruin, being ‘revived’ by Vietnamese and Russian traders. Since then the area became an open-air market, an Asian inner city, a primeval garden, a storehouse of urban legends, a piece of Land-Art, or a work camp for botanists. The heterotopic logic of the place and its long-standing (non-)presence in the city, inspired Joanna Warsza’s curated series of live art projects The Finissage of Stadium X and the related reader, Stadium X — A Place That Never Was.

Public Move­ment from Israel together with Polish col­lab­o­ra­tors in April 2009 led a walk in the former Warsaw Ghetto, in the foot­steps of Israeli and Jewish youth del­e­ga­tions. The starting point for the project was the hermetic and strictly ritualised procedures of Israeli Youth Delegations to Poland. Public Movement explores the polit­i­cal and aes­thetic pos­si­bil­i­ties resid­ing in the man­i­fes­ta­tions, spec­ta­cles or public marches. They invent­ and re-enact­ moments in the life of indi­vid­u­als, com­mu­ni­ties, social insti­tu­tions, peo­ple or states.

Joanna Warsza is a curator and director on the cusp of the performing and visual arts based in Warsaw, Poland. She runs Laura Palmer Foundation, which produces actions in the public space or conceptual events between fiction and reality. Over the last tree years she commissioned projects in the ruins of the 10-th Anniversary Stadium in Warsaw and in ex-Warsaw Ghetto based on the critic of Israeli youth trips to Poland. Her work refers to the perception shifts, the unspoken and the ephemeral. Joanna collaborated with, among others, the Centre Pompidou, Kunstlerhaus Stuttgart, Belluard Festival, Warsaw MOMA, PERFORMA NY, The Building in Berlin, CCA Kiev, Marabouparken in Stockholm and Nowy Teatr in Warsaw. She is the editor of a reader Stadion X-A Place That Never Was (2008).

Wednesday 7 October, 7 pm

Gedimino ave. 27

An Architektur: community in architectural discourses

The presentation will explore the term ‘community’ in architectural discourses and its applications in architectural practice that appears in three important works by An Architecture. The magazine's "Community Spaces" issue (of 2002) collected various examples of architectural projects based on very different ideas of community. The "Camp for Oppositional Architecture|" (2004) was an attempt to actually create a (learning) community for a period of a few days. And the project "Community Design" (2008) explored historical and contemporary design approaches of socially responsible American planners and architects.

An Architektur. Community Spaces, Poster 33. 2009. Foto: Agata Erlacher

An Architektur: Production and Use of the Built Environment (www.anarchitektur.com) is a journal founded at the beginning of 2002 extending the work of the architecture collective frees fact – a group that has sought, since the mid-1990s, to critically assess the reconstruction of Berlin and contextual political and economical conditions through actions, exhibitions, and publications.

WILD LIFE TAKE AWAY STATION

Site-specific living installation/performance by Ibrahim Quraishi

Off-site project

Saturday 3 October, from 3.00 pm

WILD LIFE TAKE AWAY STATION

A 24 hr non-stop site-specific living installation/performance

Žygimantų g. 12, Vilnius

In the framework of the X Baltic Triennial, Ibrahim Quraishi presents WILD LIFE TAKE AWAY STATION (2009) that explores affects associated with the revelation of hidden paradoxes that manifest themselves when supposed secrets are unveiled (in relation to his vision of Vilnius). Open to the public and inhabiting a non-stop 24 hour period inside a classic wooden Lithuanian house WILD LIFE TAKE AWAY STATION takes place from Saturday 3 October to Sunday 4 October. It is complimented by a new film that is being screened at the CAC for the duration of the Triennial.

Ibrahim Quraishi (b. 1973) lives and works in Amsterdam and Paris. He belongs to a new generation of artists challenging our understanding of visual performance and its relationship to a broader cultural perspective.

Original composition : Norscq // Concept & direction : Ibrahim Quraishi // Light design : Ibrahim Quraishi // Live performers : Ria Higler, Diego Agulló // Recorded voices : Veronique Ruggia-Saura, Black Stifichi // Advice : Gabriel Smeets // Continuity girl : Roselyne Bellec // Technical director : Vladimir Petkovic // Recorded at Studio Norscq à Paris September 2009 // Co-production: X Baltic Triennial of Contemporary Art "Urban Stories", (Vilnius), De Appel (Amsterdam), Studio Norscq (Paris), krschkunst (Vienna), no red stopping (Belgrade) // Research supported by : Contemporary Art Centre (Vilnius); production of Ibrahim Quraishi / STICHTING Anamorfose

CAC Cinema Hall

Saturday 3 October, 6.00 pm

Artist talk and screening of film Celebration

Quirine Racke & Helena Muskens (NL)

Celebration (2005), which is included in the Triennial, explores the eponymous village community built on reclaimed swampland in central Florida which was opened by the Walt Disney Company in 1996. Designed to capture the best of small-town life – pristine homes with front porches and shaded sidewalks reminiscent of a 1940s film set – Celebration was a unique experiment in idealised town planning. With anthropological curiosity, Quirine Racké and Helena Muskens visit the town a decade later and follow six families in search of domestic utopia.

Walt Disney always ended his shows with his famous words: “Remember dreams can come true”. Is Celebration a dream come true in a world gone wrong?

Quirine Racke & Helena Muskens (b. 1965, b. 1963) live and work in Amsterdam. They have been collaborating since 1997. Their films, documentaries and video installations explore themes of identity and community. Racké & Muskens work has been shown at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, New York Video Festival, Whitechapel Gallery in London, and hetStedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. Currently they are working on a project that reflects on the ‘musealisation’ or ‘Disney-fication’ of historical European cities and the interrelationships between its inhabitants and its visitors.

The X Baltic Triennial of International Art 'Urban Stories' opening events programme:

Friday, 25th September

At the Contemporary Art Centre

Vokiečių g. 2, Vilnius:

5pm press conference

6pm vernissage 'Black Swans, True Tales and Private Truths'

7pm performance by My Barbarian (US) and Liūdni slibinai (LT)

At Vilnius COOP venue

Gedimino pr. 27, Vilnius:

8pm vernissage 'Vilnius COOP: gaps, fictions and practices'

Saturday, 26th September

1pm guided tour to the off-site project "Comfortable" (CN)

(meeting by the entrance of Panorama Hotel, Sodų g. 14, Vilnius)

3pm screening of Shanghai by Vita Zaman (at Skalvija Cinema centre, Goštauto g. 2/15, Vilnius)

5pm guided tour to the off-site project "Comfortable" (CN)

(meeting by the entrance of Panorama Hotel, Sodų g. 14, Vilnius)

The Contemporary Art Centre is pleased to launch the public lecture and screening series as part of the VILNIUS COOP project within the frame of the X Baltic Triennial of International Art. The series of events will be presented at 7pm each Wednesday from September 9 until November 19 at the CAC Reading Room and at the VILNIUS COOP exhibition venue at Gedimino prospect no. 27.

CAC Reading Room

Paulina Olowska

Paulina Olowska & Lucy McKenzie "Nova Popularna" 2003

The talk will address the question "how can the public feel good about sharing

their secrets?" The answer to which resides in the creation of both real and

imaginary meeting spaces in which discussion can bloom. Olowska will talk about

two such spaces that she has been responsible for running in Warsaw, a bar

"Nova Popularna" and an artist salon "Des Herbs". She will also refer to work

that she produces in collaboration with other artists, another communicative

and productive strategy, such as Bonnie Camplin and Lucy McKenzie. Interested

in the concept of 'restorative nostalgia' Olowska will also refer to an ongoing

project "Neons" that aims to create a 'night salon' in the cityscape.

