A Pledge. The First Part of a Trick – 01 – While Being in a Room I Hear a Fountain

On the 19th April, 2013 at 5 pm at KCCC exhibitions’ spaces (Didzioji Vandens str. 2,Klaipeda) the first exhibition/episode of a project “A Pledge. The First Part of a Trick” called “While Being in a Room I Hear a Fountain” will be presented. Author of the exhibition is a young Lithuanian artist Andrius Svilys (born 1992) who now lives and studies in London.

A Pledge. The First Part of a Trick

We might think of a trick as something fraudulent. But then, as with a modern conjuror, fraud too requires an exact mimesis of nature. Think of the airplane wing. Think of the blue feather ensuring that the arrow flies straight. So we need to be thinking of the trick as something scientific and real, bearing a scrupulous understanding and manipulation of things, including the human body in relation to such things. But the trick slides, it seduces, it cajoles (“Hey Duchess!”), it knows and enjoys the leap beyond the thingness of things.
Michael Taussig¹

A plasterboard box, four and a half meters long, two and a half meters wide and of the same height, located in the grand floor of Klaipeda Art Centre (KCCC), is actually a room in a room. The space isolated from the inner space of the building is as an island. A bit like a boat, I would say. Just like a boat, it is stimulating imagination.

Physically it is the remnant from the French-Lithuanian exhibition “Prestigue: Phantasmagoria now”, that was held in the autumn of 2012. Art critic Nicolas Bourriaud in his text, published in catalogue of the exhibition², adverts that the term ‘prestige’  came from the vocabulary of illusionists and is one of three component parts of a magic trick; its outcome, to be more precise. A prestige follows a pledge, when at a first glance ordinary objects are presented in a particular situation; and the trick itself that transforms conventional situation into an extraordinary moment.

I do not consider magic literally. I think about things, about stories things tell, how they tell them; about   relations of those objects, stories and storytelling techniques (with subjects), and dynamics between them.

I am thinking about situations that have the ability to create a pretext for rapture or difference to occur in a flow.

The box left from the latter exhibition (being part of the last stage of the trick) here, through the trick itself, turns into its germ – the pledge.  Now it is a trigger for another project, which is extended in time for a season, like TV series.

„A – find… missing… link“, – number Two writes down with chalk on board in one of the last episodes of British TV series „The Prisoner“.

01 – While Being in a Room I Hear a Fountain

Andrius: A short story from Gert Jonke‘s pseudo-autobiographical novel The System of Vienna got me thinking about sculptures that want.  I wonder about relationships that bond things. How would sculptures express their attraction to each other?

Neringa: A desire. Also, a desire of fruit trees of distant lands.

Andrius: The only witnesses of that garden are the sculptural fragments and materials that are typical to that region, but are not from that region and not from that garden – only evoking those places.

Neringa: Looking at the garden, I notice a breast (this word sounds so strange when it’s singular) that is made from transparent resin, overgrown by false bronze… I remember a prop.

Andrius: According to Wikipedia, props are elements of scenography, which are manipulated by actors, i.e. are touched or hand-held.

Neringa: Installation as a scenography or a game?..

Andrius: But what do you think about art as a detective fiction?

Author of the exhibition: Andrius Svilys

Curator: Neringa Bumblienė

The exhibition will be held until 26^th May, 2013

Organizers: KCCC, The Purple Swamphen

Sponsors: Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Lithuania, Klaipeda City Municipality, L’Institut français de Lituanie

[1] Michael Taussig, The Stories Things Tell And Why They Tell Them, e-flux journal#36, 07/ 2012, www.e-flux.com

[2] Prestigue: Phantasmagoria Now, exhibition catalog, Klaipeda: KCCC, 2012, p. 24