‘In the beginning was the deed!’ are words from Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s “Faust”, that the scientist utters before making a deal with Mephistopheles, prioritising action over thought and word in changing the world order. These words were used as a slogan by the anarchist group Black Banner active in Białystok, Dnipro and Odessa in 1906, the slogan unambiguously expressing the use of aggressive physical force against the tsarist government and increasingly powerful industrialists and bankers. The history of this and various other anti-imperialist groups that operated in the territory that is delineated by current borders of Lithuania, Poland, Belarus, Ukraine, Moldova and Russia, was brought to life in 2021 by the exhibition “Na początku był czyn!” held in Białystok’s gallery Arsenal. Curators of this exhibition not only opened these archives, but also together with artists (and) activists reflected the context of today’s social, political and contemporary art transformations.

The exhibition “In the beginning was the deed!” organised at the Kaunas Artists’ House continues the narrative started in Bialystok with the history of anarchist movements in Lithuania. By opening the archives, this story turns the exhibition into a conversation about the ways of writing and reading radical collective and personal narratives, about the (im)possibility of resistance to dominant powers and their forms of representation, about the unevenness of the margins of everyday life.

During the exhibition, the social center Emma will host a discursive events program, which will include stories about bright rebellious personalities and little known archives, initiatives of resistance, drag, and self-publishing.

Researchers, and participants of events program: Viktorija Kolbešnikova, Aleksander Łaniewski, Tomas Marcinkevičius, Darius Pocevičius, Auksė Petrulienė, Asta Volungė, Querelle.

Opening day program:

19:00 Exhibition doors open at the Kaunas Artists’ House (V. Putvinskio str. 56)

19:30 Talk with Bialystok’s exhibition “Na początku był czyn!” curators Matthew Post and Katarzyna Różniak-Szabelsk

20:00 Exhibition tour with artists and curators

21:00 Opening party with Querelle at the social center Emma (A. Mickevičiaus str. 35)

Exhibition curators: Edgaras Gerasimovičius, Vaida Stepanovaitė

Research and public program curator: Agnė Bagdžiūnaitė

Design: Vytautas Volbekas

Organised by: Kaunas Artists’ House, Swallow (Vilnius), gallery Arsenal (Bialystok)

Project is funded by the Lithuanian Council for Culture

Thank you: Antanas Dombrovskij, Antanas Stanislauskas, social centre Emma collective

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick: The Weather in Proust

Swallow is delighted to invite you to “The Weather in Fred Sandback”, an exhibition imagined by Martin Ebner, Audrius Pocius and Ariane Müller and featuring works, music, and gestures by Eric D. Clark, Michèle Graf & Selina Grüter, Laura Kaminskaitė, Sebastian Luetgert, Robertas Narkus, Eleni Poulou & Hilary Jeffery, Ulla Rossek, Julia Scher, Valerie Stahl von Stromberg, Hannah Weinberger, Martin Ebner, and Ariane Müller.  

“The Weather in Fred Sandback” is an exhibition conceived in the space between Berlin and Vilnius, and then in Venice and Kassel when we were able to meet again, in the bliss of restarting to talk and to plan. It is until now an unreal exhibition, with us trying to reassemble a world out of scattered parts, objects promised but lost—artworks in which we have encountered something real. The Weather in Fred Sandback strives to reconstruct the world out of sounds, gestures, customs, depictions and documents that we still have from it. 

During the opening night, the visitors will be greeted with a reading performance by the iconic Eric D. Clark, the artist behind Whirlpool Productions’ “From Disco to Disco” as well as a performance entitled “Pedestrian” by Michèle Graf & Selina Grüter, embodied by Saulė Noreikaitė and Hanna Ijäs. Afterwards, we will be heading downstairs to Bar 2123 for a concert of “Organza Ray” a duo formed by Eleni Poulou, founder of “Noshe Noshe” and former keyboard player of the British band “The Fall”, and Hillary Jefferey, the trombone player of the celebrated contemporary music ensemble “zeitkratzer”. During the concert, the sounds of trumpet, trombone and bass will blend in with beats of electronic music. Finally, we will be closing the night dancing to the music selection by the legendary DJ Eric D. Clark.

