EXHIBITION "RESTART" JAPANESE AND LITHUANIAN CONTEMPORARY TEXTILE ART

The present is overcrowded, full of uncertainty, and something is always getting stuck. And if so, should it not be “restarted,” like software? Click “Restart,” close programs that are running with errors, and update everything. Restart everything, without discovering anything new, just activating the original states and forms. At the same time, stopping the rush of everyday life, going back in time to the beginning, looking back to where it all started.

Such premonitions are revealed in works that seek direct contact with reality and create new networks of meaning. Textiles reveal themselves in these works as an all-encompassing “operating system” that controls all of life’s programs. At the same time, they remind us that weaving is one of the oldest technologies, characterized by ritual repetition and repetitive movement. It is the primary medium of “writing,” which existed before writing, closest to the earth, the body, objects, interwoven in the life of the living. It encourages us to touch the original matter and to go back to the origins, when there were no definitions of media and art, rethinking all the connections and approaches.

The works of Japanese and Lithuanian artists seem to “restart” the programs of our consciousness and imagination, stirring up the whole reality. The artists use textiles as a specific medium of experience that allows us to get closer to reality, to touch the surfaces of multiple realities, and to experience the depths beneath them, recalling the experiences we have had and bringing us closer to the other’s experience or creating the possibility of other experiences.

Several themes run through the exhibition, which encompass our relationship with nature, inseparable from the experience of the native place and the primary natural materials. The human relationship with spiritual practices and the higher reality that opens beyond the veils of everyday life. The bodily relationships and the feelings of the body hidden under the clothes, which also bring us back to the mystery of ritual dances. All this involves questions of human identity, memory, interconnectedness, continuity, and change, marked by different cultural traditions and cultural expressions. But the premonitions that emerge from the present bring them together, presenting the possibility of a closer engagement with the world, and perhaps even of renewal. 

Artists: Machiko Agano, Baltos Kandys team (Austė Jurgelionytė-Varnė, Karolina Kunčinaitė, Miglė Lebednykaitė, Rasa Leonavičiūtė, Laura Pavilonytė-Ežerskienė, Julija Vosyliūtė), Yasuko Fujino, Vita Gelūnienė, Akari Yamashita, Yoriko Murayama, Morta Jonynaitė, Lina Jonikė, Donata Jutkienė, Gerda Liudvinavičiūtė, Chihiro Murata, Laima Oržekauskienė-Ore, Gertrūda Rumzytė, Kentaro Suzuki, Monika Žaltė

Curators: Keiko Kawashima, Odeta Žukauskienė, Monika Žaltė