The Contemporary Art Centre (CAC, Vilnius) together with JCDecaux announces an open call for young artists to participate in the JCDecaux Prize 2019 exhibition and is happy to present a larger monetary prize fund this year.

About the exhibition

JCDecaux Prize is a cycle of yearly exhibitions established in 2106 by the Contemporary Arts Centre and JCDecaux, aiming to encourage young Lithuanian artists to create new works, facilitate their presentation in Lithuania and abroad as well as raise the interest of the society in contemporary art. The prize, established by JCDecaux and recently increased to the sum of 4000 euros, is granted to one artist (or artist group), participating in the JCDecaux Prize exhibition, for the originality and relevance of artistic expression.

Participants of the JCDecaux Prize exhibition are selected through an open call. From all the received project proposals curators of the exhibition select five projects and form a conceptual group show. Each of the five projects receives a 1500 Euro budget for production and curatorial assistance. The winner of the prize is being selected by an international jury, newly formed each year from artists, curators and researchers of art.

In 2018, the curators of the exhibition, Monika Kalinauskaitė and Adomas Narkevičius, presented new works by five young artists – Gabrielė Adomaitytė, Matas Janušonis, Goda Palekaitė, Anastasija Sosunova and the „Money Haven“ collective. The curators urged the applicants to focus their attention on political and social problems, to rethink them in the context of artists’ own personal, familial and communal experiences. The participants of the exhibition presented works that explored the problematics of geopolitical fractures, memory, family, loss and civic engagement. The JCDecaux prize was awarded to Anastasija Sosunova. For more information on the previous exhibitions, their participants and prize winners please refer to the website of this project: http://jcdecaux-premija.lt/.

Open call

Although, as every year, this year’s theme of the JCDecaux Prize exhibition is not strictly defined, the curators would like to encourage young creators to not shy away from their impulses and envision the show as a site for interaction between different forces, in which various states and identities are interwoven, where space is carved out for especially fragile and entirely uncompromising approaches alike, and where that which is usually invisible or consciously ignored is brought to the forefront. The artists are urged to reveal their relationship to different systems – cultural, political, ecological – and look for possible positions in a near, concrete future which may differ incomparably from all of its scientific, political and philosophical visions.

The call is open for artists between 18 and 35 years that have Lithuanian citizenship (including Lithuanian citizens currently not living in Lithuania) and for foreign artists of the same age, constantly living and working in Lithuania. The application to participate in the exhibition is comprised of:

Project description (not longer than one A4 page)
Visual material of the project (sketches, visualisations)
Preliminary budget of the project
Artist CV in free form and portfolio

Please send applications till midnight, 7 April 2018 by email [email protected] with the subject line “JCDP19 Name Surname”. Applications can also be provided or sent to the address:

JCDecaux Prize
Contemporary Art Centre
Vokiečių str. 2
01130 Vilnius

Selected participants of the exhibition will be announced before the beginning of May. This year’s exhibition will open to the public in the first half of Autumn.

Curators

The curatorial team of the JCDecaux Prize exhibition changes every two years, thus aiming to maintain the originality of the exhibition, to ensure the novelty and dynamism of curatorial decisions and artistic processes. In 2018 and 2019 the exhibitions are jointly curated by Monika Kalinauskaitė ir Adomas Narkevičius.

Monika Kalinauskaitė is a writer and curator, the co-author of the graphic novel „The Great Outdoors“, currently working in the Vilnius Academy of Arts. Kalinauskaitė regularly publishes fiction texts and exhibition reviews in Lithuanian and international press and works actively with exhibitions of young artists.

Since 2017, Adomas Narkevičius is a curator of artistic residences and education in the Rupert centre for art and residencies. In this institution he also initiated and curated the programme of events of sound art and experimental music. Narkevičius also works with exhibitions of young Lithuanian and foreign artists in Lithuania and curates the 7th programme of alternative education in Rupert. He is the member of the group Without Letters.

The curators of the exhibition are eager to get acquainted with the applications and
work together on a new, dynamic exhibition.

http://jcdecaux-premija.lt/
www.cac.lt
Inquiries:
[email protected]
[email protected]
(+370 5) 2121954