Project Zone curator Valentinas Klimašauskas: “A Celebration Can Be Both the Theme of Art and the Reason for Its Creation”

The 15th International Contemporary Art Fair ArtVilnius’24, which opens this weekend in Vilnius, encodes in its visuals a moment of celebration. “Why not? A celebration can also be a theme of art,” says art historian and curator of the ArtVilnius’24 Project Zone, Dr. Valentinas Klimašauskas.

 The Project Zone is a non-commercial, curated space, organized annually at the fair, where the most renowned Lithuanian and European art institutions, art projects, and individual artists are presented. 

 This year’s fair, which has chosen a Northern European focus, has brought together the most interesting contemporary artists, galleries, and institutions in the Project Zone. Klimašauskas, a curator, art historian, and one of the curators of the Lithuanian National Pavilion of the 60th Venice Biennale, says that Lithuania is culturally, geographically, and economically connected to the heterogeneous Northern European region. “This is also a challenge,” he says, “because closer links between art audiences and collectors in this region are still being developed.” 

 The Project Zone, which the curator has named Agency: of Mice, Scene, and Machines, will aim to look at the different notions of agency, the models that dominate contemporary discourse, and to outline the key aspects of today’s context that shape our choices and possibilities. The architect of the Project Zone is Gabrielė Černiavskaja. 

 “Agency is a word that is difficult to translate into Lithuanian, which, at least in philosophical discourse, refers to the will, capacity, or ability of a subject or object to act. One of the speakers at this year’s Santara-Šviesa festival, Rimas Čuplinskas, translated this word as “authorship”. I found this a very interesting translation, especially in art discourse. In the world of contemporary art, this term also refers to the discourse of the post-Anthropocene, to the attribution of certain rights, perspectives, or abilities to non-human beings – animals, trees, rivers, machines, etc.,” – says art historian V. Klimašauskas about the idea of the Project Zone. 

KUNSTHAL CHARLOTTENBORG (Kopenhaga, Danija). Simon Dybbroe Møller, What Do People Do All Day Video various 22min 2020-22

 According to him, the Project Zone of ArtVilnius is a hybrid curatorial zone – it involves institutions, artists invited by them, and institutions and artists invited by the curator. The Project Zone is created through questions of different levels of representation – institutional, gallery, producer, belonging to certain art scenes, themes, or regions.

 “Representation, mediation, and actionability will be key themes in the Project Zone this year. A fair is always a celebration, so we don’t emphasize this theme too much, although there will be some works that analyze the theme of celebration, such as the wonderful video The Grand Opening Event by the American artist Nina Sarnelle, which is presented by Index, the Swedish Foundation for Contemporary Art from Stockholm. Or the 1st episode of Simon Dybbroe Møller’s Everybody Works from the video series What Do People Do All Day?, presented by Kunsthalle Charlottenburg, Copenhagen,” says Klimašauskas about this year’s exhibitors. 

 Copenhagen will also be represented at the fair by the independent contemporary art center Simian. At ArtVilnius’24, it will present a joint installation by Lithuanian artist Lukas Danys and Danish artist Jan S. Hansen, exhibited in Simian’s space at the beginning of 2024 in the exhibition POV.

 Oslo-based MELK gallery brings to the fair the project Tachyoness by the Norwegian-based Ukrainian artist Lesia Vasylchenko. Using artificial intelligence, the artist has put together more than 1,000 images of a Ukrainian sunrise into a video work. The images were collected from archives, advertisements, social networks, and home VHS recordings and cover the years 1990-2022. 

MTR Foundation. Igoris Piekuras, Negatyvinis portretas Tapyba aliejinė tapyba ant drobės 130x149x5 cm. 1978

 The curator advises not to miss the works of Edith Karlson and Katja Novitskova, who represented the Estonian National Pavilion at the Venice Biennale of Contemporary Art. “They are really interesting sculptors and makers of moving images,” says Klimašauskas.

 Among the participants of the Project Zone this year, you will also see Lithuanian art institutions, such as Jonas Mekas Visual Arts Centre, the recently opened Stasys Museum in Panevėžys, and Lithuanian artists.

Stasys Museum will present an exhibition of Stasys Eidrigevičius’ book illustrations Travelling Imagination. The architectural space designed especially for the exhibition will feature works created for Vytautė Žilinskaitė’s book Journey to Tandadrik (1984), Jose Murillo’s My Friend the Owl (1986), and Rita Repšienė’s Tales of Fairies (2008).

 The MTR Art Foundation, founded by the Piekuras family and dedicated to the dissemination and accessibility of the creative legacy of Marija Teresė Rožanskaitė and Igoris Piekuras, is bringing to the fair the work of one of Lithuania’s most famous painters from the 1960s and 1980s, and a member of the generation of Soviet-era modernists, I. Piekuras. 

 The Project Zone will also feature the work of Jonas Aničas, a Lithuanian artist of the younger generation, who has twice been named the Best Young Artist at the fair. Often searching for materials for his works in nature and peripheral urban spaces (forests, abandoned buildings, or little-visited places), the artist combines various artistic languages in his sculptures, which breathe new life into them. 

SIMIAN (Kopenhaga, Danija). Lukas Danys, Harmony Reduction Instaliacija Wood, metal chain, water, silver paint

 Gabija Grušaitė will invite fair visitors to a Date with an Octopus in the Project Zone. This is a two-part interdisciplinary audiovisual installation that expands the universe of Gabija Grušaitė’s novel Mushroom Dream. 

 Visitors will also see the sculptor Rytis Urbanskas’ Posture (Laikysena), which weighs several tonnes. The artist, who studied at the Royal Danish Academy of Arts and uses a wide range of technologies in his work, is interested in the economy of the sculptural surface, gravitational morphology in plastic forms, and the influence of spherological thinking on Western culture. 

 The 15th International Contemporary Art Fair ArtVilnius’24 will take place at the Exhibition and Congress Centre Litexpo on October 4-6. Tickets are distributed by kakava.lt. The fair is organized by the Lithuanian Art Gallerists’ Association. The fair’s director is Diana Stomienė, artistic director – Sonata Baliuckaitė. The event is funded by the Lithuanian Council for Culture and supported by Vilnius City Municipality. The Fair’s Maecenas is the law firm Cobalt.