VILNIUS COOP exhibition venue
Gediminas Avenue no. 27
Wednesday, 11 November, 7pm

Joanna Sokolowska ‘Another City, Another Life – of the Archives’, video screening with introduction

This programme, consisting of photograph, video work and documentation of artistic actions, is conceived as a modified and extended version of an archive accompanying the project ‘Another City, Another Life’ (www.ancity.blogspot.com), which took place in Warsaw in 2008.

The aim of the archive is to map the ways in which contemporary artists represent and engage in spatial, aesthetic, social and political regimes that developed in various cities of East Europe since the beginning of decisive changes at the end of the 1980s and early 1990s.

The archive is constructed loosely around several thematic questions: What are the contemporary consequences and potential for the abandoned ideas of the revolution, communism and socialist modernity, that were implemented in urban planning and collective identities? What kind of new collective bodies, or shared experiences can emerge today from this context? Are there any new possibilities for the ‘lived’, subjective experiences of inhabiting the cities? How is the dialectic of destruction and building, inscribed in diverse material layers, of cities related to the memory work and processes of the constant (re)writing/actualisation of history? What is omitted or excluded in historical narrations and current images of the post-socialist cities, what kind of strategies do the artists use to render these phenomena visible? How do the artists position themselves within the ambivalent field of cultural production, what role can they play in the economy (symbolical capital), public and political spaces of cities undergoing transformation? Finally can the economic ‘grey zone’, in which – despite the rhetoric of cultural capitalism – many artists in the post-socialist countries still function, be transformed into experimental fieldwork to offer possibilities of breaking away from using art for economic productivity?

The selection will include works by: Chto Delat?, Škart, Zbyněk Baladrán, Mona Vătămanu & Florin Tudor, Khinkali Juice, Grigor Khatchatryan, Lusine Talalyan, Tadej Pogačar, Miklós Erhardt, R.E.P., Voina, Angelika Fojtuch, Karol Radziszewski

Joanna Sokołowska (*1978) is an art historian and curator currently at the Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź. She is mainly interested in economies of artistic production in relation to the changes of labour along with the urban transformations in post-socialist countries. Her recent curatorial work includes: ‘Arbeiter verlassen die Arbeitsstätte’ at the Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst in Leipzig and ‘Another City, Another Life‘ at the Zachęta National Gallery of Art in Warsaw and in diverse locations in the city.

This event is kindly supported by the Polish Institute in Vilnius