On the 29th November, 2013 at 5 pm at Klaipeda Art Center – KCCC (Didzioji Vandens str. 2, Klaipeda) the sixth and the last exhibition/episode of a project “A Pledge. The First Part of a Trick” called “Last Time” will be presented.
The authors of the exhibition/episode “A Pledge. The First Part of a Trick – 06 – Last Time” are a duo of New York-based Lithuanian artists Ugnius Gelguda (b. 1977) and Neringa Černiauskaitė (b. 1984). The duo works with different media and will present their new projects that touch upon the notion of time, or communicate a specific outlook towards the past, the present and the future questioning their chronological order; the archeology of the future that is constructing in the present; inquire the relations between a copy and the original. It is also here that the dynamics between an artwork and its author, an author and a viewer, a viewer and an artwork (a re-artwork, a copy) will be reexamined.
We might think of a trick, or of anything else, as something fraudulent. But then, as it happens with a modern conjuror, convincing frauds require an exact cognition of things.
Our new works in varied resolutions question the meaning and the notion of the copy by weaving speculative ties to the past and to the future. In fact, some of them have been provoked or given rise by the circumstances that have presently emerged, i.e. the so-called super-storm Sandy that has caused the most damage and, subsequently, the overt preparations of New York City for its slow submersion; it’s becoming an object of future archeology. In Klaipėda we will present two out of four of our latest projects – a 16mm film as well as porcelain twigs.
The short 16mm film “Last Time We Walked on The Frozen River” is a documentation of a reenactment of Hans Haacke’s intervention into an ecosystem in 1965. On the Coney Island shore, Brooklyn, the artist formed temporal live sculptures by feeding seagulls off a pier. Only the swarms of seagulls are captured in the photographs; the hands of the artist that fed the seagulls, however, are left outside the frame. In 2013, when speculations on the future of the city are turning out to be the official part of the politics concerning the city of the present, the reenactment of this intervention becomes especially urgent. The medium of film, not of photography, underscores the readjustment of focus from the creation of the temporal sculptures to the performative intervening act.
Guided by the aforementioned circumstance of the present, we collected various examples of twigs and branches from Central Park in Manhattan and Prospect Park in Brooklyn to cast them in white porcelain for the future. During the process of one material – wood – turning into another one – porcelain, the primary source is obliterated. It is the “copy”, but the attempt to preserve that comes first. Any attempt of this kind irreversibly transforms or even destroys that which it chooses as its object of preservation.
Artists: Ugnius Gelguda and Neringa Černiauskaitė
Curator: Neringa Bumblienė
Exhibition will be held until 31st December, 2013
Organizers: The Purple Swamphen, KCCC
