Since 1979 Today, the Baltic Triennale organized by ŠMC is one of the most important contemporary art exhibitions in Northern Europe. This time the project is curated by Tomas Engels and Maya Tounta, who a year ago organized the prologue of the triennial “Pasiliki nulijes” in Vilnius – a one-day event presenting the curatorial direction with live performances by the artist(s). The titles of the prologue of the Triennale, like the exhibition itself, are borrowed from the poems of the little-known Greek poet Emerson.
The official opening ceremony of the triennial will take place on Friday, September 6, at 6 p.m. After the opening night of the triennial, the program will be extended by the performance of the Hungarian-born artist Eszter Salamon, followed by the presentation of the new issue of BILL, the “magazine without words” published by exhibition designer Julie Peeters. After the program of live performances, the Contemporary Art Center will host an evening extension with music selected by artists Jakūbs Čižiks and Antanas Dombrovskij.
On Saturday, September 7, the longest opening piece of the triennial will begin the program at dawn in the Great Hall of the CMC, which will last more than 15 hours until dusk. This is a work for drums by Dutch artist Toine Horvers, which was first presented in Amsterdam and will now be revived 38 years later. The piece will be performed by musicians from Lithuania. On Saturday, visitors will be invited to two more performative, live works of the program – the performance of Canadian Dana Michel and the return of Norwegian choreographer and dancer Mette Edvardsen, who performed “Untitled” in the prologue of the triennial, to the exhibition with her daughter Iben Edvardsen. Together, they will present a new piece performed live.
On both days of the opening program, visitors will also be invited to a performance by the Lithuanian artist of Armenian origin Andrias Arutiunians – a car ride around Vilnius while listening to the soundtrack created by the artist. Registration is required for those who wish to experience this journey offered by the artist. All events in the opening program are free, and the exhibition will be free to visit on Friday and Saturday.
The opening events of the 15th Baltic Triennale are part of the Vilnius Gallery Weekend and coincide with the start of the “Survival Kit” festival organized by the Latvian Contemporary Art Center in Riga. The abundance of events in different places shows the vitality of the contemporary art scene in the Baltic States.
The opening weekend of the 15th Baltic Triennale “Ta pati diena” on September 6-7. program:
“Armen” by Andrius Arutiunia (2023–2024), 42 min.
Friday, September 6, 6:00pm to 9:00pm
Saturday, September 7, 2:00pm to 9:00pm
Using a personal collection of audio tapes, vinyl records and VHS tapes from the 1970s to 1990s. Armenian diaspora pop and disco style music recordings, Armenian-Lithuanian Andrius Arutiunian remixes and reinterprets the personal and cultural memory hidden in this music.
Photo by Ilmė Vyšniauskaitė/Andrius Arutiunian “Armen”, Music in Space, 2023
Although the piece exists both as an audio recording and a live piece of music, Arutiunian’s version presented in Vilnius draws on his childhood memories of Armenia and the pounding music blaring from the speakers of aging Mercedes-Benz taxis that greeted arrivals at Zvartnots Airport in Yerevan. The track “Armen” recorded on the soundtrack reaches the ears of the listeners through the taxi’s sound system, and the duration of the car journey corresponds to the total duration of the audio tapes on sides A and B. The route created by the artist resembles a journey between the two cities intertwined in his memory and his two homes, reflecting the common history they embody.
Participation only available after registration.
Eszter Salamon “Dance for Nothing (revisited)” (2024), 45 min.
Friday, September 6, 19:00 / ČMC lobby
In Dance for Nothing (revisited), Eszter Salamon interprets John Cage’s Lecture on Nothing (1949), a musical piece that presents the idea that “ nothing’ is not a void – that it is full of possibilities, and listeners are invited to experience listening as a meaningful act in itself. For the first time this piece by Cage was interpreted by Salamon in 2010. in a dance called “Dance for Nothing”, moving between the audience on all four sides, listening to a slow-motion version of Cage’s piece recorded by American cellist and composer Frances-Marie Uitti.
Sebastian Reiser nuotr./Eszter Salamon in her performance “Dance for Nothing (revisited)” (2024)
In the new version of Salamon’s piece, the lecture aspect is more apparent: she reads Cage’s text, and the set design of the piece consists of nothing more than a chair and a microphone. She combines speaking with movements that are not planned at the beginning and appear as if “at hand”, suggest themselves during the piece itself, and eventually develop into more complex sequences and variations. Voiced words and body movements in this composition develop harmoniously side by side, without interfering with each other.
