On Friday 20 October at 6pm, the National Gallery of Art (Konstitucijos pr. 22, Vilnius) will host the JCDecaux Award exhibition “In Exchange to Ages”, organised by the Contemporary Art Centre and the JCDecaux OOH network – Out-of-Home digital and static advertising for the urban outdoor environment. The exhibition, presenting the work of emerging artists, interweaves folklore, gossip, electricity, weather forecasting, coding, and the ratio of metal to soluble minerals, while the expression of artistic ideas ranges from sculpture to performance.
Following an open call, which received more than 100 applications from emerging artists, curators Kotryna Markevičiūtė and Ona Juciūtė selected more participants than previous years and will present six artists in the exhibition: Joelis Aškinis, Tata Frenkel, Sandra Golubjevaitė, Urtė Janus, Mykolas Valantinas and Miglė Vyčinaitė. The curators noted that the ideas behind the selected artworks easily shaped the vision of the exhibition, with interesting interconnections that reflect various time experiences differently.
Discussing their intentions behind the exhibition, the curators say: “From the moment you say a word or a fantastic image is conjured up in your head, when an HTML code is generated in the browser, when you enter the electromagnetic field of other bodies or a rain cloud forms over your head, to indefinitely long civilisational shifts or geological processes. In this exhibition, the artworks stumble on one another, meet in silent dialogue, scatter across the National Gallery of Art and enter into the nearby collection of art. Through the fragmented narrative we have invited viewers to exchange knowledge and beliefs that shape our daily reality into experiences lingering in the flow of different times and temporalities.” – the curators say, explaining their vision of the exhibition.“
The JCDecaux Award is an annual cycle of exhibitions initiated in 2016 by the Contemporary Art Centre and the JCDecaux to promote the artwork of emerging Lithuanian artists, raising its profile in Lithuania and abroad, and expanding the public interest in contemporary art. Each year, the project’s curators receive applications through an open call, evaluate them and select participants to receive financial and institutional support for the creation and presentation of new artworks. The one-off award of €4,000, granted by the JCDecaux, is awarded by an international jury to one participating artist or collective based on the originality, relevance and artistic expression of their artwork. The public are also encouraged to express their preference. The artist most appreciated by the public will be given the opportunity to present their project within the JCDecaux OOH network of public advertising spaces.
The exhibition runs until 3 December 2023 at the National Gallery of Art (Konstitucijos pr. 22, Vilnius). Opening hours of the National Gallery of Art: Tuesday & Wednesday 11am–7pm, Thursday 12–8pm, Friday & Saturday 11am–7pm, Sunday 11am–5pm.
JCDECAUX AWARD 2023 PARTICIPANTS
JOELIS AŠKINIS lives and works in Vilnius. In 2022, he received a master’s from the Vilnius Academy of Art. The artist’s works mainly fall into the category of performance art, yet he prefers referring to them more adequately as meta-events. In his work, Aškinis seeks to emphasize the multilayeredness of symbols and signs, how their perception may differ, and how such semantic variance can activate the state of a present moment.
TATA FRENKEL is an artist and educator living and creating in Vilnius. In 2022, she received her master’s from the Photography and Media Art Department of the Vilnius Academy of Art. The artist researches Unseen Arts (a term coined by Frenkel herself), namely, performative speaking, storytelling, and other forms of articulation or sonification.
SANDRA GOLUBJEVAITĖ lives and works in Amsterdam. In 2017, she graduated from the Gerrit-Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam, and from 2019 to 2021 continued her master’s studies at the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam. In her work, the artist seeks to build a connection between language, autobiography, and coding practices as an offset and resistance to the prevailing commercial development of digital space.
MIGLĖ VYČINAITĖ is a Lithuanian artist living and working in Copenhagen. In 2023, she graduated from The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. In her creative work, the artist employs different media, such as video art, sculpture, sound, text, and installation. The dominant themes in Vyčinaitė’s work are contemporary myth and story making, and magical materialism, among others. The artist develops speculative scenarios that intertwine with unorthodox stories.
URTĖ JANUS is a Lithuanian artist living and working in London. Janus is currently a part of Alexander McQueen’s Sarabande Foundation residency program. She creates sculptural installations investigating the flow of time, and the interplay between human creations and the natural world. In her work, Janus employs slow chemical processes and lets the environment affect her creations.
MYKOLAS VALANTINAS is an interdisciplinary artist who works with photography, installation, and video art, researching sci-fi and memory-related themes. Inspired by the psychoanalytic method, the symbolism of the past and current cultures, and Lithuanian folk art, Valantinas works within the frame of documentaries and folk horror. This way, he challenges the dominant narrative and seeks to reveal the complexity of the human experience.
