Deimantas Narkevičius

Salt and Disappearance

gb agency is delighted to present a new exhibition by Deimantas Narkevičius, showing his latest film in three dimensions. How is one to ponder history and understand it through the many ideologies and political and social transformations that shape it? Narkevičius’ work repeatedly examines these clues to history, these official narratives and objects that claim to exist as eyewitness testimony.

His film 20 July. 2015 portrays the dismantling of a sculptural ensemble of eight figures which was erected on the “Green Bridge” in 1952 in downtown Vilnius. In the purely socialist realist style, these eight statues could no longer stand up to the continual obliterations following the fall of the Soviet Union. While experimenting with cinematic technique, all work by Narkevičius tends to bring the past to life through subjective investigation.
20 July. 2015 uses the subject of the film to establish a dialogue between history and the present, in a response to our propensity to want to forget. During the film, different time periods are juxtaposed: the 1950s with its ideologies, the present with its ennui and expectation, and finally a time of storytelling and mediatisation.

From the 1990s until today the notion of the monument, along with its apparatus of signals, runs throughout the artist’s work. A witness to his country and its transformation from the Soviet era to modern Lithuania, Deimantas Narkevičius dissects the issue of identity, be it national or individual, and shifts the requirement not to forget to the world of art.