Evening programme:

18:00 opening of the exhibition

19:00-20:00 Eric D. Clark, reading performance at Swallow;

20:00-21:00 Michèle Graf & Selina Grüter, “The Pedestrian” at Swallow, performed by Hanna Ijas and Saulė Noreikaitė;

21:00 concert of “Organza Ray” (Eleni Poulou & Hilary Jeffery) at Bar 2123;

22:00 Eric D. Clark, DJ set at Bar 2123.

Image: Sebastian Luetgert: UNPROMPTED #106, excerpt

Financed by the Lithuanian Council for Culture

Visitors will be invited for fireweed tea (& more) which will be brewed from fireweed leaves collectively foraged, dried, and fermented during a workshop in July around SODAS2123.

Fireweed has woven, entangled, and taken root in this exhibition – a weed blossoming in midsummer, also nicknamed as invasive or even colonial. Not exactly welcomed by the human in his local ecosystem, the plant has its way of traveling – shedding its seeds where others don’t dare to go. Where the soil – or a roof, or a concrete pavement – has been marked by progress: by construction waste, railway tracks, oil spills, and other objects or weapons. Taking long budded root, fireweed sucks up poison as if a healer bandaging Earth‘s wounds.

Isn‘t it weird for a plant to be humanly invasive, alien, as if stumbled into the wrong private yard? The seed flies with wind, without following directions set by global logistical capitalism. In the face of ecological tensions – no, catastrophe – the exhibition follows the fireweed across calcified grids of consumption, looking for alternative epistemologies and healing movements. Movement from urban gardens and suburban meadows all the way to the makeshift stalls of local markets and neighborhood pavements – where communal insider agreements and unwritten rules are abundant; and the (non)human migration is a survival condition rather than a threat.

Artist Marija Nemčenko lives and works between Glasgow and Vilnius. Member of Lithuanian Interdisciplinary Artists‘ Association (LIAA) and Scottish Artists Union (SAU). Her research activates cultural interlinks between Eastern and Central Europe and Middle East, which she explores through questions of migration, cultural stereotypes and historic parallels. Attending critically to the construct of a ‚periphery‘, the artist asks what knowledge arises from these ‚peripheral points‘? Marija‘s work is marked by high contrasts and humor driven by these clashes, as well as bright, eclectic aesthetics of everyday.

https://www.marijanemcenko.com

Curator – Vaida Stepanovaitė

Soundtrack recording and mixing – Sholto Dobie

Soundtrack voice – Dovilė Šimonytė

Photoprint – Arielink

Design – Vytautas Volbekas

Consultant on SODAS2123 environmental architecture – Ona Lozuraitytė-Išorė

Consultant on growing fireweed at SODAS2123, co-curator of fireweed foraging workshop – Aušra Vismantaitė

Consultant on fireweed habitats in Naujininkai and Rasos districts, co-curator of fireweed foraging workshop – Vaiva Aglinskas

Exhibition partners SODAS2123 and Lithuanian Interdisciplinary Artists‘ Association (LIAA).

April to July, 2022 Marija Nemčenko worked on the exhibition at LIAA residencies at cultural complex SODAS 2123.

Marija Nemčenko was supported by the individual grant from Lithuanian Council for Culture.

Exhibition is open 11 August – 11 September

III-V, 4-7 pm+ 20 Aug, Sat, 12–3 pm
+ 3 Sep, Sat, 12-4 pm
+ 10–11 Sep, Sat-Sun (times TBA)

For other times contact vaida@swallow.lt, +37061347187

Swallow is delighted to present Barry Doupé’s AMIGA Works, the Vancouver-based artist’s first solo exhibition in Europe. 