Paulina Olowska was born in Gdansk and lives and works by Krakow, Poland. She

was educated at the academy in Gdansk. Olowska's work that borrows from a range of 20th century art

histories and popular images and imaginaries, has been exhibited and collected

by major institutions around the world (including the VanAbbe, Eindhoven and

Centre Pompidou, Paris). Olowska is also well known as a performance artist,

and organiser of socially interactive projects. She has also participated in

biennales in Berlin, Istanbul, and Moscow.

Paulina Olowska's visit to Lithuania has been supported by the Polish

Institute, Vilnius

For more information about the X Baltic Triennial of International Art, see:

www.urbanstories.lt

Partner of the Triennial: Vilnius - European Capital of Culture 2009

4 September, Friday, 5pm, by the entrance of the Contemporary Art Centre

You are invited to Breadway concert!

Surprises and music!

Bread songs!

Breadway is a project by Ha za vu zu, an artists' collective from Turkey. The outcome of this project will be shown in the X Baltic Triennial of International Art Urban Stories opening on the 25th of September, 2009.

More about Ha za vu zu and their project:

breadway.blogspot.com

www.myspace.com/hazavuzu

Presentation by Ha za vu zu, 28 August

28 August, Friday, 6pm at the Contemporary Art Centre

Presentation of Breadway project by HA ZA VU ZU

We are HA ZA VU ZU, an art collective based in Turkey. We invite you to take part in the campaign we have started in Vilnius in order to collect expired bread and to develop our art project for the city. We have chosen a collective and collaborative system for implementation of our project - the bread will be collected from restaurants and houses through the recycling points located in Vilnius. The course of project will be constantly evaluated not only by us but also by the participants and the whole city community.

You can contact us at our blogspot www.breadway.blogspot.com to find out where the expired bread collection points are - these recycling points will be situated according to your suggestions and advice of other Vilnius residents.

One of the aims of our campaign is to encourage the residents of Vilnius to recycle expired bread. Posters, brochures, radio teasers, public announcements, advertisements and every other helpful medium underlining this awareness will be employed and we invite you to build this publicity together.

This invitation aims to trigger a united action and to create a spark to discuss the possible realization of such campaign in the city of Vilnius. Supportive ideas, alternative solutions and tactics of realization discussed with the volunteers and participants will enrich both, the campaign and the collective action during our art project.

Throughout the campaign the collected bread will be stored in the great hall of the Contemporary Art Centre. The storage space will also function as a point of information about the status of the campaign. Additionally, it will underline the main motto of the campaign: “Bread gets us together” and discourage the “paradigm of distrust” in the society.

This campaign will be held between 28th of August and 10th of September, 2009 at the Contemporary Art Centre and in various locations in Vilnius city. Documentation and outcome of the campaign will be shown in the X Baltic Triennial of International Art Urban Stories between 25th September and 22nd November, 2009 in the Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius.

Best Regards,

HA ZA VU ZU

27 August, Thursday, midnight, Panorama hotel

One night only exhibition by Frank Koolen in his hotel room

6 August, Thursday, Butina factory, Vilnius

Kevin van Braak's project Books for Burning?: oven testing and dinner for factory workers

Saturday, June 27th, in Kurtuvėnai

We are kindly inviting you to the ceremony dedicated to the actualization and celebration of a unique cultural valuable. The valuable we are speaking about is probably well known to you by the name of the pavilion of the Gates of the Royal Palace as it has been standing in Vilnius close to the Archcathedral and the former Royal Palace for many years. The building was erected in 2001 as the result of the activities of the Fund supporting Royal Palace. Nobody by then was conscious about the significance that this object is going to gain in the future. Today, however, we – the members of The Second Royal Palace Club – state that this building in fact is the actual Royal Palace. For the sake of accuracy we name this building The Second Royal Palace, in order for it not to be confused with the historical (first) Royal Palace, demolished in 1801 and with the complex of buildings undertaken in 2001 and also called the Royal Palace. This title is justified by the analogies of the architectural forms of the building with the historical residence of Lithuanian rulers and also by the abundance of values and advantages it embodies. After all it is the first reconstruction of the Royal Palace in the history of Lithuanian nation (the following reconstruction and thus the third Royal Palace are expected to be completed by 2009).

Therefore, once more we would like to invite you to the opening ceremony of The Second Royal Palace. Newly reconstructed palace is awaiting you in new environment and accompanied by new interpretations.

Events programme:

Saturday, June 27th

4pm Opening of the exhibition The Three Royal Palaces. Procession towards the Palace.

Place: Elementary school of Kurtuvėnai (P. Višinskis str. 1A, Kurtuvėnai, Šiauliai region).

5pm Inauguration of The Second Royal Palace.

Place: Liepkalnis.

Yours sincerely,

The Second Royal Palace Club

You are invited to visit the event by the bus reserved by CAC, gratis. The bus will leave on Saturday, June 27th, 12pm from CAC and will return to Vilnius the same evening (departure from the place of event at 10pm). The filmed material of the inauguration of The Second Royal Palace will be used in making the film which is going to be presented at the X Baltic Triennal of International Art 'Urban Stories'. It will take place at the Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius, from September 25 to November 22 this year.

27 March, Friday, 5pm at the Contemporary Art Centre

As part of our programme of introductory events towards The X Baltic Triennial of International Art (opening 25 September, 2009) we are cordially inviting you to the artist's talk and video screening by performance collective My Barbarian (Los Angeles).

The group will be talking about recent projects including the PoLAAT (Post-Living Ante-Action Theater), a work they have presented in Cairo, Egypt, Trento, Italy, and New York, USA. Their presentation will be a combination of video and performance documentation and will also include a live performance element.

Bio:

My Barbarian is a Los Angeles-based performance collective founded in 2000 by Malik Gaines, Jade Gordon and Alexandro Segade. The trio performs in site-specific plays, musical concerts, theatrical situations and produces video installations that play with the spectacular while engaging viewers critically. Their interdisciplinary projects conflate fantasy and satire to explore and exhume cross-cultural mishaps and misadventures drawn from history, mythology, art and popular culture. My Barbarian has performed and exhibited widely in Los Angeles: LACMA, REDCAT, Hammer Museum, MOCA, LAXART, Schindler House, LACE; in New York: Whitney Museum, New Museum, Studio Museum in Harlem, Participant, Inc., Joe's Pub; and elsewhere at Yerba Buena Center, San

Francisco; Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago; Aspen Art Museum; Contemporary Arts Forum, Santa Barbara; Vox Populi, Philadelphia; Samson Projects, Boston; The Power Plant, Toronto; De Appel,

Amsterdam; Peres Projects, Berlin; Torpedo, Oslo; El Matadero, Madrid and Galleria Civica, Trento, Italy; Lui Velazquez, Tijuana. My Barbarian was included in the 2005 and 2007 Performa Biennials, the 2006 and 2008 California Biennials and the 2007 Montreal Biennial. In 2008, the group performed commissioned works for the New Museum and Galleria Civica, Trento. They also presented a durational performance installation at Art Positions, Art Basel Miami Beach. In 2008, My Barbarian received an Art Matters grant to make a new performance and video project at the Townhouse Gallery, in Cairo, Egypt.

More at:

http://www.mybarbarian.com/

P R O L O G U E

11-12 December, 2008, at the Contemporary Art Centre

The X Baltic Triennial of International Art in Vilnius - taking place in 2009, the year of Vilnius - European Capital of Culture - is launching the session of introductory events in December 11-12, 2008, and featuring stories by Triennial curators Ann Demeester (Amsterdam), Kestutis Kuizinas (Vilnius), artist collectives Chim Pon (Tokyo), Ha Za Vu Zu (Istambul), artists Beatrice Gibson (London) and Kevin van Braak (Rotterdam).

