On 6 February, we invite visitors to the solo exhibition ‘Fortune Whispers when the Static is Rising’ by Lithuanian artist Tata Frenkel. In this exhibition, the artist explores communication before and beyond articulation, examining the pressures and limitations of language, the reception and transmission of information through invisible forms – such as intuition, chance, radio communication, and sound – as well as what she describes in her practice as ‘unseen arts’. The exhibition features radio and electroacoustic objects, diagrammatic drawings developed over many years (which also function as scores for narratives unfolding during the artist’s meetings and workshops), and a lottery machine that allows visitors to win invisible yet highly positive prizes. The exhibition is accompanied by a series of live encounters titled Cosmic Tea Machine.
In June, the Northern Gallery (Ground Floor) will host the 19th edition of the international artists’ film platform Artists’ Film International (AFI), titled ‘A Type of Power’. In this year’s edition, the video works question what it means to look, to witness, and to be seen in an age of constant image flow and surveillance systems. The programme foregrounds the relationship between gaze and power – how it protects or exposes, affirms or rejects – and considers how responsibility permeates every encounter between camera, subject, and viewer.
The Northern Gallery’s exhibition programme will conclude on October 2 with an exhibition by Palestinian artists Basel Abbas (b. 1983, Nicosia, Cyprus) and Ruanne Abou-Rahme (b. 1983, Boston, USA), who live and work between New York and Ramallah. The duo’s artistic practice combines found material with their own productions: fragments of sound, image, text, and objects are reworked and rewritten into entirely new ‘scripts’. This process gives rise to a practice that investigates the political, instinctive, and material possibilities of sound, image, text, and place, ultimately taking the form of multimedia installations and live audio-visual performances. Working at the intersections of performativity, political imagination, the body, and virtuality, the duo explores a contemporary landscape marked by seemingly perpetual crisis and an endless ‘present’, shaped by the politics of desire and catastrophe.
On 23 April, the opening weekend of the major group exhibition ‘Housekeeping in a Dangerous Time’ will begin. Curated by Inesa Brašiškė, Edgaras Gerasimovičius, and Povilas Gumbis of Sapieha Palace, the exhibition explores – through the works of contemporary artists – the shifting ideas that define stages of human life within an increasingly virtualised and digitised everyday reality.
On 23 May, Sapieha Palace will host its second symposium, curated by Inesa Brašiškė. The symposium invites reflection on the role of storytelling – word, voice, text, listening, and memory – in contemporary art and culture. The power of narrative will be examined from postcolonial, feminist, and new-media perspectives by art historians Irene V. Small and Irene Revell; artists Agnieszka Polska, Marissa Lee Benedict, and David Rueter; curator and art critic Monika Kalinauskaitė; and others.