On September 6 & 7, the opening weekend of 15th Baltic Triennial Same Day will present a live programme of contributions by Andrius Arutiunian, Mette Edvardsen & Iben Edvardsen, Toine Horvers, Dana Michel, and Eszter Salamon.
Friday 6 September
18:00 Exhibition opening / First Floor Lobby
Same Day includes contributions by Rey Akdogan, Nick Bastis, Kazimierz Bendkowski, Geta Brătescu, Matt Browning, Tom Burr, Elene Chantladze, Josef Dabernig, Aria Dean & Laszlo Horvath, Gintaras Didžiapetris, Jason Dodge, Kevin Jerome Everson, Simone Forti, Michèle Graf & Selina Grüter, Villu Jõgeva, Tarik Kiswanson, Michael Kleine, Běla Kolářová, Jiří Kovanda, Kitty Kraus, Bradley Kronz, Kaarel Kurismaa, Simon Lässig, Ian Law, Klara Lidén, Jolanta Marcolla, Ugnė Nakaitė with Urtė Jarmuškaitė & Pranas Gustainis, Elena Narbutaitė, Ewa Partum, Matthew Langan-Peck, Julie Peeters & BILL, Cameron Rowland, Margaret Salmon, Stephen Sutcliffe, Tanya Syed, Jean-Marie Straub & Danièle Huillet, Raša Todosijević, Thanasis Totsikas, Maria Toumazou, Rosemarie Trockel, Christos Tzivelos, Mare Vint, Tanja Widmann, Marina Xenofontos, and Eiko Yamazawa. The exhibition is curated by Tom Engels and Maya Tounta.
18:00 Andrius Arutiunian / Armen / Car ride starting in the Sculpture Yard / Registration required / 42 min. / Repeated every hour on the hour, last ride 21:00
Drawing from a personal collection of cassettes, vinyl, and VHS tapes of diasporic Armenian pop and disco from the 1970s to the 1990s, Andrius Arutiunian, himself Armenian-Lithuanian, remixes and reimagines the personal and cultural memory embedded in this music. While Armen also exists as a record and a live music performance, this Vilnius iteration taps into Arutiunian’s childhood memories of Armenia, where the sounds of blaring music from the speakers of ageing Mercedes-Benz taxis greeted arrivals at Zvartnots Airport in Yerevan. Published on an audio cassette, Armen is experienced through a taxi’s sound system, with the journey’s duration mirroring the combined lengths of the cassette’s A and B sides. The route, mapped out by Arutiunian, evokes a passage between two intertwined cities and homes, encapsulating the shared histories they embody.
19:00 Eszter Salamon / Dance for Nothing (revisited) / Performance / 45 min. / First Floor Inner Yard
In Dance for Nothing (revisited), Eszter Salamon returns to John Cage’s Lecture on Nothing (1949), a piece of music that suggests that what seems to be ‘nothing’ is not empty but filled with possibilities and invites listeners to experience the act of listening as inherently meaningful. Building on her 2010 choreography Dance for Nothing, where Salamon first interacted with Cage’s text by repeating it from a slowed-down in-ear recording performed by American cellist and composer Frances-Marie Uitti, she moved among an audience positioned on four sides. In this iteration, Salamon intensifies the lecture’s format, using only a chair and microphone as she recites Cage’s words. Pairing these recitations with unintended movements that evolve from ‘at hand’ or ‘readily available’ gestures into complex progressions and modulations, she creates a composition where spoken word and physical action move side by side, interacting without interference.
20:00 Julie Peeters & BILL / Magazine launch / First Floor Lobby
BILL is a ‘magazine without words’ conceived and edited by graphic designer Julie Peeters, with Elena Narbutaitė serving as Associate Editor. Each year, BILL publishes an issue that uses the logic of the image to collect photographs and visual reproductions sourced from artists, archives, and rare book collections. Prioritising visual reading without distraction, the images in the magazine are printed without any accompanying text. The 5th issue of BILL launches on the occasion of the opening of Same Day and contains 192 offset printed pages printed in CMYK, silver, black and white on a dozen different paper stocks with Japanese bound signatures, depicting sand, wind, tide, bills, tulips, LA, parking lots, waves, thoughts, bagels, prints, Tokyo, orchids, horses, backs, balm, magazines, updates, shadows, Elena’s shoe, two mud-baths, and a garage door, contributed by Boyle Family, Jochen Lempert, Ketuta Alexi-Meskhishvili, Gillian Garcia, Beat Streuli, Takashi Homma, JP, Adrianna Glaviano, Mimosa Echard, Rosalind Nashashibi, Gerald Domenig, Christian Kōun Alborz Oldham, Martiniano, and Blommers Schumm.
