The Sweet Sweat of the Future

Engaging with these broad questions, the exhibition examines Lithuanian art from the past 40 years. The exhibition starts from the end of the seventies through early eighties – a period just before great change. While it is common to talk about new Lithuanian art starting in the period of Sąjūdis (the late 80s independence movement), less considered is what it was like to create, as an artist, without knowing about these upcoming changes, but slowly sensing them as they approached.

Sometimes we choose to sweat profoundly ourselves or make others to do that for a sweeter future, but sometimes we do the opposite – relinquish our pretensions to prove our power and instead smell and follow the sweet scent coming from the future; secreted by the sweaty, warming, glands of the earth strained by more and more humans. The exhibition presents these and other strategies for facing this future. In some of the exhibited works, one can perceive conscious reflections of the future and the powers enabling it. In other works, the authors appear as the unbeknownst harbingers of the future. Connected in a concentric structure, the artworks form a unitary totality. The closer we get to the centre of this totality the greater we push forward to the future. Yet, moving in circles, we can feel how the ponderings of one future overlap with others.