When the Commodore AMIGA was released in 1985, it was marketed as the world’s first multimedia multitasking personal computer. Using the gendered conventions of boyish programmers, the computer’s name (Spanish for “female friend”) gave an impression of “user-friendliness” and placed it alphabetically in front of its competitors Atari and Apple. To persuade early PC users who wanted a “creative edge”, the launch even featured a demonstration by Andy Warhol, who generated a live portrait of Debbie Harry on stage, and remarked that he liked how the pixelated images already looked like his own artwork. Due to its peculiar graphic and processing capabilities, the AMIGA became the go-to tool for animation, video editing, graphics, and video game design in the 80s and early 90s. Key to this popularity was Electronic Art’s bitmap graphic editing software Deluxe Paint, which was first developed as an in-house art development tool that gradually became the de facto image and animation editor for the platform. The program’s broad range of features and its novel interface design set a standard, and anticipated the influence and ubiquity of digital image making and animation today.

AMIGA Works features an unabridged presentation of Barry Doupé’s 100 AMIGA Paintings (2016), an extensive series of pictures made on the commodore AMIGA with the software Deluxe Paint V (the final version of the program). For many years, Doupé has used these tools from a bygone era to generate some of his idiosyncratic animations, which draw from the subconscious and are developed through writing exercises and automatic drawing. The artist began the ambitious, yet somehow manageable, task of making 100 paintings as a sort of casual respite during the laborious five-year production of his psychosexually charged animated film Distracted Blueberry (2019). The hundredfold static images on display at Swallow were produced as a sort of procedural game of meditative problem solving, an exercise in creativity with constraints. 

By interrogating the technical quirks and bizarre accidents of the pixelated software as a language, Doupé explores its peculiar influence on the production of pictures. Each individual image has its own rules, addressing generic conventions from the history of painting using specific tools, features, or restrictions in the anachronistic program. Intuitive, playful, surreal, and unpretentious, every painting is its own unique and engaging puzzle that teases thematic tropes and explores specific formal principles such as figure/ground relations, mark making, gesture, repetition, perspective, tension, flatness, representation, compositional weight, landscape, materiality, texture, surface, color, portraiture, and so on. The resulting hecatontarchical hoard gives an overview of the basic categories of pictorial practice, demonstrating painting’s conventions and constant redefinition through an impressive inventory of eccentric flat images. As singularities, each painting articulates its own logic and demands, but as a multitude, a narrative emerges between control, automatism, and the painterly that confuses any assumptions about the sacred role of the artist’s hand and the impersonality of the machine.   

This use of passé technologies and media invokes a nostalgic melancholia for a cultural techno-adolescence. Neither ironic nor fetishistic, the series functions as a sort of counterpoint to the ideology of high-definition realism in digital media today. Given painting’s status as a stand-in for art-as-such, the transformation of painterly gestures into code that outputs pixelated imagery suggests the annihilation of differences between mediums by the digital. Indeed, this poor resolution incorporation of the past (and all information generally) into the digital world recalls Deluxe Paint’s own iconic sample images of Botticelli’s Venus and the visage of King Tut. Doupé responds to the digital logic of quantification by exploring qualitative transformations. The conflict between hand and technology is perhaps most apparent in “hard edge” abstractions that upon closer inspection, divulge broken, fragmented, pixelated lines. By revealing and disfiguring qualities that are seen as “essential” or “inherent” to painting and digital graphics, painting is revealed not as specific liquid material applied to a surface, but as a procedure, a mode of thinking and doing. 

The laserjet printouts of digital bitmap images are paintings because they were made with Deluxe Paint. Its interface is a skeuomorphic simulation of the painter’s toolbox and blank canvas. The artist draws lines by the simple drag of his mouse, modifies and transform them, fills fields of color with a single ‘click’, and changes parameters and tools with a combination of hotkeys. The essence of Deluxe Paint brushes is this: anything can be a brush, so you can paint with a single pixel, a pictorial element, a whole screen, or anything in-between. With each click of the mouse and key pressed, Doupé opens a field of virtualities, demonstrating a kind of imagination based not on the interpretation of the world but on calculating effects. 

