Parodos
Exhibition “POST-IDEA IV. WAR”: DEMILITARISATION OF IMAGINATION
Exhibition “Post-Idea IV. War” is opening at KKKC Exhibition Hall (Didžioji Vandens str. 2, Klaipėda) on Friday, 14th October, at 18.00, curator – Laima Kreivytė. Artists: Jurga Barilaitė, Yvon Chabrowski, Cooltūristės, Nezaket Ekici, Kristina Inčiūraitė, Aurelija Maknytė, Sigita Maslauskaitė, Veda Popovici, Neringa Rekašiūtė, Eglė Ridikaitė, Laisvydė Šalčiūtė, Mare Tralla, Laura Zala. At the opening, Cooltūristės and “Sheep Got Waxed” will perform “The Anthem Fight. Divide and Rule.”
Why war? Even though we do not want to think about it, it is here already. Not only on battlefields and at refugee camps, in Ukraine and Syria, on TV and social networks. According to Paul Virilio, there is a global civil war going on, for citizens are targeted and borders disregarded. A city became a battlefield in which living targets and living time bombs are moving around. This asymmetrical trans-political war affects everyone, and the imaginary peace of a small country is not a salvation promise.
The exhibition is not a war propaganda or an attempt to intimidate; the Internet is full of horrific straightforward videos and images. This is rather an attempt to ease down the flow, to stop and take a closer look at the feuding reality on both sides of the screen. Today’s virtuality dictates gaming rules onto the reality; first, a shocking image is directed and then is carried out in real life. Imagery kills not only in a figurative way – if an act of terror is pre-constructed as a spectacle, any kind of image production becomes political.
Why does this exhibition involve women artists only? A war affects everyone regardless of gender. However, every war becomes a gender war, once mass rapes of women are included in the weapon arsenal. The war is not merely a demonstration of power, a seizing of territories, making a cult of its heroes, a history of conquests. Even though the outlook is changing, women’s testimonies are still displayed as a “collateral damage” on the great war’s discourse margins. The artists in this exhibition are not direct witnesses of war (even though some of them saw tanks in Vilnius on 13th January 1991). They use their own experience and art practices to analyse the current situation and the shifting meanings of war.
Every war is originally internal – it starts in one’s mind and should end therein. The fact that the Virilio’s internal war refers not to geopolitical but to metropolitan nature of war (a density of a city rather than external borders of a country) does not compromise the significance or power of imagination. The artists are not going to solve military conflicts through their artworks. However, viewing them might start the process of demilitarisation of our own imagination.
In this exhibition you are going to find works of following artists: Jurga Barilaitė, Cooltūristės, Nezaket Ekici, Yvon Chabrowski, Kristina Inčiūraitė, Aurelija Maknytė, Sigita Maslauskaitė, Neringa Rekašiūtė, Eglė Ridikaitė, Laisvydė Šalčiūtė, Laura Zala.
The exhibition will run until 13th November 2016.
Ticket – 1,70 € / 0,85 €
Working hours of KKKC Exhibition Hall (DidžiojiVandens str. 2, Klaipėda): 11.00–19.00, Wednesday – Sunday.
