LAZNIA 2 2017 Exhibition: Some Pieces from a Cracked Sidewalk (through an intent gaze)
Kipras Dubauskas | E.B. Itso | Morten Kildevæld Larsen | Kalin Lindena | Mirjam Wirz
Opening: 14th July 7 p.m.
Exhibition: 14th July–10th September 2017
LAZNIA 2 Centre for Contemporary Art, Strajku Dokerów 5, Gdańsk Nowy Port
Opening: 14th July 7 p.m.
Exhibition: 14th July–10th September 2017
LAZNIA 2 Centre for Contemporary Art, Strajku Dokerów 5, Gdańsk Nowy Port
Curator: Ūla Tornau
The exhibition accompanies the Vilnius Festival in Gdansk (8-10th September 2017).
This exhibition stretches across the five secretive and intent gazes towards particular urban places and routes. Focusing on those of Vilnius and Gdansk – the two cities that are both similar and different in numerous respects. Histories, sceneries, urban textures, and ways of placemaking compose their transient experiences. There is something difficult to verbalize and poetic, invisible and promising in their messy places and ephemeric states.
Such long and ongoing histories of alteration – total change of population, urban landscape and culture, constant need to re-invent the urban and cultural identities, flashing back recently again have created those hybrid spaces which are so typical to these cities of the region. Up to this day one of their characterictic items of use are cracked sidewalks that witness the layers, the lost and recreated identities, the transience, the permanent efforts to become an integral urban whole and at the same time the lure of the impossibility to achieve this.
Such long and ongoing histories of alteration – total change of population, urban landscape and culture, constant need to re-invent the urban and cultural identities, flashing back recently again have created those hybrid spaces which are so typical to these cities of the region. Up to this day one of their characterictic items of use are cracked sidewalks that witness the layers, the lost and recreated identities, the transience, the permanent efforts to become an integral urban whole and at the same time the lure of the impossibility to achieve this.
Image: Still from Kipras Dubauskas, Escape Trajectories, videoinstallation, 2017
Five artists, who in their practices address urban research, and who had been earlier exploring Vilnius‘ spaces, were invited for residencies to Gdansk. The artists address different urban issues in their work, some focusing on social contexts and their paralells, some working with architectures, some searching for items of material culture that tell stories from the place. All of them are linked through a secretive predisposition and toolbox of the inquiry – stretching from the deduction, and mysterious alteration of things up to the quest for alternative worlds of the place.
Both residencies and exhibition were organised in collaboration between the Laznia Contemporary Art Centre in Gdansk and the Contemporary Art Centre in Vilnius.
BIP