Deluxe Paint incorporated animation into its graphic user interface and overall operating logic, allowing the user to produce images in sequences, “color cycle” the entire palette to make still images appear to move, and had an “animbrush” setting whereby animated sequences could be moved around like any other element on the screen. Doupé’s video loops Vhery (2013) and Whaty (2012) stretch the animation capacities of the software to its lineaments and, in doing so, uncovers some of animation’s core principles. Vhery is an abstract looping sequence of lines and textured planes, repeating state changes and moments of vulnerability, evolution, involution, and overturning. Though it may appear as if the sequences are stochastically auto-generating, the video was “hand” drawn frame by frame, pixel by pixel. The line is given an uncanny independent agency, perfectly illustrating Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s comments that: 

“The beginning of the line’s path establishes or installs a certain level or mode of the linear, a certain manner for the line to be and to make itself a line, “to go line.” Relative to it, every subsequent inflection will have a diacritical value, will be another aspect of the line’s relationship to itself, will form an adventure, a history, a meaning of the line…” (“Eye and Mind,” 183)

At times, the computer graphic lines correlate to give the impression of recognizable forms emerging, but these never resolve, leaving a continuously changing painting where the formal elements and their relations are in constant renegotiation. Doupé’s looped video Whaty further teases disequilibrium and the will to recognize patterns in random information, provoking pareidolia by portraying a series of morphing human faces. The video is an updated homage to James Stuart Blackton’s 1906 Humorous Phases of Sunny Faces, one of the earliest animated films, which used stop motion and “lightning sketches” on a chalkboard to produce comic scenarios. Here, Doupé explores the ways personality and countenance are used to give drawings life in animation and by addressing the face as a site of identification and expression. At any moment, the moving visages are caught somewhere between their emergence into form and their disappearance into the formless, suggesting continuously changing identities and emotional states. This polymorphic capability to shift and change form is what Sergei Eisenstein described in the early animated cartoons of Walt Disney as “plasmaticity” based, of course, on the omnipotence of protoplasm, which contains in “liquid” form all possibilities of future species and forms. The video exposes a peculiar figuration found in animation that, as Keith Broadfoot and Rex Butler note, is a “figuration in which the figure is no longer opposed to its dissolution but only given […] in or as its very dissolution.” Through these sketchy and squash-and-stretched modes of embodiment, Doupé draws attention to perception as always in process, and considers what animated worlds could mean for the self. 

Through his labor-intensive sequences of images, Doupé explores how technical limitations and structural constraints can yield unexpected creative potentials. AMIGA Works makes visible that pictorial techniques have agency and determinations all their own. By exploring the AMIGA as an early multimedia device, the works unearth a certain coding of pictures in general that crosses media and traditions. Lev Manovich and other contemporary animation and media theorists often assert that due to the ubiquity of animated post-production in moving images today, “cinema can no longer be clearly distinguished from animation. It is no longer an indexical media technology, but rather a subgenre of painting.” One could go further with this and recognize that animation is not only an omnipresent logic in our contemporary images and interfaces, but also somehow appears at the origin of painting itself. 

Barry Doupé (b. 1982 Victoria, BC, Canada) is a Vancouver based artist primarily working with computer animation. His films use imagery and language derived from the subconscious; developed through writing exercises and automatic drawing. He often creates settings within which a characters’ self-expression or action is challenged and thwarted, resulting in comic, violent and poetic spectacles. His films have been screened throughout Canada and Internationally including the Ann Arbor Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Anthology Film Archives (NY, USA), Lyon Contemporary Art Museum, Pleasure Dome (Toronto, Canada), MOCCA (Toronto, Canada), Whitechapel Gallery (London, UK), Centre Pompidou (Paris, France), the Vancouver Art Gallery (Vancouver, Canada), and the Tate Modern (London, UK). His practice also includes music, performances, sculptures, drawings, writing, and digitally mediated images.

Text by Post Brothers

Photos: 

Laurynas Skeisgiela

Translations:

Alexandra Bondarev

Edgaras Gerasimovičius

Installation:

Jokūbas Adamonis

Graphic design:

Vytautas Volbekas

Partners: 

Embassy of Canada to Lithuania, 

Sodas 2123,

Contemporary Art Centre Vilnius

Thanks to:

Wil Aballe, Audrius Antanavičius, 

Justina Beniušytė, Antanas Gerlikas, 

Dovilė Grigaliūnaitė, Dennis Ha, 

Virginija Januškevičiūtė, Ona Juciūtė, 

Jesse McKee, Ignas Meilūnas, 

Ignas Pavliukevičius, Audrius Pocius, 

Marina Roy, Antanas Stanislauskas, 

Vaida Stepanovaitė, James Whitman

Probably the first challenge that a freshly-born contemporary art space has to face is trying to grasp the time in which it will thrive. After all, every exhibition, text or artwork exhibited here will inevitably become a commentary on what is “contemporary” in contemporary art.