“Urban Stories” invites international artists and researchers to leave behind the usual touristic representations of Vilnius; to reach out for the periphery of the city, its suburbs and residential neighbourhoods; to track and generate its diverse geographies: urban ambiences, rooted legends, individual schedules, and small stories. The outcomes of these urban expeditions will be mediated through the means of contemporary art – installation, film and video, as well as artistic actions and new media interventions – producing a new complex narrative on Vilnius.

Organizer: Contemporary Art Centre (CAC), Vilnius

Curators: Ann Demeester (Director of De Appel Art Centre, Amsterdam), Kęstutis Kuizinas (Director of CAC, Vilnius)

PROLOGUE PROGRAMME

Thursday 11 December, 2008

17.00 Ann Demeester (Amsterdam) & Kestutis Kuizinas (Vilnius): Curators’ talk and Triennial story.

18.00 Beatrice Gibson (London): Artist’s talk

19.00 Chim Pon: Ryuta Ushiro, Masataka Okada, Eri Ohata (Tokyo). Screening of the artists‘ collective films and performance activities.

Friday 12 December, 2008

17.00 Vera Lauf (Leipzig) & Ūla Tornau (Vilnius) Vilnius-COOP: Presentation of the project

18.00 Ha Za Vu Zu “Stragedy” (Istanbul)

During the two days of the programme special event “Books for Burning?” by Kevin van Braak (Rotterdam) will be taking place in the ground floor gallery of the CAC (12.00-19.30).

Brief History of the Baltic Triennial (1979-2005)

The exhibition was founded as The Baltic Triennial of Young Fine Artists in Lithuania in 1979 while the country was under the occupation of the Soviet Union. Paradoxically, biennials and triennials existed in Lithuania for a long time, as in the USSR there were more biennials and triennials than in the rest of the world (though they served a different, and local, function); the Biennial for Young Art, the Poster Triennial, the Ceramic Biennial, the Crafts Triennial, and even a Fashion Biennial.

The Triennial was one of the youth invested projects that emerged after the collapse of Stalinism. And from the 1960s young artists also expressed a critical non-conformist spirit considered dangerous to the totalitarian regime. From its inception, and until the collapse of the Soviet at the end of the 1980s, the Triennial provoked passionate discussions in political as well as artistic discourse. The exhibition has a long tradition of showing emerging art and provided the only possibility for international exchange and was the sole showplace for 'avant-gardist' art.

After the restoration of an independent Lithuania in 1990–1991, the Contemporary Art Centre (CAC) in Vilnius directed by Kestutis Kuizinas and his young team of curators became the primary site for the exposition contemporary art in the Baltic region. The CAC took over the mission of fostering contemporary art together with introducing international artists and their work to the local public, and creating conditions for local artists to show their work in an improved qualitative environment and expanded conceptual context. By the end of the decade Lithuanian artists began to participate in international exhibitions, including biennials, and curators and writers associated with the CAC were similarly invited to contribute to international art discourse and contribute to exhibitions and conferences. As part of this process the CAC took-on the development and re-branding of the Baltic Triennial for International Art that is now integrated into the European biennial circuit as the strongest Eastern European showcase event – that has helped raise the profile of Vilnius as an international cultural hub.

The 6th Triennial in 1995, titled Misfits and curated by Lolita Jablonskiene (now director of the National Gallery of Art, Vilnius) had a close-to-home focus that was expanded for the 7th Triennial Cool Places (1998), curated by Kestutis Kuizinas, to include artists from the greater Baltic and Nordic Region. Cool Places was a possibility for artists of the Baltic region to reveal their personal attitude to meanings of the word cool: slang connotations of ‘cool’ are positive and hip, as are its readings in socio-linguists and critical theory, but it also registers as something cold, indifferent, and characteristic of the Nordic and Baltic region and its art.

The 8th Baltic Triennial (2002) aimed to make a major step forward and establish a truly international event and to guarantee its regular appearance within a region, in Eastern Europe, where large-scale international and contemporary events were still rare (even after 10 years of independence). As such, an international curator was invited to lead the project and to bring their extensive professional and artistic networks and contacts into play for the Triennial. Curated by the German curator Tobias Berger (now chief curator of the Nam June Paik Art Center, Seoul, South Korea) and titled Centre of Attraction, it was the largest Triennial to date involving 60 artists. The Triennial presented artworks that focussed on the phenomena of centres, their attraction, opportunities, dangers and the relationships among different centres (political, economic, cultural, social, etc.). A majority of the artworks were produced especially for the Triennial and were exhibited in two spaces; the CAC and the former ‘Pravda’ printing house building. The exhibition, accompanying panels, lectures, a seminar and a catalogue started new discussions about centres, sites of space and their transformation in Vilnius and new publics were engaged into contemporary art (with a popularly subscribed series of guided tours)

The IX Baltic Triennial BMW (2005) was entrusted to three young freelance curators – Alexis Vaillant (Paris), Raimundas Malasauskas (Vilnius) and Sofia Hernández Chong-Cuy (New York). BMW was a proxy for a range of titles, including Black Market World, Before Meaningful Writing, Be My Woman, et al. There was a running LCD line above the entrance to CAC that displayed an endless roll of possible meanings of BMW (that was an artist's project). The Triennial continuously transformed its identity and employed similarly obscure and mysterious organisational strategies, as part of its exploration of artistic practices referring to the topic of the project. It discussed links between authorised and forbidden economic exchange and, with that, interventions between marginalised and 'official' fields. The structure of the Triennial adapted to the model of double structures. The main exhibition took place in the CAC while a second parallel and temporal exhibition was presented at the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) London in correspondence with the exposition Vilnius. The curators invited some 50 artists from more than 15 countries – once again expanding the Triennial's geography to a broader territory. In order to open up a new field of discussions about BMW topics, artists and collaborators were encouraged to produce site-specific work for both exhibition venues that offered a range of 'black market' perspectives. For instance, All Wrong a video by Gabriel Lester (NL) was made from audiovisual material entirely found on Google!, AltaVista and other Internet search engines. Arturas Raila (LT) produced a geo-energetic map of Vilnius and the CAC building. Jeppe Hein (DK) proposed to repaint the CAC façade black and the CAC architect Valdas Ozarinskas made black plastic inner walls to subvert the original 'white cube' spaces of the CAC. Once again there were several off-site and temporal and performance projects especially produced for BMW plus a number of episodes of CAC TV (the institution's experimental television program broadcast on national television) were directed by the curatorial team and participating artists or included artist's video works. Debates, lectures and a seminar as well as an award winning printed publication – in the form of a ‘black box’ – accompanied the exhibition and provided further background information and theoretical discussions about the artistic practices and the topics comprising BMW.

Media Advisory - June 2, 2009

The Contemporary Art Centre (CAC), Vilnius launches X Baltic Triennial in Venice

Image: Arūnas Gudaitis, Vilnius Postcard Series (2009)

The Contemporary Art Centre (CAC), Vilnius is excited to launch the X Baltic Triennial of International Art that will be presented in the national programme of "Vilnius – European Capital of Culture 2009".

Opening on Friday 25 September and on show until Sunday 22 November the X Baltic Triennial is the pinnacle contemporary art event of the Vilnius Culture Capital and the Contemporary Art Centre's exhibition calendar.

