The three organisations The Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art, Narva ArtResidency and NAC in collaboration with PUBLICS have co-commissioned three new works with artists Agnė Jokšė, Sandra Kosorotova, Anni Puolakka and MartaTrektere. As part of this joint participation NAC has developed Unconditional Love by Agnė Jokšė, a video work and an ongoing inquiry into entangled cross-generational family relations and their role in the claim of kinship.
Unconditional Love consists of several interlinked chapters, exploring themes related to care, compassion, and love through the lens of intergenerational relations that are constituted in parallel to the societal and political changes taking place in Lithuania around the 1990s when transitioning from the Soviet Union and its economic and ideological models into the independent state of today (and its neoliberal, capitalist, and so-called western ideology).
With this specific geography and sociopolitical context in mind, Agnė Jokšė questions how two sociologically distinct generations – the so-called “lost” and “independence” generations, formed prior to the 1990s transition period and born after the reestablishment of sovereign Lithuania, respectively – became so connected while remaining politically and ideologically far apart? And how do their generational clashes affect the relationship dynamics of these two groups that are often closely linked by a family bond?
In Unconditional Love, Jokšė observes and follows the thread of family relations as it takes her to seemingly ordinary, but tender emotional places. By filming and interviewing her extended family in Lithuania and the Lithuanian diaspora in Europe, she chronicles their rituals and collects their memories in an attempt to piece together the portrait of this “lost” generation that her parents belong to. Even though Jokšė’s research originates in the idea of generational divide and cultural trauma, the space of Unconditional Love is tranquil. It reaches beyond disappointment or conflict into a state of shared familiarity, where one is resigned, resting, joking, worrying, and sharing with each other. The hours reveal the banality of unconditional love and its necessity and brilliance against the banality of evil.
Agnė Jokšė was born in Vilnius in 1993. She currently lives in Copenhagen where she conducts her studies at the Royal Danish Academy of Visual Arts, in the class of the artists Jane Jin Kaisen and Agnieszka Polska. Prior to her studies in Copenhagen, Jokšė studied painting at Vilnius Academy of the Arts. In her work, she investigates questions surrounding experience, parallel history, entangled relations, queerness, and language. She usually works with writing, video, and performance. In 2019 her work Dear Friend received the main award at the contemporary art competition JCDecaux Prize, organized by Contemporary Art Center in Vilnius. In 2020 she presented Lezbynai at the inaugural group exhibition of the art space Swallow in Vilnius.
The project is co-funded by The Baltic Culture Fund.