Each time, Kaunas Biennial becomes a new, contemporary, international gust of wind that stirs up the city’s inert cultural life. This year, this stirring has been entrusted to Adomas Narkevičius. The Vilnius-born curator, currently residing in London, has previously worked at the Rupert Art Center and curated exhibitions at the MO Museum, the Contemporary Art Centre, and abroad…
…And before all that, Adomas played in a band called Without Letters. But that was a long time ago. Now it’s time to delve into the theme he has devised for the 15th Kaunas Biennial: Life After Life. Opening on September 12, the exhibition will not only explore themes of transformation and uncertainty but also, it seems, continue what cannot be continued – experimenting with the very format of the biennial itself.
The theme of the biennial – Life After Life – might sound like just another complex art concept. What feeling or question might the average visitor take away from the exhibition?
I would like to invite people to come to this exhibition with an open heart. It should be kept in mind that my own principle and method in preparing this exhibition was to work from a state of uncertainty and the unknown. While this can be analyzed through a complex philosophical lens, I believe that we all, in one way or another, experience uncertainty; uncertainty about the future of our region, about the future of our families, and ultimately, on a global level, as the world’s economy and political direction shift, and very negative things – such as wars, occupations, climate collapse – occur.
If politicians and economists must offer concrete answers and reassure us in such conditions, then art can simply allow us to be with that uncertainty. So I invite people to engage in an open conversation about this troubling time: where we are going, what kind of future we want, and how we can think and create it together. And after all, this year’s biennial is not only about artists in the usual sense. We also showcase fashion designers’ works, music, crafts, and other fields.
Does this concept come from what you live in London, or rather from what you do not experience and what you lack when talking about contemporary art and working in this field?
I think it comes more from what I don’t experience. I want to create something that I, as a visitor, would like to experience more often – even in London. But also from what I do experience: I see many exhibitions that, in my opinion, pretend to know and try to impose that knowledge. In London, I feel a certain fatigue, not because contemporary art is too complex, but because it is too didactic. The mix of complicated jargon and didactic instructions on how to think is simply uninteresting and unappealing.
So the task I set myself, which the wonderfully open Kaunas Biennial team allowed me to pursue, was different. In London, many political, corporate, and other considerations dictate how everything has to be done. And here I felt that trust, and the opportunity for the whole team to embark on a common adventure, to work freely, to doubt and play. This is very rare. I think the Lithuanian art scene still has that freedom, and that’s why I feel like I am part of it. With this biennial, I had the chance to make the kind of exhibition I myself, as a visitor, miss.
In the context of the Kaunas Biennial, you often talk about old art forms and rules no longer working. What will that look like in practice?
First, I want to disappoint those expecting a total experiment – the exhibition will still resemble a biennial. But within the standard exhibition format, I wanted to bring in a certain looseness, as if improvising on a jazz standard.
This means that non-works can appear between artworks, artists can swap places with artisans, and a fashion object can become an object of contemporary art, and, at the same time, remain a commodity. In art, unlike in politics, we have the pleasure and the freedom to play with double meanings. For example, the young-generation designer Patricija Baronaitė will present blouse-armor pieces Lithuania Votum, which will be a performative artwork, an object, and also a commodity that can be purchased. Perhaps this sounds vulgar, but after all, every biennial in some sense fulfills the function of “greasing” the art market. This work simply does so openly, while also critically questioning who we are, what we wear, and how we understand Lithuania.
There will also be works that complicate established representations, for example, Lulua Alyahya’s paintings look at the masculinity of Gulf Arab men, thereby expanding our understanding of the mythologized Arab world.
Finally, there will be artists who appear in different roles – both as contemporary artists and as musicians. I think it’s important for the art community itself to remember that in these uncertain times, we don’t need to overexert ourselves with hyper-professionalism. We can be anything and get back to what’s most important – the creative process that stems from the existential need to create.
You keep mentioning music, and I can’t help but notice that members of your former band Without Letters, Miša Skalskis and Milda Januševičiūtė – now working as the duo Liudmila – will also be participating in the biennial. How important are friendships in art? Don’t they also contribute to gatekeeping the contemporary art scene, where the same names seem to be circulating?