Titled Urban Stories the project is a multi-platform presentation that will occupy multiple spaces within Vilnius, includes a special website, a full-colour catalogue, and a special issue of CAC Interviu magazine. The major exhibition platform, to be staged at the CAC and curated by Ann Demeester (director of De Appel, Amsterdam) with Kestutis Kuizinas (director of the CAC), Black Swans, True Tales and Private Truths is a dynamic and multi-media exposition in which many of the artists will present artworks that 'imagine Vilnius' from both an insiders and an outsiders perspective and address its status as one of Europe's most enigmatic cities. The exhibition will also present a range of international works representative of alternative urban experiences or idiomatic ways of being and operating in cities around the world. A second site-specific project titled Vilnius Coop: gaps, fictions and practices (curated by Vera Lauf and Ula Tornau ) is presented in a former Public Social Insurance Office on Vilnius' important promenade 'Gedimino prospektas'.

Since autumn 2008 artists have been travelling to Vilnius – from around the globe – to experience and make research about Vilnius and present their work or make performances for the CAC, Vilnius audience. And a number of these artists will be producing specially commissioned artworks for the Triennial. Curator Kestutis Kuizinas "is happy that we have been able to continue a tradition of bringing international artists to the CAC and to Vilnius for the purpose of making brand new works for the Triennial and our audience. We chose the theme of this years' event "urban stories" to specifically compliment and counteract the Vilnius culture capital year. Large festivals are always rich with 'official' and PR-inflected language and pictures about the place they are held; and it is our hope to add a measure of humour, reflexiveness, and even criticism to this stream of images and language about Vilnius – the dynamic and analytical qualities that are inherent to contemporary art".

The title of the exhibition Black Swans, True Tales and Private Truths reflects upon the fact that the Triennial is being staged in Vilnius during a time of crisis – the Black Swan referring to events that appear by complete surprise and have a major impact – and upon the idea that every image, reconstruction or evocation of a city contains a high degree of the ‘consciously false’. According to curator Ann Demeester; "Much has been made of novelist Jonathan Franzen's attempts to avoid cliché by writing blindfolded in the dark. This might be just what we have asked artists to do: produce – blindfolded in the dark – a response to Vilnius. This has generated a plethora of works that are based on a contemporary version of armchair travelling or idiosyncratic local research, works that offer parallel [hi]stories, based on a mixture of rumours and half-truths, hard facts and reliable information. Films, sculptures, performances and installations that offer, a phantasmagorical portrait of an existent city, to borrow from Laimonas Briedis' book Vilnius – City of Strangers (2008), or that examine a real place that seems as ‘illusionary’ as Disney’s town ‘Celebration’ or New York’s ‘Roosevelt Island. As a whole the exhibition will position Vilnius as both Everywheresville and Nowheresville, it will scrutinize the fictional character of real places and the reality of imaginary spaces”.

Participating artists include: Akvilė Anglickaitė (LT) Kevin van Braak (NL) Pavel Braila (MD) CHIM↑POM (JP) COMFORTABLE project (CN) Cora Roorda van Eijsinga (NL) Laura Garbštienė (LT) Beatrice Gibson (UK) Arūnas Gudaitis (LT) HA ZA VU ZU (TR) Alison Jackson (UK) Evaldas Jansas (LT) Edmunds Jansons (LV) Frank Koolen (NL) Irina Korina (RU) Algimantas Kunčius (LT) Žilvinas Ladzbergas (LT) Gintautas & Mindaugas Lukošaitis (LT) Aurelija Maknytė (LT) MY BARBARIAN (US) Deimantas Narkevičius (LT) Kristina Norman (EE) Nikolay Oleynikov (RU) Ariel Orozco (MX) Gail Pickering (UK) Ibrahim Quraishi (PK / NL) Quirine Racke & Helena Muskens (NL) Paul Ramirez Jonas (US) Kęstutis Šapoka (LT) Emily Wardill (UK) Vita Zaman (LT)

Vilnius COOP: AnArchitektur (DE) Dalia Dūdėnaitė (LT) Sven Johne (DE) Urbikon (DE) Clemens von Wedemeyer (DE) Dorit Margreiter (AT/US) Elva Olafsdottir (IS) Paulina Olowska (PL) Jekaterina Lavrinec (LT) Oksana Zaporožec (RU) Indrė Klimaitė (LT/NL) Laura Stasiulytė (LT) Žilvinas Ladzbergas (LT)

May 13, 2009, Prague

Dear Ann,

Finally I have a minute to write you a text. “Just a little something” as you suggested during yesterday’s meeting at the Krasnopolsky bar.

I've had a long day of travel. After we lost our national carrier (Lithuanian Airlines recently went bankrupt) traveling became an issue again. There are very few odd connections left to fly abroad. One of those is via Prague. This is where my letter begins. In the airport hotel with half bottle of local wine, an empty Marriott notepad (you know that I don’t carry a laptop, I don't check my e-mails when traveling…) and a bunch of drunken Lithuanians celebrating the semifinals of the Eurovision song contest somewhere behind my room walls.

In fact, they're part of a group of losers like me – all stuck in Prague until tomorrow morning. So I have a whole night in front of me. And I've still got that meal voucher for 240 Czech kronas unused on my bedside table. I tried to exchange it for the wine at the reception desk shop, but they said it is valid for meals at the airport restaurants only. MacDonald’s should be still open. But it can wait. It's a few minutes after midnight. And I have a story to tell you.

It is about the girl in the window who I saw just after our meeting in Amsterdam. After we talked Baltic triennial business and I rushed out for my next appointment to say "hello" to my old mate Suzanne. We agreed to meet at 19.30 in the Het Loosje bar at Nieuwmarkt square. It is a short walk from Krasnopolsky hotel as you know.

The streets were packed as usual by that time in the evening. She was sitting quietly on her bed in the far corner of the semi-lit window space. My first impression was that she is too shy to look up at the passers by. She was nicely dressed though. Dark tight skirt and a classical white silk shirt with a few buttons open at the top. She had blonde hair and secretary-style glasses resting nicely on her nose. She was reading a book…Or at least pretending to do so. I kept looking at her for a while trying to follow the tiny movements of her lips. At some point she looked like a child who has a difficulty to follow the text only by means of her eye-reading. That was probably why she looked somehow tensed despite of her seemingly relaxed posture.

A few seconds later she has noticed me standing out there. She looked up only once at me, said something short or nothing that I could hear because of the thick window pane and continued with her reading. I got more curious. I even lifted myself on my toes to try and see what the book was, but the distance was too big and I still could not see anything. What was she reading there? Then suddenly she jumped off her bed and rushed to the window shouting: “What do you want?” “It’s fifty, fifty!”

She was screaming aloud at me and repeatedly showing her hand with five fingers on it. I stepped backwards slightly, but she'd already opened the door. Now I had to explain what I wanted, here. I mumbled something about reading in the dark, but she cut straight to the point. “Are you coming in or not?” She said it rather impatiently with her broken English looking at me with utmost disdain. Indeed, what did I want?

I said "Sorry, its not gonna work that way probably. You are just too angry for me" (meaning that men prefer hospitality in most cases) and sneaked away. I caught something like “stupid bastards” behind me, but I didn’t hear much of it. I was late for my next appointment with Suzanne. The door was closed and she obviously returned back to her bed and taken that stiff position of intense reading.

Well, once again, what the hell did I do there? Generally, I could say that I was there for a research visit in Amsterdam. Let’s say, to collect material for my article if it becomes something that could be discussed and recycled later within the Urban Stories project framework? I believe that every large exhibition consists of many different stories (and windows* if you want) that curators somehow put together. But, frankly, I didn’t feel well about it all. I felt like a kind of loser trapped by a simple trick of reading. Most probably by a trick meant for high school students or lonely tourist-looking-curators wandering Amsterdam like me.