The time of ‘Palydos’ is a special time: the globe is still being shaken by the shock of the pandemic, speculations about what the future will look like are as contradictory as ever, while what unites their diversity and scenarios is only a general consensus that the future is bound to be completely different from the past; for after what has happened, nothing can remain as before. And yet these speculations remain blind as long as they are believed to speak of something more than just the time we live in now – giving voice to expectations, desires and traumas rooted in modernity and disguising them with the promise that this time will take on a different face than the present.

So Swallow’s first exhibition marks this journey from one uncertainty to another. A journey in which the traveller becomes more concerned with the concern itself rather than the final destination, and the city surrounding the path becomes increasingly pregnant with stories and fictions. These, in turn, haven taken root in reality, become free to speak of it from the perspective of possibility, able to reveal its contradictions, and grasp its deep tensions invisible to the naked eye.

For this city is made up as much of parks and squares as it is of stories of constant retelling, gradually sinking into these urban places. Moving from mouth to mouth, these stories change this space, at the same time changing themselves, transcending the boundaries of an individual being. On the one hand, this relay of constant retelling is inseparable from a conservative approach to the past, the preservation of heritage and the attempt to make it more “present” by sticking memorial plaques on walls and seating marble gentlemen in stone armchairs on the squares. On the other hand, it gives a voice to what we might call folklore – a certain “people’s throat” that gargles the same syllables until it transforms them into something new. Paradoxically, this never-ending retelling shows us that this “people’s throat” contains a kind of negative aspect to memory – it is important to hear what is being said, but even more important to listen to what remains silenced.

Thus, the works presented in ‘Palydos’ seek to immerse in this peculiar “swamp of the city’s subconscious” and grasp these orderless life forces spontaneously forming the city: a curiosity permeated with dreams, desperation or laziness, outbursts of hidden lust, dreams and hallucinations, thoughtlessly broken promises, exceptions to behaviour that summarize rules, or just wordless mutual understanding.

Graphic designer:
Vytautas Volbekas

Translation and proofreading:
Aleksandra Bondarev

Exhibition documentation:
Laurynas Skaisgiela

The project is financed by Lithuanian Council for Culture

Supporters:
UAB „Rėmelis“, Valdas Studio

Partners:
Starship magazine, echogonewrong.com, artnews.lt

Many thanks to:
Autarkia, Nick Bastis, Justė Beniušytė, Aleksandra Bondarev, Lina Blauzdavičiūtė, Vytautas Budziejus, Jokūbas Čižikas, Danutė Gambickaitė, Kipras Garla, Gailė Griciūtė, Ričardas Gerasimovičius, Antanas Gerlikas, Edvinas Grinkevičius, Adam Harrison, Eglė Juocevičiūtė, Petras Išora and Ona Lozuraitytė, Monika Kalinauskaitė, Kaunas Artists’ House, Valentinas Klimašauskas, Agnė Kuprytė, Matas Labašauskas,Lithuanian Interdisciplinary Artists’ Association, Ignas Meilūnas, Pilypas Misiukevičius, Beatričė Mockevičiūtė, Greta Milevičiūtė, Ariane Müller, Robertas Narkus, João Laia, Thomas Plantenga, Matthew Post, Valdas Pukevičius, Andrius and Mykolas Sinkevičiai, Greta Slivskytė, Antanas Stanislauskas, Aistė Marija Stankevičiūtė, magazine „Starship“, Rūta Stepanovaitė, Emilija Škarnulytė, Andrius Šoblinskas, Gintautas Trimakas, Rokas Vaičiulis, Kotryna Žukauskaitė

Reproduction of the picture used:
Stanislovas Bohušas-Sestšencevičius, „Children of Vilnius (Famine in Vilnius)“ / „Children in the Outskirts“. Oil on canvas. 210 x 205 cm, 1917. Courtesy of the Lithuanian National Museum of Art