“At the exhibition I turn to the phenomenon of light – brilliance, sun, searing power, the touch of radioactive photons, to help tell the story of the contemporary moment of the Baltics. I speak about what it means to grow up here, being the first children of the great rupture, the seeming freedom. Where do the silent brilliances – from the threat of invasion to the sunwarm memories of the dreams for future, progress, nationhood and its autopoiesis – the capitalist dream and the communist dream – blend muddy, and melt.
On the backdrop of these legacies, I ask – how can light be unchained from the lethally abstacting violences conjured by the enlightenment and alive and well still today (Denise Ferreira da Silva)? How can the touch of a song break the searing gaze of the eye-watering, bone aching light?
Do you remember the moment when you closed your eyes in the warm afternoon sun, and nothing seemed impossible?
Do you remember a brilliance so bright that it annihilates all inclarities, opacities?
Whose violence,
whose love?
Who owns light?”
The 4-channel ambisonic sound installation with voiceover monologues creates an atmospheric soundscape and invites the listener to selected locations over the Baltics – Iru Power Plant, the town of Šiauliai and the landscapes around it (the location of the main NATO airbase in the Baltics) in Lithuania and by proxy of Riga airport to the Zaporozhye Nuclear Power Plant in Ukraine. Also to the post-apocalyptic (or post-imperial?) world close to Prague, pained by searing light and its past, created by the writer Missouri Williams in her debut novel “Doloriad” (2021).
The space of the exhibition is expanded by performative actions by Karolina Januleviciute (Lithuania) and weronika Zalewska (Poland) and a live sound performance by Sille Kima. Both of the guest artists share the experience of the post soviet and have their birth dates in the beginning of 90s.
The exhibition acts as a prologue for “Brilliance” („Helevalgus”) – an artist film and a research project by Sille Kima about the Eastern-European mindset and its connections with global extractivism (human resources, labor power and natural resources alike) and the continuous creation of peripheries by the neoliberal world. A predicament that connects regions across the world.
Karolina Januleviciute’s “Garment that needs sun” is an experiential speculation upon the intrinsic need for fibre to receive solar light and energy. The strand of fibre that has grown, harvested, treated to be carded, spun, woven and sewn into a garment hold a memory of solar warmth within itself. The proposed work is combined from an essay and a hand-made garment, both unfolding the intricate need of cellulose based fibre garments, while touching upon the colonial history of cotton, extinct harvesting of linen in the Baltic states while grounding the subject in the civilisation-long image of laundry hanging outdoors.
“the fruit was on the public side of the fence” by Weronika Zalewska is a sculptural and multimedia installation addressing issues of soil detoxificaiton – both from armed conflict and large-scale agriculture – but also speaks about the processes of regenerating imagination and developing alternative meanings of economics, value, exchange, community. Using rhizomes, seeds, found objects, but also clustered volumes of a soviet encyclopedia and a video juxtaposing a global stock exchange with grassroots exchange, the artist shows the proximity of skin – both human and more-than-human – to global systems of oppression euphemistically called organization. The title of the work suggests an ambivalence between neighborhood looting and the possibility of exchange, the private and public, totalitarian and neoliberal, suggesting paths of grassrooting.
The interventions of the guest arstists and the sound performance by Sille Kima take place Saturday, June 8 at 6 pm. The interventions will be accessible to the public until the end of the exhibition.
Sille Kima is an artist and a mover in body, sense and sound. Her installations of sound and video are rooted in the haptics of the sonic, and look at the interplay between setting and dissolution of boundaries within intimate relationships and power structures alike.
They also make and perform music about the grammars of love formed by an exploitative world under the name “Silly love songs” and are co-tending to an open garden and a garden residency near Narva Art Residency in the eastern border town of Narva, Estonia.
Karolina Januleviciute is a Lithuanian artist and garment-maker based in Stockholm, Sweden. In her practice, she conducts artistic research focusing on the garment as a subject to guide a narrative on Baltic Sea region identity, memory and wardrobe as a method for insight into how garments are entangled into our biographies.
She is focused on storytelling through colors, materiality and sensory pleasure of dressing. A continuous dialogue and calibration with the fiber and touch sublimates through an auto-ethnographic lens into making processes, trapping memories and worries in the garments created. In her practice, a garment is taken as the subject and a material reference in the web of connections extended from fashion as a collective phenomena, poetics of making and life on earth. She is particularly interested in sustaining her artistic practice in terms of current urgencies and communal wellness from a feminist perspective.
Weronika Zalewska is a transmedia artist, poet, student of Dutch Art Institute living in Warsaw. She is interested in developing more-than-human languages and explores interspecies entanglements, biopolitics and alternative futures.. She works closely with the Office for Postartistic Services and the Bc Zmiana Foundation. She is co-curator of the HER Docs Film Festival and the performance program The Discomfort of Evening at the Zacheta National Gallery of Art. This summer she will participate in Vilnius Performance Biennial and in Triennale in Orosko Centre of Polish Sculpture, reflecting upon the themes of decolonising the earth, post soviet conditioning and grassroot knowledge-making.
Gallerist: Mari Škerin
Technical support and installation: Lauri Kütt, Silver Marge
Graphic design: Ann Pajuväli
Thanks to: Arjuna Neuman, Stephen McEvoy, Urmo Teekivi (Tartu Kunstimaja), Indrek Grigor (Tartmus), Madis Eiche (Võru Kannel)
Supported by: Võru linn, Eesti Kultuurkapital
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Kanal gallery
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