Yesterday, somebody from the "Prix de Rome" jury mentioned Vermeer’s painting when discussing the picturesque work by Sara Rajaei. I wasn’t sure if that was a correct reference though. I presume my own story is a much more convincing case! Girl in the Window, Delft revisited. Fifty euros only, the suck and fuck included. Amsterdam forever… Damn it, I should have asked her what she was reading in the end. Now it is too late for that anyway (unless we can invite her for a talk or something in Vilnius…).

I wish I could include a picture of that girl in my story. Pictures sometimes are better at conveying simple stories like this. As you know I am a camera freak, I always carry one with me. However, photographing is strictly forbidden in that area of Amsterdam. So, my dear Ann, imagine please, that I have attached a well known image of Girl Reading a Letter that I could easily Google! for you (if I only had a computer with an internet) before going to sleep in my Prague room.

Sincerely Yours,

Kestutis

p.s. OK. I went for another bottle of wine downstairs. Hanna – the good looking receptionist was not perfectly responsive towards the crooked smile of mine. Instead of that she put in a cold way: “Pin code, please”. “Excuse me did you say bingo please?” I have stupidly inquired of her as I wasn’t sure about what I just heard. Then I took my card out of the machine and departed towards the elevators.

* Windows (Okna in Russian) – is also the name of highly popular Russian TV show (á la Jerry Springer's nasty-sexual-racist bound show) broadcasted in Lithuania.

Amsterdam, the advent of spring, 21st of March 2009

Subject: Urban Stories - Black Swans (1) , Rumours and Tall Tales

Dear Artist,

According to local myth Vilnius is the product of one man’s private albeit unconscious fiction. Vilnius was born out of a dream.

You might and most probably will read the founding legend in any tourist guide or encounter it repeatedly in the lofty descriptions included in the city’s promotional brochures. It is said that around 1323 Grand Duke Gediminas camped for the night in the Sventaragis valley on the Vilnia river. In his sleep Gediminas saw an iron-clad wolf, which was standing at the top of the Crooked Hill (now called the Bald Hill) and howling as if there were a hundred wolves inside it. The High Priest, Lizdeika, interpreted the dream in the following way: the iron-clad wolf meant that Grand Duke was going to build a city, his future capital, at the foot of the hill. The howling of the wolf meant that the fame of the city would spread far and wide in the world.

Gediminas’ nightly visions gave birth to a city that in its present—day form ‘suffers’ from a similar mild form of schizophrenia that characterizes almost every medieval city, in the (former) East or in the (former) West, that functions as a tourist destination. On the one hand: an excessively restored ‘Old City’ which has acquired a ‘Disney-like’feel and in which Vilnius plays or acts out itself as a historical city heading for western-style progress for a motley audience of foreigners. On the other hand: extensive suburbia where the majority of the population lives and that despite uniform architectural style seems to contain and actually be ‘the reality’ that most residents inhabit and that visitors never get to discover. Vilnius ‘knows’ the almost generic contrast between the enchanting ‘fiction’ of the inner city and the banal realness of sleeping towns. An almost generic split that all of us have encountered, whether it was in Amsterdam or Frankfurt, Prague or Saint Petersburg. Vilnius could in that sense be Everywheresville.

Anyone who wishes to encounter the ‘unreal’ Vilnius, its Nowwheresville counterpart, should however reverse to total fiction. In his critically acclaimed bestseller ''The Corrections'' (2001) American author Jonathan Franzen – who is remarkably apt at armchair travelling and has never set foot in any of the Baltic States – evokes the Lithuanian capital as a post-Soviet city characterized mainly by economic chaos, gangsterism, and a local cuisine in which the most coveted dishes are based on horse meat. (2) Franzen does to Lithuania- in an slightly more sophisticated sense - what Borat has ‘achieved’ for Kazakhstan: he has treated the country as a blank canvas on which prejudices about the conditions of former USSR-states can be freely projected without any restrictieons and without being inhibited by any criteria of realism.

Despite the fact that Franzen’s novel sketches a repulsively distorted image of Lithuania after independence there is a scary type of ‘propheticness’ that underpins his absurd depiction of the country. The patriarch of the protagonist-family, Alfred Lambert, refuses to speculate on the market. A fact which frustrates his ambitious wife Enid. Enid responds by organising holidays such as Scandinavian cruises where she can attend aspirational talks on money management. One such talk explains the title of the novel: a "correction" is the so-called "mechanism" by which markets re-evaluate overly optimistic speculations. Viewed like this, a correction is never a downturn or a depression: it can be regarded with equanimity as a good thing, a cheerful thing. (3) Their son Chip engages in a dark enterprise in which bits of Lithuania are sold off to rich Americans on the Internet. His boss Gitanas Misevicius explains that they need to offset the consequences of his government taking advice to privatize the phone and airline business (after Russia's economy flopped) and then having the (American) controlling interests pull out when the world economies collapsed, resulting in liquidated assets and no airlines left in Lithuania.

In retrospect this might read as an eerie prediction.

In the past decade Lithuania, Latvia and their fellow Baltic state Estonia enjoyed a reputation as economic "tigers" in the EU, which they joined in 2004. But once-solid consumption has withered amid high inflation and tighter domestic credit rules, and the global economic crisis has dented exports, hitting businesses hard and sparking mass lay-offs. Lithuania's economy grew 3.1 percent in 2008 but will likely face a sharp recession this year, contracting by at least 4.9 percent according to the country's central bank. The credit crunch hits Lithuania as a punch in the stomach and has recently amongst other severe cut-backs leaded to the bankruptcy of its national carrier FlyLAL. Fiction overhauls reality as the cliché will have it.

Fiction bypasses reality on multiple levels in present-day Lithuania. The ultra-perceptive powers of novelist might not be put to a functional use but other visionaries are employed to vivisect problems and partially remedy economical ills. In January 2009 one of the country’s main debt collection agencies said it was using a renowned clairvoyant to track down debtors and identify secret business crooks. Vilija Lobaciuviene is well known in Lithuania for her supernatural powers. Now the otherworldly psychic has signed a down-to-earth cooperation agreement with debt collection agency Skolu Isieskojimo Biuras (SIB), whose corporate website says: “There are cases when unconventional means and methods must be applied.” (4)

One needs however not be a prophet, visionary or a psychic to predict that the global economical meltdown will permanently reconfigure our cultural landscape, whether we live in Lithuania, the Netherlands, Madagscar or Brazil. Our imagination fails in light of our faltering and collapsing economical system. We do not dare, do not have the audacity to imagine how ‘Tomorrowland’ will look like. As French curator Guillaume Desanges in a recent private conversation pointed out: we have a tendency to refuse grand visions of our own and instead revert to retrofuturism, to the archaeology of the future. We are interested in looking back and exploring depictions of the future produced in the past (most often the 1920s through 1960s), both in science fiction and in non-fiction futurism of the time, which often seem dated by modern standards. It is safer and more secure to indulge in ‘a distinct nostalgia for the unfulfilled promise of the future’ (5) than to imagine what might lie ahead of us right now.

