CONTEMPORARY ART EXHIBITION “CHRONOMETERS”

Contemporary art exhibition “Chronometers” will be opened at the KCCC Exhibition Hall (Didžioji Vandens str. 2, Klaipėda) on Friday, 14th of September 2018, at 6 PM.

Works by artists participating in this exhibition measure time, which has become the cultural discontent of this decade. The excuse “I don’t have time” has become so commonplace that we no longer notice its absurdity. As if time were a material object we could possess. Our present, however, is surely speeding up. Even before the omnipresence of internet, the French philosopher Paul Virilio predicted the “desert of world time”: the “dromospheric” time flying at the speed of light would devour space, and there would be only total present. Perhaps this has already happened? Yet isn’t it a paradox that while the accelerating time is deleting space, we have only time, yet lack it most acutely?

In our culture of mediated experiences, “falling behind time” is a chronic disease. Unfinished tasks accumulate to disintegrate us into the arrhythmia of having accomplished nothing. Time has become malleable and slightly unreal. Consciousness twitches in the narrowed now and, like a schizophrenic, breaks into several time zones. It runs away from the present, trickling fast with the numbers on the electronic clock. For many, the boredom of slowed time becomes a desirable state of mind. We ask ourselves in the words of Leonidas Donskis: how “to restore a sense of meaningful life in the midst of meaninglessness”?

The photographer fromKlaipėda, Remigijus Treigys, has been showing how to do that for around thirty years. The scratches and dust covering his images make time audible. While listening to its sounds, the curators of this exhibition have decided to look for time forms created by artists from all aroundLithuania. Their photographs, films, objects, drawings and paintings, having turned into chronometers, take us into the labyrinth of temporal experiences. It is made of varied durations and speeds, anachronistic relics and phantoms from the past, predictions of the future, observations of everyday life, the synchronized rhythms of the body and nature, the past and present of the city in counterpoint, temporary sculptures and boundaries behind which there is no time left.

Participating artists: Aleksas Andriuškevičius, Eglė Bertašiūtė, Violeta Bubelytė, Alfonsas Budvytis, Cooltūristės and Adomas Žudys, Kęstutis Grigaliūnas, Arūnas Kulikauskas, Algimantas Kunčius, Dainius Liškevičius, Aurelija Maknytė, Valentyn Odnoviun, Remigijus Pačėsa, Liudas Parulskis, Eglė Ridikaitė, Rūta Spelskytė, Ričardas Šileika, Remigijus Treigys, Gintautas Trimakas, Darius Žiūra.

Curators: Agnė Narušytė and Gintaras Zinkevičius

The exhibition is part of the Vilnius Academy of Arts research project “Imagining Time: Chronopolitics, Heterochrony and Experiences of Accelerating Time in Lithuanian Art,” financed by the Research Council of Lithuania.

The exhibition will run until the 4th of November 2018.

Opening hours of the KCCC Exhibition Hall (Didžioji Vandens str. 2, Klaipėda): Wednesday-Sunday 11 AM – 7 PM (closed on public holidays).