Hey there,

What a year we’ve all just been through here. One could go from one end of the emotional spectrum to the other and back within a month and all that mostly facing a screen. It was perfect for Facebook to have introduced their expanded emoti(c)ons (while Zuckerberg still doesn’t believe Facebook influences our political attitudes) but in reality, it is a confirmation of the power of big data and psychographics on a broader scale. You know that something very odd is taking place when departures of pop icons like Bowie or Prince among others feel distant in time.

And for the art world… There will be calls for mobilisation around ideas, for harsher political art combating the realpolitik, for relevant theory and research, for left-globalist strategies, for more propaganda about propaganda, for local iniciatives and temporal interventions, for a self-critical, less naive approach regarding all of the aforementioned actions, to carry on (viva arte viva)… Just like the global market, the art (market) world has been able to stabilise itself around these competing ideals for decades in a dialectic progression of thesis, antithesis and synthesis. There’s lots to synthesise from 2016. So lets put on a song that feels and sounds like the glory decades of pop music put into one thinly coated in a sort of contemporary fabric. One where the complexities facing us feels like towards personal melancholia and gradually is left behind.

So lets begin synthesising what year 2016 has been for Rupert. The ‘Double Bind’ exhibition travelling through Vilnius, Pabradė and Visaginas to Oslo and Reykjavik with performances by Lina Lapelytė and Styrmir Orn Gudmundsson. In case you’d bump into Juha or Augustas in the near future, ask for the story about how their work barely made it in time for the exhibition opening. Travis Jeppesen’s workshop and lecture at Kazys Varnelis museum in January grew into the exhibition ‘Word’ at Rupert November. The workshop ‘How Does it Feel?’ for Vilnius Art Academy and KhIO students led by Augustas Serapinas and Felix Gmelin in the former nuclear power plant city Visaginas will stay with us for a long while and you could see why. The final event of our educational programme in hindsight looked to promise ‘NO ESCAPE FOR NOW’. A screening of film endings ‘More More Than Than Lovers Lovers,, More More Than Than Friends Friends‘ curated by Jo-ey Tang became a 6 hour marathon and left us a little dizzy in the end. Not to mention that Jo-ey discovered a new friendship with the cinema old-timer, apparently, he saw most of the films over the years that we’ve screened that night. Not to mention that Rupert released ‘A Solid Injury to the Knees‘, a book by Maya Tounta, with contributions by Florian Cramer, Travis Jeppesen, Nina Power, Joshua Simon, and Marina Vishmidt. We still have a small amount of free copies left at Rupert.

Finally, we’re super excited about our last event of the year is ‘An experiment in cinema in reverse‘. A screening programme by curator Shama Khanna starting today at 6pm at Skalvija premiering works by former Rupert curator Maya Tounta, Ulijona Odišarija, former Rupert resident Mike Crane, Camilo Restrepo and Deimantas Narkevičius for the first time in Lithuania and showing new versions of works by Eglė Budvytytė (and collaborators), Lina Lapelytė and Tibor Hajas.

…and that’s for 2016,

wishing you all a more optimistic new year,

Rupert

In residence

Enterprise Projects

Enterprise Projects is a project space in Athens, Greece run by artist Vasilis Papageorgiou and curator Danai Giannoglou.  During the residency in Rupert, Danai will attempt to create a method that will allow her to communicate a personal experience of a territory as a common place. Vasilis will aims to trace the specific elements that form the culture and subculture of Vilnius in order to create negated narrations.

In residence

Vikram Uchida-Khanna

Vikram Uchida-Khanna lives and works in Oslo and Vancouver.  He is currently writing a play about human history from the point-of-view of dogs, plants and rocks and studying Proto-Indo-European. During his time in Rupert, artist will be working on a project about the development of Proto-Indo-European, a reverse-engineered language that theoretically reconstructs the grammar, myths and poetry of an ancestral Eurasian language.