Within the relatively secluded and sheltered microcosm of the art world the economical collapse has other palpable effects: budget cuts and budget shifts and more general concerns about changing societies urge us to question whether we should spend as much as we do – however limited that is in relations to expenses in other fields - on art production, distribution and consumption in this very moment. Artistic and curatorial practice has up till now not been renowned for fitting within the rapid-response-scheme of things but this total shift is bound to be reacted to rather impulsively and immediately. Writer and publisher Clementine Deliss has mentioned that these are the times for ‘recessionist curating’; times in which we look at our ideas in examine them in light of their necessity. Times in which we try with fewer means, and greater inventiveness to reach the same goals. Or as debt collection agency Skolu Isieskojimo Biuras (SIB), will have it: “There are cases when unconventional means and methods must be applied.” (6)

There seems to be two major and overruling impulses in the times of crisis: escapism into nostalgia or escapism into sci-fi, or as was pointed out above, escapism into a combination of both of these ‘trends’. When all seems uncertain and unstable we develop either an obsession with the past or a fixation on the improbable and very far way future. It might however be the moment to explore the liminal space in between, the other world that is neither here or there, neither past nor future. In times of recession ‘armchair travelling’ could be a way to explore this ‘nowwhere-everywhere-ville’, a good alternative to real-time physical journeying to physical places.

In the early 19th century the new media technologies (the rotation press, lithography, photography) in the applied form of novels, illustrated magazines and popular scientific publications and three-dimensional dispositifs as diorama’s provided the armchair traveller with a means to carry them away from his immediate physical surroundings. The Aspen Movie Map, realized by the Architectural Machine Group of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the late 1970's, was a new kind of vehicle in its time: a combination of the video-disk and the computer allowed us to traverse an urban landscape, to look around, turn at the cross-roads, even peer into people's houses without actually 'being there'. The paradoxical experience of the presence-in-absence made possible by the project has been called by many names: 'surrogate travelling', 'virtual world voyaging', or 'movie mapping'(7). In the aftermath of this experiment travelling in the mind has acquired new overtones since the advent of virtual trips via Google earth and other related means that have become widespread and easily accessible to anyone with the possibility of being on-line.

Much has been made of Jonathan Franzen's attempts to avoid cliché by writing blindfolded in the dark. This might be just what we ask you to do: produce – blindfolded in the dark – a response to Vilnius, a place that might just exist in your own sphere of imagination. We ask you to propose work that is based on rumours and half-truths, not on hard facts and reliable information. Work that refers to a place that might be a personal universe, a phantasmagorical portrait of a non-existent locality (such as the Litaliania evoked in the 16 th century book “Vita S. Casimiri” by the Italian Ferreri, a cross-breed between Italy and Lithuania) (8), a real place that seems as unreal as Disney’s town ‘Celebration’or New York’s ‘Roosevelt Island’. We hope to provoke you to speak about the fictionality of real places and the reality of unknown spaces.

One of my all-time heroes literary theorist Frank Kermode, in drawing heavily upon the 19th century German philosopher Vaihinger said:

“We have to distinguish between myth and fiction. Fictions can degenerate into myths whenever they are not consciously held to be fictive.... Fictions are for finding things out, and they change as the needs of sense-making change. Myths are the agents of stability, fictions the agents of change.” (9)

Kermode relies on Vaihinger's notion of the ‘as if’ as the tool or motor for knowledge production, the fictional ‘as if’ distinguishes itself from hypothesis because it is not in question that at the end of the finding out process it will be dropped. Artistic fictions belong to the category of the ‘consciously false’, they help us understand and in that way function as catalysts but are not like hypotheses subject to proof or disconfirmation, only if they come to lose their operational effectiveness, to neglect.

We invite you to invent this kind of fictitious Vilnius. Vilnius can be as real or as unreal as we imagine. A city as a narrative space that exists in our multiple minds. Or as Lithuanian-American writer Philippee Bonosky will have it:

“There is one Vilnius: the Vilnius visible to the eyes, the ears, the nose, and other senses. This is a Vilnius which the whole world agrees is one of the lovely cities of Europe. It has suffered too much, as a city, but its suffering has been so closely intertwined with human suffering that one thinks of it as half-human, as having feelings, as humanely enduring. There is another Vilnius which is one’s own, and which one makes for himself. That Vilnius becomes part of one’s autobiography. I came to Vilnius for the first time as though I had been there many times before, as though ‘I had lost thee’. It was already as familiar as a dream.” (10)

Kind regards

The curatorial team

Ann Demeester

Kestutis Kuizinas

- - -

(1) Wikipedia: The theory was described by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his 2007 book The Black Swan. Taleb regards many scientific discoveries as black swans—"undirected" and "unpredicted". He gives the rise of the Internet, the personal computer, World War I, and the September 11, 2001 attacks as examples of Black Swan events. Based on the author's criteria:

1. Event has appeared by complete surprise.

2. Event has a major impact.

3. Event, after it has appeared, is 'explained' by human hindsight.

(2) Chip Lambert one of the main protagonists of the novel goes off with a crooked politician to run a scam in which bits of the country are sold off to rich Americans on the internet, via the website Lithuania.com "Chip was struck by the broad similarities between black-market Lithuania and free-market America. In both countries, wealth was confined in the hands of a few; any meaningful distinction between private and public sectors had disappeared."

(3) Passage derived from the review http://www.newstatesman.com/200112100043

(4) http://www.thaindian.com/newsportal/world-news/

(5) James Sullivan, "Visions of Tomorrowland; How past concepts of the future are taking over pop culture," The San Francisco Chronicle, January 3, 1999

(6) http://www.thaindian.com/newsportal/world-news/

(7) Derived from ‘Armchairtraveller on the Ford of Jordan - The Home, the Stereoscope and the Virtual Voyager’ by Erkki Huhtamo (Helsinki), 1995. See http://www.mediamatic.net/page/5910/en

(8) Laimonas Briedis, Vilnius- City of Strangers, Baltos Lankos , Vilnius, 2008, p 38.

Frank Kermode, The sense of an Ending: studies in the theory of fiction, Oxford

(9) University Press, New York, 1966 (reprint 2000), p 39.

(10) Philippe Bonosky, Beyond the Borders of Myth: From Vilnius to Hanoi, Praxis Press, New York, 1967, p 79.

The X Baltic Triennial of International Art 'Urban Stories' opening events programme:

Friday, 25th September

At the Contemporary Art Centre

Vokiečių g. 2, Vilnius:

5pm press conference

6pm vernissage 'Black Swans, True Tales and Private Truths'

7pm performance by My Barbarian (US) and Liūdni slibinai (LT)

At Vilnius COOP venue

Gedimino pr. 27, Vilnius:

8pm vernissage 'Vilnius COOP: gaps, fictions and practices'

Saturday, 26th September

1pm guided tour to the off-site project "Comfortable" (CN)

(meeting by the entrance of Panorama Hotel, Sodų g. 14, Vilnius)

3pm screening of Shanghai by Vita Zaman (at Skalvija Cinema centre, Goštauto g. 2/15, Vilnius)

5pm guided tour to the off-site project "Comfortable" (CN)

(meeting by the entrance of Panorama Hotel, Sodų g. 14, Vilnius)

Saturday, 3rd October

6pm Screening of Celebration and artist talk by Quirine Racke and Helena Muskens

Akvilė Anglickaitė (LT)

Kevin Van Braak (NL)

Pavel Braila (MD)

CHIM↑POM (JP): Erii, Ryuta Ushiro, Yasutaka Hayashi, Noriaki Mizuno, Masataka Okada, Motomu Inaoka

COMFORTABLE project (CN)

Cora Roorda van Eijsinga (NL)

Laura Garbštienė (LT)

Beatrice Gibson (UK)

Arūnas Gudaitis (LT)

HA ZA VU ZU (TR): Sukru Ozgur Erkok, Guclu Oztekin, Mert Oztekin, Emir Ozer, Gunes Terkol

Alison Jackson (UK)

Colter Jacobsen (US)

Evaldas Jansas (LT)