Benedikt Reichenbach wrote about BILL: ‘In terms of empowerment, where identity is typically formed merely in relation to a dominant structure, looking at BILL seems to bring you closer to yourself, without ever leaving it static at what that is. […] By putting you in the middle of its content, which at no point has anything to prove, you’re asked to articulate your own point of view to what you’re seeing. And if Peeters merely refers to the ornithological meaning of name and logo, it might just express the nature of BILL: a refusal to speak or have things resolved.’
Saturday 7 September
5:30 – 20:55 Toine Horvers / Rolling 1 / Performance / 15 h. 25 min. / Main Hall
Ten snare drums are positioned in single-file in the main hall of the CAC. At first light, at 5:30 am on 7 September, ten drummers (20 on rotation) assemble in position. A sensor measures the light on the ceiling at the point at which it enters the room. The measurements are displayed on a screen as a score for the players to follow and determine the strength of their drum roll. Until the last light at 8:55 pm, for 15 hours and 25 uninterrupted minutes, the intensity of the percussion echoes the luminance of the hall.
‘My sculpture consists of a human being who, for a time, is moving, living on the tops of his energy, and by this action abolishes time.’ – from ‘Drumming’ by Toine Horvers in The Act, 1988/1989.
Originally titled Rolling, the performance has since been renamed Rolling 1 to indicate its belonging to a larger series of ‘Rolling’ performances using drums as instruments for measurement and translation. Initially conceived for and performed at de Appel, Amsterdam, in 1986, the restaging of Rolling at the Triennial is only its second iteration 38 years later. Video documentation of the original performance was presented in the exhibition Performance Registrations: Dan Graham, Toine Horvers, Joan Jonas at Laurenz Space in Vienna in 2024.
14:00 Andrius Arutiunian / Armen / Car ride starting in the Sculpture Yard / Registration required / 42 min. / Repeated every hour on the hour, last ride 21:00
Drawing from a personal collection of cassettes, vinyl, and VHS tapes of diasporic Armenian pop and disco from the 1970s to the 1990s, Andrius Arutiunian, himself Armenian-Lithuanian, remixes and reimagines the personal and cultural memory embedded in this music. While Armen also exists as a record and a live music performance, this Vilnius iteration taps into Arutiunian’s childhood memories of Armenia, where the sounds of blaring music from the speakers of ageing Mercedes-Benz taxis greeted arrivals at Zvartnots Airport in Yerevan. Published on an audio cassette, Armen is experienced through a taxi’s sound system, with the journey’s duration mirroring the combined lengths of the cassette’s A and B sides. The route, mapped out by Arutiunian, evokes a passage between two intertwined cities and homes, encapsulating the shared histories they embody.
19:00 Dana Michel / PRETZEL DI AQUA / Performance / 30 min. / CAC
In PRETZEL DI AQUA, Dana Michel employs improvisation as a tool to navigate the present moment, crafting a one-off live performance that is both a response to the immediate situation and the surrounding exhibition. The title itself acts as a predicate for the performance, suggesting a contraction of opposites: a fluid, intertwining shape that embodies tension and flow, structure and spontaneity. PRETZEL DI AQUA twists the seemingly static, challenging the fixed nature of things by introducing a disruption to the predictable and inviting a continuous re-engagement with the present.
21:00 Mette Edvardsen & Iben Edvardsen / Livre d’images sans images / Performance / 60 min. / Cinema Hall
Livre d’images sans images (A Picture Book Without Pictures) is a work by Mette Edvardsen and her daughter Iben Edvardsen that unfolds through vinyl, paper, and live performance. It takes its title from a book by Hans Christian Andersen, also referred to as The Moon Chronicler. The book follows a conversation between a painter and the Moon, in which the Moon describes what she sees on her journey around the world every evening, telling the painter to paint what she describes. As Mette Edvardsen outlines, ‘This conversation, as in the now obsolete meaning of the word (“a place where one lives or dwells”), was the starting point for our work. Using the weather report as dramaturgy (“the moon did not show up every evening, sometimes a cloud came in between”), we have created and collected materials from our conversations in the form of recordings, text, voice, drawings, references, found images, loose connections, inspirations and imaginations, in the order they came to us. They are at the same time sources and traces, material and support for new imaginations or events to come.’
Title image: Birth, circa 1970s, silver gelatin print attributed to Elia Lekodimitri under the pseudonym Emerson. Photograph courtesy of The George Tourkovasilis Estate
