Artist talk & screening: Deimantas Narkevičius
An artist talk with the internationally acclaimed Lithuanian artist Deimantas Narkevičius. The event will be moderated by the contemporary art collector and curator and Māris Vītols from Latvia. The event is part of the public programme of the exhibition “Archaeologists of Memory: Vitols Contemporary Art Collection”.
Location: Kumu Auditorium
The artist talk will include the screening of video works by Narkevičius that have played an important role in the artist’s career and that are well-regarded in the international contemporary art scene. The conversation will deal with the main origins of Narkevičius’s work: memories as a form of subjective history, reconstructions of the recent past as modelling future scenarios, and the relevance of the Eastern European identity.
Deimantas Narkevičius (born in 1964 in Utena, Lithuania) is one of the most prominent and relevant contemporary artists in the Baltic states. Narkevičius made his artistic debut in the early 1990s, after graduating from the Department of Sculpture at the Vilnius Academy of Art, but it was his studies of various narrative structures in the media of film and video that brought him international recognition. An active contributor to group exhibitions, the artist has mounted over seventy solo exhibitions worldwide since 1994. Narkevičius has taken part in several editions of the Venice Biennale and has shown his works at the Sao Paulo, Istanbul and Gwangju biennials, as well as the Manifesta 2 and Manifesta 10 exhibitions and many international film festivals. His works are held in some of the world’s most significant contemporary art collections: the Tate Modern (London), MoMA (New York), Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (Madrid), Musée d’Art Moderne (Paris), the Louisiana Modern Art Museum (Humlebæk, Denmark) etc.
Māris Vītols is an entrepreneur, contemporary art collector and curator. Since 2015 Vitols has been the Director of the Association of Latvian Cultural Projects and has worked as a curator and project manager of international art projects. Together with his wife Irina Vītola, he has collected contemporary art since the beginning of the millennium. The Vitols Contemporary art collection has a clear focus on post-1989 Eastern and Central European contemporary art, exploring the social and political changes and cultural diversity in this region through different types of visual art, from the fall of the Berlin Wall till the present day.
The exhibition “Archaeologists of Memory” is the first exhibition to offer in-depth theme-based insight into the Vitols Contemporary, one of the most intriguing art collections in the Baltics, focused on the contemporary art of Central and Eastern Europe. The collection includes close to 1000 artworks by more than 150 artists. The curator of the exhibition is Eda Tuulberg.