Exhibition "The Quarters of the Chess City" by Vilnius Academy of Arts Students and Graduates

Published on Thursday, 26 July 2012 20:41

On the 28^th of July (2012) Nida Art Colony of the Vilnius Academy of Arts presents the exhibition “The Quarters of The Chess City”. The opening is at 6pm.

The exhibition’s title refers to John Brunner's science fiction novel “The Squares of the City”. The novel tells a story of a road engineer, who is asked to improve the street net of a fictional South American capital city Vados, while the latter has got an almost perfect street system already.

The novel's structure is based on the chess game between Wilhelm Steinitz and Mikhail Chigorin, which is described in a chess handbook “The Game of Chess” by Harry Golombek. Every move (except the castling and the three last moves) has an equivalent in the script of the novel. The exhibition concentrates on the general atmosphere of the game, unrealized moves, castling, lapses and the last three deviated moves. Reference to Steinitz's and Chigorin's game is partly speculative, chosen as means to urge reflection of relations between artists, curators and institutions.

The exhibition “The Quarters of The Chess City” neither adopts the model of the Steinitz-Chigorin game, nor retells the Brunner's novel. It partly shares the opinion on the novel expressed by the Lithuanian-American science fiction author, editor, and literature critic Algis Budrys: "this is a confusing, overpopulated, almost-unidentifiable-with story set in a city which seems to have been created for the sole purpose of having Brunner set a 'human chess game' in motion upon it... There is nothing in particular here to catch and hold the reader's involvement."

The word “squares” is substituted by the word “quarters” in the title of the exhibition. This substitution is noticed only when the reader starts to think about the transfer of the novel’s model into the context of contemporary art. Converted title contributes to and mystifies the idea of the show. In this instance mystification is a positive and desired quality of the art work/exhibition/text, which could draw and shape the quarters of the chess city in the map of the viewer’s imagination.

The exhibition presents artworks by students of Vilnius Academy of Arts: Marija Šnipaitė, Linas Jusionis, Milda Laužikaitė, Vytenis Burokas, Jonas Vaitiekūnas, Vytautas Viržbickas, Justas Žekonis, Arnas Anskaitis, Viktorija Peleckaitė.

Curators: Gintarė Matulaitytė & Danutė Gambickaitė

The exhibition is open from July 29 to August 31, all days of the week from 1 to 7 p.m.