Goethe-Institut, Institut Français in Lithuania, Nida Art Colony of the Vilnius Academy of Arts, and independent curator Julija Čistiakova are pleased to present residency project “Between Time and History”, dedicated to the 50th anniversary of the Élysée Treaty and European integration development.
Three artists – Martin Neumaier (Germany), Dominique Blais (France) and Žilvinas Landzbergas (Lithuania) – spent almost two months in the residency in Nida. They were employed to think about history’s bearing on the present in this particular small piece of land. It is important how the artists percieve the history that has been changing people’s consciousness and have nostalgia of the things that will never happen. M. Neumaier focused on the question what does it mean to be a German? How future and the past can be bound together and why it is important for him to find the answers to his questions. Ž. Landzbergas’s personal mythologies, which consist of tiny details important only to the artist, of his feelings on the seaside during the residency, are resulting into the site-specific installation that refers to Lithuanian traditional mythology and has many symbolic meanings. In his works, D. Blais has been researching the ideas of solitude and isolation as well as contraversion between East and West in a figurative and literate sense. The time and political contexts are changing, but certain landscape elements remain the same.
The artists were encouraged to navigate real and imagined territories and times – geographic, political, economic and social by revealing how the forgotten personal and communal construct the nostalgia of/for the future. The show functions as an archive of parallel micro-narratives, expanding on the notion as a means of touching upon local chronotops. The exhibition strives to formulate an unstable and fragmentary cartography where spatial and time collisions often result in conditions close to a pseudo-modernist melancholy. Finally, it reveals how cultural mythologies are inscribed into a personal Time-Space/Landscape-Memory equation.