Ilona Jurkonytė
Texts
Image Production and Curation
Other Explorations
I am a film and moving image researcher and curator, currently a Marie Skłodowska‑Curie Actions / UKRI Postdoctoral Fellow at the School of Modern Languages and Centre for Exoplanet Science at the University of St Andrews. In my work I focus on moving image, media, and environmental justice.
Read more →
© Ilona Jurkonytė. All Rights Reserved.
In the Sea of Kaunas
In the Sea of Kaunas, 2017
A
Group Exhibition Video: Portals… Or Location Scouting in Kaunas, Spike
Art Magazine
Dear Activists, Artists, Filmmakers, Spectators,
We all once lived in Kaunas, a failed modernist city with hope. If
you notice a contradiction in this sentence, think of a city or hope as a
trope; a porous hyper-object burrowed with social-economic wormholes, a
conflicting portal to other chains of contradictions, holes, and hopes.
Let’s start anew. As the invitation to make an exhibition came from
the Kaunas International Film Festival it seemed rather natural to ask
ourselves what if this group exhibition was presented as filmed material
and occupied a chosen symbolic video footage instead of being installed
in a typical white cube or a black box set up?
Before continuing, we would like to ask whether you know what
‘location scouting’ in the cinema industry means? ‘Location scouting’ is
a vital process in the pre-production stage of filmmaking – once
filmmakers have decided what scenery they require, the search for a
suitable place or “location” begins.
The location scouting for this exhibition space started in a similar
manner. While looking for a potential exhibition space, together and
separately, we watched many films, YouTube videos, TV series, visited
unused buildings, memories, museums, photos, and texts. The exhibition
location was invoked. Participating artists were asked to share the
location scouting videos, transforming filmed or other material, which
ordinarily stays unused, into their contribution to the exhibition.
Some references, stories, tropes became more memorable, more visible
than others. For example, in 1963 the Italian film director and writer
Pier Paolo Pasolini visited Israel and Palestine, expecting to find
locations for his forthcoming film The Gospel According to Matthew. The
locations and people he met rather differed from his expectations,
inspiring a documentary titled In Search of Locations for The Gospel
According to Matthew and leading Pasolini to film The Gospel in Italy
instead. This story reminded to us that Kaunas may be ‘located’
elsewhere, not just in Kaunas. That any city, as a hyper-object, is a
portal to many other experiences, places and times, that any object is a
portal, that any location may be an event, experience, materialisation
of multiple historical, esthetical, physical events; a portal to other
locations, to other portals, themes, and people.
After thorough investigation and discussion the idea to use the
Memorial to the Victims of Fascism (built between 1966 and 1984, it is a
32 metre high monument that symbolises the people, survivors or the
chorus in the sense of an ancient Greek tragedy) as a portal, an initial
terminal or a depot to initiate further research seemed to be a rather
inspiring although demanding extraordinary respect to the victims and to
the history. Those times were as worrying as they are now, writing this
in the winter of 2016, though let’s stop there. Or let’s continue using
another thought. We must look back to the 20th century respectfully and
carefully as it’s not just an old dead anonymous past but also our
collective and personal past, as well as one we are witnessing reappear
in new historical forms in front of our eyes. The artists’ contributions
do not comment on the Monument or historical circumstances – the
Monument stands for itself, it does not need our help, on the contrary,
it’s us who call for its engagement.
When we say “We all once lived in Kaunas, a failed modernist city
with hope” among other things we also mean that most cities as
sophisticated organisms, as hyper-objects, have parts that radically
failed, went nightmarishly bad, but also have parts that gave and still
give grounds for expectations, that still inspire and promise, or that
are an unlikely combination of aforementioned events, conditions and a
persistent will; a will to shape the past, the present, and the future,
although not necessarily in this order.
Valentinas Klimašauskas
Artists:
ANDREAS ANGELIDAKIS
DOROTA GAWEDA & EGLE KULBOKAITĖ
GPB
PAKUI HARDWARE
ILONA JURKONYTĖ
FELIX KALMENSON
YORGIA KARIDI & SEE CHANNEL
LARS LAUMANN & CECILIA LOPEZ
JAAKKO PALLASVUO
EMILIJA ŠKARNULYTĖ
JOKŪBAS ČIŽIKAS
Design: Gaile Pranckunaite
Editing, monument footage, sound: Jokūbas Čižikas
Curator: Valentinas Klimašauskas
Produced by Kaunas International Film Festival. With support from the
Lithuanian Council for Culture and the Ministry of Culture of the
Republic of Lithuania
Presented in:
http://www.spikeartmagazine.com/en/articles/group-exhibition-video-portals-or-location-scouting-kaunas
Uploaded on Dec 21, 2016 at 12:23 am