Exhibition time: 10 08 2023–07 09 2023
Opening: August 10 | 18:00
Meno Parkas Gallery (Rotušės a. 27, 44279 Kaunas, Lithuania)
This exhibition is a place. It's an effort to think about how life in specific geographic locations and their historical layers leave traces/imprints in the core of a person's further development and internal world transformation. It is thinking from a specific place and thinking about it at the same time. It's the realization that a specific geographic place has become a land of thinking, identity, self-awareness. For Petras Lincevičius, this land is the village of Šilavotas, and for Gabrielė Aleksė – the village of Plokščiai and her grandmother's homestead within it. These are places not only lived in or where childhood summers were spent, but also locations inhabited and remembered by ancestors, a kind of familial legacy. The ongoing connection with the sensory environment there, exploring and trying to hear what philosopher Arvydas Šliogeris named pre-verbal mythos, which can be described as pre-linguistic reality. It's unarticulated speech, the language of the earth, stones, rivers, trees.
And although neither Petras nor Gabriele constantly live in these places anymore, the distance provides an opportunity to view this situation from an internal perspective. Without romanticizing, but by reconsidering, searching for an answer to how the environment etched itself into self-awareness. The engraving of a specific place is not limited to its spatial configuration. It's a dialogue and identification when the environment becomes both a place and a character. A cherished place, a necessary place – home. But what are they like? Constantly being built, recreated, reconsidered. Houses of thoughts and homes for thoughts. The exhibition is based on the structure of a house, with each floor of the gallery developing a separate part of the narrative:
The first floor is a vision of childhood. Here, memories blend with dreams, imagination, a fairy-tale understanding of the world.
The second floor is a conscious mind. It's an adult's relationship with the surrounding environment. When confronted with the rational aspect of the world's structure.
The attic is dreams, desires. Both fairy-tale and rational perspectives on the world are connected. It's the infiltration of human visions into the future, the longing for purpose and happiness.
This exhibition is a house being built from separate parts, capturing the characteristics of earthly and unearthly, tangible and intangible places. It's a response to the cultural, ecological, historical, and spiritual nature of these places.
We invite you to visit, feel at home.
The exhibition is supported by the Lithuanian Council for Culture, Lithuanian Artists’ Association, Mindaugas Naudžiūnas.