JCDECAUX AWARD 2023 CURATORIAL TEAM
KOTRYNA MARKEVIČIŪTĖ is a curator of art and educational activities and a researcher. In her professional activity, she combines interests broadly encompassing contemporary art, cultural education, and sociology. Markevičiūtė is interested in the interdisciplinary interaction between these fields, both in creating new experiences of art and cultural education and in reflecting on the relationship of contemporary art with established ways of knowing (science) or forms of organising social life (politics). Markevičiūtė currently works in the education department of the National Gallery of Art and collaborates with other Lithuanian cultural institutions on curatorial and educational projects. In 2018-2020, she was a curator of residencies and exhibitions at the Rupert Centre for Art, Residencies and Education, where she co-curated the exhibitions Jonas Mekas: Let Me Dream Utopias (2019, Rupert) and Other Rooms (2020, Rupert, LDS Gallery).
ONA JUCIŪTĖ is an artist, curator, and stage designer based in Vilnius. She has held solo exhibitions at Editorial Project Space (Vilnius) and the Centre for Contemporary Art Derry~Londonderry (London). Her work has also been presented in group exhibitions at MOCAK Museum (Krakow), Istanbul Biennial Parallel Programme, Kaunas Artists’ House, and multiple institutions in Vilnius, including the Contemporary Art Centre, National Gallery of Art, Atletika, Rupert, Swallow Project Space, and others. Juciūtė participated in residency programmes at AIR Niederosterreich in Austria, Stiftung Kuenstlerdorf in Germany, and Diyalog Istanbul in Turkey. In 2021, her sculptures became part of the permanent collection of the Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art in Helsinki. Juciūtė has been awarded the JCDecaux Prize 2016 and a prize founded by Lithuanian-born American artist Aleksandra Kašuba.
JCDECAUX AWARD 2023 JURY
MILDA BATAKYTE is a Lithuanian curator based in London. She is the Exhibition Curator at Auto Italia, a London-based non-profit contemporary art institution dedicated to researching, producing and exhibiting works on the intersections of queer studies and social change. She is the former Acting Director of Rupert, a centre for art, residencies and alternative education in Vilnius. In 2019, Milda was appointed as the Assistant Curator of the Lithuanian Pavilion at the 17th International Architecture Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia. In the past, she assisted the artist Mona Hatoum at her studio in London and worked at White Cube, London; Lisson Gallery, London and Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, among others. Milda received her MFA degree in Curating from Goldsmiths, University of London.
NINA CANELL is a Swedish artist who studied in Dublin and currently lives and works in Berlin. She has had solo museum exhibitions at Kunstmuseum St. Gallen; The Artist’s Institute, New York (with Milford Graves); Moderna Museet, Stockholm; S.M.A.K, Ghent, Camden Arts Centre, London; Arko Art Center, Seoul; Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin (with Rolf Julius); mumok, Vienna; and the Fridericianum, Kassel. Canell has taken part in the Venice, Sydney, Lyon, Manifesta, Gwangju, Cuenca and Liverpool biennials, as well as group exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Museo Tamayo, Mexico City; Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, Vienna Secession; and Guggenheim, Bilbao, among others. Nina Canell frequently collaborates with Robin Watkins on installations and artists’ books.
MARIANNE DOBNER is a curator at mumok – Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, where she curated exhibitions such as Elisabeth Wild. Imagination Factory (2023), Adam Pendleton. Blackness, White, and Light (2023), ANDY WARHOL EXHIBITS a glittering alternative (2020), DEFROSTING THE ICEBOX. Guesting at mumok: The Hidden Treasures of the Collection of Greek and Roman Antiquities of the Kunsthistorisches Museum and Weltmuseum Wien (2020), MISFITTING TOGETHER. Serial Formations of Pop Art, Minimal Art and Conceptual Art (2020), Cécile B. Evans. AMOS WORLD: Episode One (2018), Julian Turner. why not (2017), Fischerspooner. Sir (2017), Hannah Black. Small Room (2017), and Anna-Sophie Berger. Places to fight and to make up (2016). Dobner is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Vienna, where she is completing her dissertation entitled ANDY WARHOL EXHIBITS. A Critical Approach towards Andy Warhol’s Exhibition Practice (1952–1987). From 2015 to 2016, she was director of the Galerie Bastian in Berlin. From 2012 to 2013, she was an assistant curator at Museum Brandhorst in Munich, where she assisted on the world’s first exhibition of Andy Warhol’s work in books, titled Reading Andy Warhol (2013). She studied art history in Vienna, Paris, Munich, and Berkeley.