Edmunds Jansons (LV)

Paul Ramirez Jonas (US)

Frank Koolen (NL)

Irina Korina (RU)

Algimantas Kunčius (LT)

Zilvinas Landzbergas (LT)

The Second Royal Palace Club: Gintautas Lukošaitis, Mindaugas Lukošaitis, Salvijus Kulevičius (LT)

Aurelija Maknytė (LT)

Thomas Manneke (NL)

Darius Mikšys (LT)

MY BARBARIAN (US): Alexandro Segade, Jade Gordon, Malik Gaines

Deimantas Narkevičius (LT)

Mindaugas Navakas (LT)

Kristina Norman (EE)

Nikolay Oleynikov (RU)

Ariel Orozco (MX)

Gail Pickering (UK)

Quirine Racke & Helena Muskens (NL)

Ibrahim Quraishi (PK / NL)

Kęstutis Šapoka (LT)

Emily Wardill (UK)

Vita Zaman (LT)

ANN DEMEESTER (Brugge,1975) is currently director of de Appel Arts Centre and head of de Appel Curatorial Programme in Amsterdam. She is on the editorial board of the magazines A-Prior and F.R. David and has written recent essays on Michael Borremans, Jennifer Tee, Salla Tykka and Nicolas Floch. After studying literature and linguistics within the field of Germanic Languages she worked as an editor and art critic for the Belgian national newspapers De Morgen and De Financieel Economische Tijd. From 2000 onwards she worked as an assistant curator for Jan Hoet in both the SMAK, Museum for Contemporary Art in Gent (BE) and Museum MARTa Herford (DE) where she realized exhibitions and projects with e.g. Luc Tuymans and Raoul De Keyser, Rui Chafes, Royden Rabinowitch, Rob Birza, Joe Scanlan and Bjarne Melgaard. From 2003 till 2006 she functioned as director of W139 production and presentation platform for contemporary art in Amsterdam and alongside programming, managed the renovation and acquisition of the art space.

KESTUTIS KUIZINAS was born in 1968 in Kaunas, Lithuania. Director of Contemporary Art Centre (CAC), Vilnius since 1992. He has curated a number of exhibitions in Lithuania and other countries including Cool Places.The 7th Young Baltic Art Triennial and Lithuanian Art 1989-1999, both held at the CAC, Vilnius. He has curated a selection of works by Deimantas Narkevicius for the Lithuanian Pavilion at the 49th Venice Biennial (2001) and was a curator for the Lithuanian participation in the 26th Biennial of Sao Paolo (2004).

PERGALE - URBAN NARRATIVES

Vilnius May 2005

Initiated by: Nora Bürger (Budapest/Vilnius),

Vera Lauf (Leipzig), Ula Tornau (Vilnius)

Organised by: Contemporary Art Centre Vilnius

Like all of the former Eastern European states which underwent political changes, the cultural life and lifestyles in Lithuania are influenced by quickly changing developments. The capital, Vilnius, is the location where these phenomena are negotiated in a broader way considering the clash of various groups of people, lifestyles and

supplies.

The project “Pergale: Urban Narratives” seeked to approach these phenomena by focusing on the questions of how and in which way certain cultural changes and lifestyles manifest themselves in the urban space of Vilnius. Urban space is not characterised by continuity and stability, instead it is processual and situational. The project aimed to investigate how architecture, its form, its usage, associated official histories and personal connotations can give information about broader cultural developments.

Where in town are these developments visible? How has the city itself changed due to the shifts of systems and orientations? How do people adapt to the changes and in which way is this adapted in the (use of) architecture? How does the organisation of urban structure narrates cultural stories and tells about the interpretation of cultural heritage and history? And what personal histories lie behind these grand narratives?

The idea “Pergale: Urban Narratives” focused on two parts: The first part was an exhibition projected for May

2005 in and around the building of former cinema theatre “Pergale”. The building was constructed in the 1960s in a representative palace-like style. It functioned as a social place where people met to watch films or enjoyed other celebrations available at the time. In 2005 the building was almost abandoned. It was let with such marginalised activities as a dancing party for people over 30 and Saturday markets for pirate CDs. Already back then it was planned to reconstruct the building and to turn it into a casino. Pergale – the casino opened its doors in 2006. The building, its function, its in-between and present use portrait the broader history of the city’s transformations.

Therefore, the building in this project was seen not only as a location for visual activities but also as a model for the recent changes in urban structures and lifestyles.

It was planned to accompany the exhibition by lectures on the topic, which would open up a discussion on the cultural heritage of the 2nd half of the 20th century, its interpretation, but also orientations within changing

lifestyles in Lithuania. For further background information a catalogue should have been published during the course of the show.

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The second part of the project focused on present topographic interpretations of Vilnius. In recent years the city represents itself with its history stretching from the 16th to the 19th century then jumping to present processes. The 20th century, especially its Soviet part, is visible only when having a closer look at the openings in-between the baroque style churches and steal-glass skyscrapers of commercial use. Aiming to investigate the recent developments in the cultural life of the city, the project “Pergale: Urban Narratives” wanted to open up this settled hermetic image and to focus on individual perceptions of the city. Various groups of people (scientists, professionals, common people) would have been asked to describe their personal city map and how they link locations that are part of it. These topographies would broaden up the research on recent cultural changes and would look into the personal stories and connotations that lie behind specific urban spaces. This viewpoint would be a significant alternative insight into the interpretations of space, culture and history as well as into the popular lifestyles in the city of the present and past. This material was expected to result in a publication – a certain form of a city guide. Photography: © Mirjam Wirz 2004

2004

VILNIUS COOP: gaps, fictions and practices

It is this intrinsic semiotic poliglotism of a city that turns it into a zone of the most diverse collisions that would be impossible to imagine in any other conditions. While bringing together various national, social, stylistic codes and texts, city performs various hybridisations, transcodings and semiotic translations that turn it into a powerful generator of new information. The source of these semiotic collisions is not only a synchronic coexistence of diverse semiotic formations but also the diachronics: architectural buildings, urban customs and ceremonies, even the city plan, street names and thousands of other relicts from other epochs, which, as if some coding programmes, are constantly generating historical texts anew. (1)

Vilnius, the Cultural Capital 2009, is set to become a new centre of attraction in the European geography. Located in a former state of the Soviet Union, it was long seen as a certain vague territory, unexplored and therefore a somewhat blank space in the context of better-elucidated European urban texts. Following the political and cultural changes of the 1990s, geographical and urban orders of the city experienced dramatic shifts. New centres and peripheries were created, varied hubs and gaps structure the life of the city differently. The exhibition project VILNIUS COOP: gaps, fictions and practices (25.09.–22.11.2009), organized by the Contemporary Art Centre Vilnius as part of the 10th Baltic Triennial of International Art Urban Stories, aims to discuss the transformations by focusing on city’s gaps.

The celebrations of 2009 will accentuate only some of the urban changes – the ones that are most polished, integral and best articulated. They are largely determined by real estate trading in the suddenly emerged free market economy. Vilnius COOP, meanwhile, aims to explore the city’s multilayered space and culture. It traces the peripherial, the sideways, the abandoned as well as the clandestine and hidden spaces and practices that can be seen as narratives that are left behind in the dominating context of recent developments. Against the background of the effects the current financial crisis causes, it seems that particularily the marginal structures offer the potential for alternative paths. The project focuses on those gaps in the dominant drive for the economically efficient city which are the places and activities that do not necessarily appear to be the most rational choices in the prevailing economic logic. They generate contradictory meanings, overlapping narratives but indeed make the city more diverse and contradictory. The gaps are spaces that mark a position in-between, a pause which links former and future orders, affirmative and subversive practices. They denote situations of improvisation or even a crisis but are also the points of new departures in which the structures are not fixed and can be re-articulated. These gaps and spaces can be noticed in the tiny bits of everyday life and in physical spaces; they appear in empty buildings (anticipating their new function and use) as well as in the busy centres of the city (when dominant logics and marginal practices correlate). We ask how those gaps can further provide very promising alternative narratives, which focus on more diverse urban choices, colourful placemaking, and the appearance of unsuspected urban fractures that would trigger fantasy – that would create urban fictions for a possible present and/or future, and allow for a break from the established frenzied market-dictated urban development.

