Exhibition at the CAC Reading Room
“I arrived at the sanatorium to look for peace of mind, to catch a break. It was a transformative experience. I lived through the recuperation of my creative powers and, besides, I could, even if for a little while, silence the obsessive urge to justify and rationalise all of my actions. While belonging to the secret society The Order of the Spur, I had stopped creating artefacts. Even when we were walking through the widest of streets we pushed on each other, huddled together and, unwittingly, brushed against each other, even if only with the spikes of our elbows, and it is precisely due to this reason why all the works which we created happened on the road, and only in our heads and memories. And whenever one of us attempted to start creating something material – writing, drawing, conceiving anything in a space or painting – the others would immediately engage their critical apparatuses and paralyse the desire for action (we called it taming). Everything would be preserved solely in wordplay and ritual dancing.”
CAC Reading Room presents Vytenis Burokas’s watercolours and ink drawings – rapid motions from his notebook, signs of his own fictional community, rituals of recovery. In his practice, the artist investigates metabolism and the fermentation of knowledge, splintered traces of cultural influences and the new whole formed by straining them through the filter of personal experiences and observations.
Vytenis Burokas graduated from contemporary sculpture and art pedagogy programs in Vilnius Academy of Arts and was a participant of “Rupert” alternative education program in the years 2013 – 2014. For a couple of years, the artist worked as a curator of exhibitions and the educational program in the National Gallery of Art, Vilnius, and is currently teaching at the Sculpture Department of Vilnius Academy of Arts.
