From exhibitions that glow like comets to the end of the world: a colourful autumn at the Lithuanian National Museum of Art
As autumn days grow shorter ushering in some gloomier moods, the Lithuanian National Museum of Art (LNMA) invites to look for light at the exhibition halls. The LNMA has prepared 13 new events for its visitors – from historical narratives to contemporary art that brings together local and international creatives.
“This autumn when our mundane life is quite disquieted, the museum invites to experience art as a meaningful escape and an opportunity to stop and reflect on our relationship with memory and landscape, on fragility of nature and human resilience. The LNMA’s visitors to the galleries in Vilnius and coastal Lithuania will discover art as a support and even inspiration in this complex world”, says Dr Arūnas Gelūnas, director general of the LNMA.
Autumn season at the Museum of Applied Arts and Design: young talents, tea routes and the treasures of the museum
On September 4, the season opened with the 15th edition of the Young Designer Prize competition, organized by the Vilnius Academy of Arts. The laureate announcement ceremony took part at the Museum of Applied Arts and Design of the LNMA, followed by the opening of an exhibition featuring the artwork by fifteen best creatives.
October 17, the Museum of Applied Arts and Design opens an exhibition Peace in a Cup of Tea. The Culture of Tea Drinking. It invites to look closer into Lithuania’s unique tea drinking tradition which emerged at the geographic East-West crossroads. The display will focus on the role of tea in the life of Lithuanian gentry, tea parties of 20th-century-town folks and the influence of Japanese tea drinking ceremonies in Lithuania, which also introduced the idea of tea drinking as the art of living in harmony with people and nature instead of merely a leisure activity.
Late autum at the Museum of Applied Arts and Design of the LNMA promises even more surprises. The display opening 27 November, titled See the Unseen Because if You don’t – You will Never See it, will offer an unexpected approach to the museum content by relocating the treasures of the museum storage area to the exhibition spaces. The opening up of museum storage areas is today an ascending concept that merges the safeguarding and exhibiting functions of a museum. The display will be on only for several months, and is unlikely to be repeated soon: like a glowing comet, it will shine light into the life of the art collections.
The horizons of autumn exhibitions in Vilnius: Between the Northern Memories and the Dream Worlds
October 7, the Vilnius Picture Gallery of the LNMA opens three photography exhibitions that weave three creative visions of different epochs into one narrative. Its historical strand, Bright City, Dark Times: Vilnius through the Lens of 19th-Century Photographer Wilhelm Zacharczyk features a collection of 51 photographic images from the Vilnius Album safeguarded by the LNMA. The Vilnius Album is a unique witness to the early stage of Lithuanian photography. The collection evokes the town of the 19th century as a scene of great contrasts, both European and provincial, a sunlit place, but burdened by the tsarist repressions. Here Then, There Now. Location – Vilnius presents Dovilė Dagienė’s passage-of-time-recording sun photography, this time inspired by the images of Zacharczyk. Mindaugas Meškauskas’s exhibition I am a Vilnius Citizen poses multiple questions about the contemporary identity of Vilnius dwellers.
November 7, the National Gallery of Art of the LNMA opens two exhibitions inviting to talk memory and landscape. The international event Shadows Leave Traces will invite to reflect on the themes of the memories and imagination of the northern landscape through the legacy of artists, deportees, travellers and nature scientists in the Baltic and Nordic countries. Concurrently, the gallery opens an exhibition Siberian Exiles by the German Netherlands-based photography artist Claudia Heinermann. The artist tells a story of the harshness of deportation experience and the fragility of human memory, based on her investigation into the Second World War trauma on the people in the Baltic states. Both exhibitions will not only enrich the autumnal cultural landscape, but will propose to reflect on relevant-these-days context of landscape decline and geopolitical tensions.
The Vytautas Kasiulis Museum of Art of the LNMA will invite to leave the gloom of outdoors and enter the world of profusion of plants, creatures, feelings, light and metamorphosis in an exhibition Merging Dreams opening 20 November. Featuring the works by Adomas Danusevičius, Alina Melnikova, Eglė Gineitytė and Eglė Kuckaitė, the exhibition traces the roots of their art, as if intertwined together in the deeply hidden layers. Though of different generations and different backgrounds, in their dreams these artists seem to be kindred souls.
October 17-26, the Radvila Palace Museum of Art will host an interactive exhibition NK-INTERACTIVE organized by the film festival Awkward Cinema and will present Lithuanian and foreign works of extended reality. Two outstanding exhibitions will open in November. A solo exhibit by Jurga Barilaitė will complete her trilogy project Dreams of the Living and Delusions of the Dead. In a post-apocalyptic atmosphere of a hide-in, the event will weave together signs of progress and regress, the old and newly produced artwork, motifs of war, digital Gothic, death and vitality.
November 27, the museum will present an exhibition by Hong Kong born artist Oscar Chan Yik Long They Always Look from an Imagined Above. The project created specifically for Vilnius will include his new and early works on canvas, paper and furniture-like objects, while the vaults of the Radvila Palace will be filled in by a painting created for the exhibition. In his art, Oscar Chan Yik Long explores the belief systems of East Asia and their points of contact with the Western spiritual practices.
Seaside venues of the LNMA offer an unexpected beauty of amber and the landscapes that are with us till the end of the world
September 26, the Palanga Amber Museum of the LNMA opens an international exhibition Unexpected Amber: Strong Feelings, bringing together 20 creatives from eight countries. Among them are artists who have used amber long ago, while others tended to avoid the material. The encounter of different cultures and traditions will work as a field of challenges, some of participants safely relying on polished skills, others venturing into unknown.
October 24, the Pranas Domšaitis Gallery of the LNMA in Klaipėda opens an exhibition Even if it’s the End of the World: The Landscape in Lithuanian Photography. It is the first photography event of this scale in Lithuania showcasing the landscape of the late 20th and 21st centuries. No landscape is only about hills, planes, forests or a skyline disappearing in the distance. Every society and each period shape their landscape in their own way: some footprints are obliterated, new values are imprinted into it to reflect new policies, economy and their relationship with nature. The exhibition invites to perceive landscape as a mirage, fragile and multilayered, but at the same time, as a reflection of human longing, anxiety, a belief in the eternity of nature even in the face of the end of the world. November 19 – 20, the LNMA in cooperation with the Klaipėda University and the Lithuanian Culture Institute hold a scientific conference At the Crossroads of Nature and World View in connection to the exhibition.
The seaside and Vilnius venues of the Lithuanian National Museum of Art offer its visitors an opportunity to escape autumnal dimness to the colourful worlds of imagination and history. The exhibitions will be accompanied by specially developed lectures, discussions, film screenings, tours and creative workshops for visitors of all ages.