Visual artists, urban collectives and researchers from various European countries will be invited to question and comment on the consequences of the cultural and political changes in Vilnius. Though the urban context of the project is specific, the developments in Lithuania’s capital can also be discussed as a case for current political, economic and cultural tendencies in the whole of Europe. Therefore, already existing artistic and theoretical positions will be combined in the exhibition project with new commisioned work that investigates the tendencies and their outcome.

Format

The results of research will be presented in an exhibition (25.09.–22.11.2009) that is accompanied by discussion panels, a lecture series, film screenings, performative work and publications.

Fifteen artists, urban collectives and researchers will be invited. They will present existing artistic and social positions as well as new work. Discussion panels and film screenings will provide a platform for the public to share the experience on the differences in the city’s life and culture and search for the ways to vitalize a multifaceted life in the city of Vilnius.

Location

To position the project in the heart of the city, VILNIUS COOP: gaps, fictions and practices will be located in the very centre of the city. Notably, the active use of urban ruptures is often organized in unistitutional collaborations, due to cooperations that embrace a diversity of interests. Therefore a site for the exhibition that itself offers a script of a collaborative initiative is chosen: a vacant part of a Policlinics. The Policlinics was found in the beginning of the 20th century thanks to the voluntary association of the local community who ensured the funding. The venue therefore tells (as many other vacant locations in the city centre do) a story of getting together, a story of different ways of collaboration and tactics of community building. Taking the narrative of the Policlinics as an example for strategies of selforganization in the urban, globalized life, the project aims to investigate the potentials of alternative strategies of space production. Namely we ask if cooperation is the way to maintain a diversity of social life, imagination, economies and practices in the city?

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(1) Jurij Lotman “Peterburgo simbolika ir miesto semiotikos problemos”

Foyer of the Polyclinics, Gedimino pr. 27

September 9, 7 pm - Paulina Olowska, artist talk, Common Salon.

September 16, 7 pm - Indrė Klimaitė, presentation of work-in-progress. Revival of Lithuanian Canteen Culture.

September 30, 7 pm - Screening of Fritz Lang film Metropolis, 1927 (in relation to Clemens von Wedemeyer and Maya Schweizer’s piece Metropolis, 2005, presented in Vilnius COOP); introduction by Vita Petrušauskaitė

October 1, 12 am - Lunch Excursion to Vilnius’ Canteens. As a part of Indrė Klimaitė’s project Revival of Lithuanian Canteen Culture. Departure from the venue of Vilnius COOP, Gedimino pr. 27.

October 7, 7 pm - Andreas Müller, An Architektur collective, project presentation Common Room.

October 8, 12 am - Lunch Excursion to Vilnius’ Canteens. As a part of Indrė Klimaitė’s project Revival of Lithuanian Canteen Culture. Departure from the venue of Vilnius COOP, Gedimino pr. 27.

October 14, 7 pm - Joanna Warsza, Public art projects in the derelict communist Stadium in Warsaw (Boniek! by Massimo Furlan and Radio Stadion by backyardradio) and A Walk Through the Ghetto led by Public Movement.

October 15, 12 am - Lunch Excursion to Vilnius’ Canteens. As a part of Indrė Klimaitė’s project Revival of Lithuanian Canteen Culture. Departure from the venue of Vilnius COOP, Gedimino pr. 27.

October 15, 7 pm - Joanna Warsza, Autobiographical lecture-performance on the image of Vilnius as lost homeland and the Polish colonialism. Address: Mykolaičio-Putino g. 4, Vilnius.

October 21, 7 pm - Jekaterina Lavrinec, research presentation City as a Playground: Vilnius Case.

October 22, 12 am - Lunch Excursion to Vilnius’ Canteens. As a part of Indrė Klimaitė’s project Revival of Lithuanian Canteen Culture. Departure from the venue of Vilnius COOP, Gedimino pr. 27.

October 28, 7 pm - Screening of Alexandr Shapiro Putevoditel’ (A Guide, 2004), introduction by Olga Blackledge.

October 29, 12 am - Lunch Excursion to Vilnius’ Canteens. As a part of Indrė Klimaitė’s project Revival of Lithuanian Canteen Culture. Departure from the venue of Vilnius COOP, Gedimino pr. 27.

November 4, 7 pm - Oksana Zaporozhets, Sociological Research on Russian canteens.

November 5, 12 am - Lunch Excursion to Vilnius’ Canteens. As a part of Indrė Klimaitė’s project Revival of Lithuanian Canteen Culture. Departure from the venue of Vilnius COOP, Gedimino pr. 27.

November 11, 7 pm - Joanna Sokolowska, Ben Cope: performance and project presentation Another City Another Life.

November 12, 12 am - Lunch Excursion to Vilnius’ Canteens. As a part of Indrė Klimaitė’s project Revival of Lithuanian Canteen Culture. Departure from the venue of Vilnius COOP, Gedimino pr. 27.

November 18, 7 pm - Vilnius’ Storytelling Evening.

November 19, 12 am - Lunch Excursion to Vilnius’ Canteens. As a part of Indrė Klimaitė’s project Revival of Lithuanian Canteen Culture. Departure from the venue of Vilnius COOP, Gedimino pr. 27.

November 25, 7 pm – Siarhei Liubimau: presentation Re-branding Space as Re-bounding Space: Creative Clustering and Its Toolkits in Warsaw District Old Praga

An Architektur (DE)

Olga Blackledge (UA)

Benjamin Cope (GB) & Joanna Sokolowska (PL)

Dalia Dūdėnaitė (LT)

Sven Johne (DE)

Rasa Juškevičiūtė (LT)

Vidmantas Ilčiukas (LT)

Indrė Klimaitė (LT/NL)

Žilvinas Landzbergas (LT/NL)

Jekaterina Lavrinec (LT), Julius Narkūnas (LT) & Oksana Zaporozhets (RU)

Siarhei Liubimau (BY)

Dorit Margreiter (AT/USA)

Elva Olafsdottir (IS)

Paulina Olowska (PL)

Vita Petušauskaitė (LT)

Maya Schweizer & Clemens von Wedemeyer (DE)

Laura Stasiulytė (LT)

Urbikon (DE)

Joanna Warsza (PL)

Mirjam Wirz (CH)

Vera Lauf is a freelance curator and art historian based in Leipzig, Germany. She organizes exhibitions and conferences for different institutions such as the Contemporary Art Centre Vilnius, the Dance Archive Leipzig and the Visual Art Academy Leipzig. Her curatorial work especially focuses on site-specific and context-based topics, art in public space, on curatorial questions themselves and on the interrelationship between artistic as well as scientific approaches within socio-cultural discourses.

Ūla Tornau is a cultural theorist and curator of contemporary art. She is working at the Contemporary Art Centre in Vilnius. Currently she is also contributing to KultFlux - an urban research space in Vilnius, working on a publication Urban Change in Central and Eastern Europe: Social, Cultural and Architectural Transformations, and is involved in several other initiatives of urban research.