Dear Reader,

When NASA’s spacecraft Viking 1 first landed on planet Mars in 1976, the event opened up the belief that humankind is open to limitless expansion, although it also broke the dream of ever meeting a Martian. But let’s not fool ourselves, it was one of the initial steps into the colonization of space, which also brought our imagination back to terrestrial issues. 

We live in times when any micro-managed action or even emotion or relation established at the right place and time can potentially be translated into currency or some kind of capital. Do the right thing, learn how to manage your emotions, know the right X number of people, choose your target social setting, reinvent your habitus, capitalize on it. Max Haiven has been howling for a while now that capitalism has colonized how we all imagine and express what is valuable. Hey, we all know we have to be radical in imagining our lives on this fucking planet Earth. Just it isn’t always the case that one life is enough to fight the monsters.

Imagination has always been the most powerful tool – either to escape from reality or to make actual alterations of it. Immobilizing circumstances, remote viewing, clairvoyance, imaginative speculations are also some of the conditions and modes of imagining in the screening programme ‘There Was a Forest in the Ceiling’ curated by Rupert’s former resident and curator Erik Martinson. The screening will feature four video-films by Lana Lin, Miko Revereza, Monira Al Qadiri and Basma Alsharif, and a reading of ‘Remote Viewing’, a CIA’s transcript published after the operation Mars Exploration, May 22, 1984, read by our dear residents Johannes Heldén and Rasmus Myrup.

In the second part of November, the curator and writer Maria Lind will pay us a visit to give a talk on her current curatorial practices and methodologies. Who else, if not her, having spoken and written so much about social value and collaborative art practices, can remind us of the necessity of radical imagination?

So please, if you’re in Vilnius area, join me physically at these events. Otherwise, you know where to find me. 

x
Rupert

In Residence

Rasmus Myrup

Rasmus Myrup is a Danish artist and curator living and working between Paris and Copenhagen. Working primarily with sculpture and drawing, his work is a synthesis of the big and the small investigating humanity’s natural roots in the context of personal human emotions and relations. At Rupert, Myrup will continue his research in to the deep human past, and the time when we shared Europe with the Neanderthals. With this line of research and the local nature surrounding Vilnius, he will produce new works for an exhibition in Paris in early 2020.

In Residence

Gabrielė Adomaitytė

Gabrielė Adomaitytė (LT/NL) graduated from Vilnius Art Academy in 2017 and until 2019 Spring had been enrolled in the De Ateliers residency, Amsterdam. In her practice, the artist explores painting’s potential to question forms of visual representation. . At Rupert, the artist will present a project about an archive of experiences and images. She will examine a story and a documentary of one Lithuanian man who had been recording his mundane life through the history of Soviet transport and technology developments.

G. Adomaityte observes the surrounding environment, the ways materiality meets the digital and looks into the private life-stories of others through artefacts and documents using anthropological and semiotic methods