I’ve thought a lot about the relationship between sustained creative dialogue and friendship. For example, Anastasia Sosunova’s project at the Ignalina Sports and Culture Center was both her first solo show and my first curated exhibition. While preparing the biennial, I’ve been in dialogue with quite a few international artists I’ve worked with over the past several years at Cell Project Space in London. Sometimes these are also friendships with creators whose careers in the art scene haven’t yet developed significantly. After all, Liudmila has never participated in any Lithuanian biennial or triennial.
Although the percentage of emerging Lithuanian artists in this biennial is one of the highest in the past decade, I would like to see that door opened even more often. The sharpness and quality of young artists’ ideas are certainly not inferior to those of the names that we hear more often.
I see how interestingly the Lithuanian creative scene is expanding; how many young people are making art. But sometimes it seems that they lack infrastructural conditions and, more importantly, institutional and curatorial courage to work more often with new perspectives and voices.
The Biennial, like other major cultural events in Kaunas, traditionally takes place in unconventional, historically charged spaces. How does the history, dust, cracks, and forms of the Stumbras factory influence your curatorial thinking?
It is impossible not to be affected. The Stumbras factory is a very interesting architectural phenomenon, because it has expanded throughout all the complex periods of Lithuania’s modern history. It all started back in the Tsarist period, as a reaction to the first revolution and an attempt to centralize power and strengthen the treasury – alcohol, of course, is a good tool for this. Later came the interwar, postwar, and finally the late Soviet extensions, which imitate the interwar period style but are in fact Soviet. This whole “consistent inconsistency” is strongly felt in the architecture.
Moreover, cooperation with Stumbras is not neutral – it is a partnership between private business and a public organization. I have an idea of how this could be revealed in the exhibition, but for now, I’ll leave some intrigue.
As for the works presented at Stumbras, many of them in one way or another reflect on the legacy of industrial modernity and modernism. After all, all contemporary issues – from artificial intelligence and ChatGPT to the influence of social networks – are dictated by the same principle of the “assembly line” and modernity, where everything gradually becomes automated.
You are not from Kaunas and do not claim blind love for this city. Still, what do you find peculiar, interesting, or real about the city?
During one of my first visits as a curator, a walk with the biennial’s artists from the Heritage Institute helped me feel the strong pulse of historical layers. That history sticks out everywhere. It is a city full of signs of aesthetic and financial ingenuity, of creativity, yet I get the impression that, for example, Vilnius is a city that has praised itself more.
But this also brings me to a less joyful question. Why do so many of Lithuania’s strongest artists and curators come from Kaunas, but rarely create here? Why the locality of Kaunas is so seldom reflected in their work? It seems that some kind of schism has occurred. Therefore, one of my tasks as a curator was simply to invite the people of Kaunas to come to a contemporary art exhibition without hesitation and to have a good time.
For example, there will be “interactive”, playful works. In Destruction Park, recreated by Anastasija Sosunova and Tomas Kažemėkas, visitors will be invited to smash devices that mediate reality: printers, television screens, tablets. Another example is the work Untitled (Brain Nourishment) by the American artist Alex Mackin Dolan. These are slot machines that offer worthless tokens as prizes. Much like social networks, they hook you for no real reason, just like scrolling through social media. I myself got hooked and spent an hour on it. I thought that in Kaunas, a city that has a modernist cinema, which was turned into a strip club, it would fit perfectly.
So there will be many associative, both serious and light-hearted, commentaries, which everyone will be able to accept based on their own imagination. These are my intuitive reflections not only on global paradoxes, but also on those of Kaunas: on the junctions and relics of modernism and capitalism, and how they still operate in the present.
In the press release, you say that contemporary art is most interesting when it creates conditions to “feel free, curious, to play, to doubt, and to laugh at our own preconceptions.” Today, when the world is so polarized and serious, isn’t laughter and play simply a luxury, or an escape from reality? Or, on the contrary, could it be the most radical form of resistance?
Exactly. In times of political polarization and of growing authoritarianism, everything must have only one, strict meaning. A thing, a person, or an identity must mean one thing and not another. And when ambiguities disappear, essentially, the possibility of play disappears as well. So our current social condition is anti-playful.
But human beings are, after all, playful creatures. As Donald Winnicott wrote, play creates an intermediate space between us and the world – a space in which we can experience the unknown and try new ways of being together. And this is not a denial of serious or painful matters. Having such nooks is vital. Where else, if not in the art environment, can we afford them?
t