Julie Peeters ir BILL „BILL 5“ (2024)
Friday, September 6, 20:00 / ČMC lobby
BILL is a “magazine without words”. Its creator and compiler is graphic designer Julie Peeters, who is assisted by Elena Narbutaitė as the second editor. Every year a new issue of BILL is published, in which photographs and reproductions of works collected from the artist(s), their archives and rare book collections are published according to a visual logic. In order to prevent anyone from reading a purely visual language, images are printed in the magazine without any text.
The fifth issue of BILL, which will be presented on the opening day of the “Ta pati diena” exhibition, consists of 192 pages of offset printing, printed using CMYK (ŽPGJ), silver, black and white colors and a dozen different types of paper. Japanese bound press bows feature sand, wind, tide, beaks, tulips, Los Angeles, parking lots, waves, thoughts, bagels, prints, Tokyo, orchids, horses, backs, balm, magazines, news, shadows, Elena’s shoe, two mud baths and garage door. Images 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: “When it comes to empowerment, identity is usually formed only in relation to a dominant structure, and looking at BILL feels like you’ve come closer to yourself, and your identity doesn’t stop being different.” […] By including content that in no way aims to prove anything, BILL encourages you to develop your own perspective on what you see. And although Peeters seems to hint at the ornithological significance of the name and logo [viena anglų kalbos žodžio bill reikšmių – snapas]maybe this is exactly what reveals the inherent quality of the magazine – the refusal to speak and explain.”
Toine Horvers „Rolling 1“ (1986/2024), 15 falls. 25 min.
Saturday, September 7, 5:30-8:55pm / Great Hall
Ten solo drums are arranged in a row in the Great Hall of the SMC. September 7 5:30 a.m. ten drummers gather at dawn (20 in total, playing in shifts). The sensor measures the brightness of the sunlight on the ceiling of the hall. The data of these measurements broadcast on the screen tells the drummers how hard to hit the drums. Until 8:55 p.m., when darkness envelops the hall, the 15 hours and 25 minutes of continuous drumming is proportional to the illumination of the hall.
“My sculpture is a person moving and living to the fullest for a certain period of time, and thereby taming time.” – Toine Horvers, “Drumming”, The Actt. 1, Nr. 3, 1988/1989, p. 23
The performance was originally titled “Rolling” and was later renamed “Rolling 1” to indicate that it is part of a larger series of performances called “Rolling” in which drums are used as instruments of measurement and translation from one language to another. “Rolling” was created for the art space “de Appel” in Amsterdam and presented there for the first time in 1986, and at the 15th Baltic Triennale it is performed for the second time after 38 years. Video documentation of the original performance in 2024. was presented in the exhibition “Performance Registrations: Dan Graham, Toine Horvers, Joan Jonas” at the Laurenz Space in Vienna.
Dana Michel PRETZEL IN AQUA (2024), 30 min.
Saturday, September 7, 19:00 / ČMC
In PRETZEL DI AQUA, Dana Michel uses improvisation as a tool to help navigate the present moment. It is a one-off live performance that responds to both the situation of that moment and the exhibition surrounding it.
Mette Edvardsen and Iben Edvardsen „Livre d’images sans images“ (2023), 60 min.
Saturday, September 7, 21:00 / Cinema hall
Livre d’images sans images (Book of pictures without pictures) is a work by Mette Edvardsen and her daughter Iben Edvardsen, realized using vinyl record, paper and live performance. Its name comes from Hans Christian Andersen’s book, also known as What the Moon Saw or The Moon Chronicler. The book tells about the conversation between the painter and the Moon, in which the Moon, a female character (French the moon), describes what she sees every night while traveling around the world, and asks a painter to paint her story.
As Edvardsen points out, “this conversation is understood according to the already forgotten word conversation meaning (“a place where one lives or stays”), became the starting point of our work. Using the weather report as dramaturgy (“the moon didn’t appear every night, sometimes it was blocked by a cloud”), we created and collected material from our conversations – texts, voice recordings, pictures, links, found images, stray links, inspirations and figments of imagination – and we put it together intuitively. These are both traces and sources – material and support for future events and imagination.”
You can read more about the 15th Baltic Triennale “Ta pati diena” and the program of the opening weekend here.
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2024-08-27 15:37:10
