Deimantas Narkevičius

Deimantas Narkevičius (born 24 May 1964) is one of the most consistent and widely recognised Lithuanian artists on the international art scene. Originally trained as a sculptor, Narkevičius has mainly worked with film and video. Employing documentary footage, voice-overs, interviews, re-enactments and found photographs, his films submit historical events to the narrative structures of storytelling and cinema. In his artistic practice Narkevičius examines the relationship of personal memories to political histories, particularly those of his native Lithuania. For the artist, history itself has become both material and methodology. He represented Lithuania at the 49th Venice Biennale in 2001 and two years later exhibited at the 50th Venice Biennale in Utopia Station curated by Molly Nesbit and Hans Ulrich Obrist. Narkevičius's work was shown at Manifesta II (Luxembourg, 1998) and Manifesta X (St. Petersburg, 2014). Amongst his most recent solo shows are 20 July.2015 at Maureen Paley (London, 2017), Books on Shelves and Without Letters at The Blank Contemporary Art (Bergamo, 2016), Archeology of Memories at former KGB building (Riga, 2015). Narkevičius's major retrospective opens at the National Gallery of Art in Vilnius, Lithuania, in December 2017.

Narkevičius's works are a part of major private and public collections such as Tate Modern (London), Moderna Museet (Stockholm), Modern Art Museum (Vilnius). In 2008 for his achievements in art Narkevičius has been awarded the Vincent Award and the Lithuanian National Prize for Culture and Arts. His film Restricted Sensation (2011) was a nominee for the best short feature at the 2012 Silver Crane film awards.

Narkevičius lives and works in Vilnius, Lithuania.

Biography

Childhood in Utena

Deimantas Narkevičius was born in Utena, Lithuanian SSR, in 1964 at the time when Lithuania was part of the Soviet Union.

In several interviews such as the 2003 interview with curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, Narkevičius reflected on the importance of films he saw in his early childhood. His first experience of cinema was watching movies with his parents in the theatre or at home on television. Films by prominent Soviet directors such as Sergei Eisenstein, in particular his Ivan Grozny, Part II (1958), which he saw at the age of five, and Bronenosec Potiomkin (1925), were among his earliest cinematic experiences that in Narkevičius's own words had a dramatic impact on him.

Quote|Though I couldn't adequately perceive what I saw, I sensed my parents' emotions. They were moved by something I myself could not yet understand, just as I did not comprehend their emotional experiences. I tried to find the elements that affected them so much in those movies. One of the earliest memories of an evening spent with my parents that I can associate with a specific work was watching Sergei Bondarchuk’s shocking directorial debut, Sudba Cheloveka (1959). […] I felt sympathy for the orphaned boy Vaniushka, who had nowhere to sleep and nothing to eat, although I completely failed to comprehend the drama of losing one’s parents in the war, with my own parents sitting beside me, eyes wide open, watching the war open a void in the fate of the protagonist.

The early influences of cinema and television describe Narkevičius's artistic style and means of production. They can potentially be seen as a factor that affected his decision of selecting filmmaking as opposed to object making early in his career. The history and context of the Soviet Union in which these early experiences were produced had become the principal subject of Narkevičius's oeuvre.

Student years in Vilnius and London

At the age of fourteen Narkevičius was sent to Vilnius by his parents to study at the art boarding school where he matured surrounded by students who came from similar backgrounds. The majority of his films deal extensively with the cultural legacy of Communism and attempts to erase it after the fall of the Warsaw Pact regimes in 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union two years later, with an emphasis on statues, sculptors, artists and moving images. These themes first emerged in his early films Europa, 54° 54' – 25° 19 (1997), Legend Coming True (1999), and Energy Lithuania (2000). A seven-minute 35mm film His-story (1998) shown at Manifesta II in 1998 gained the artist international recognition, making Narkevičius a leading contemporary Eastern European filmmaker.

In 2001, Narkevičius represented Lithuania at the 49th Venice Biennale. Two years later he came back to Venice to show his work in the Utopia Station curated by Molly Nesbit and Hans Ulrich Obrist.

Restricted Sensation (2011) was Narkevičius's first long feature shown in cinemas: a 45-minute film depicting the abuse of a talented young gay theatre director in the Lithuanian SSR in the 1970s, with the post-Stalinist re-criminalisation of homosexuality representing the oppressive cultural policy that took hold as Stalin assumed total power in the late 1920s. Although it can be read as a comment both on that period's homophobia and Vladimir Putin's current persecution of Russia's LGBTQI population, Narkevičius said he was not aiming to depict the explicit, illegal life of gays in the Soviet Union. Rather, the film comments on "the distrust and intolerance of what is perceived as foreign to a particular country’s culture" and was "an attempt to identify the causes of the increasing prevalence of intolerance".

Artistic work The Role of a Lifetime

Lithuania, 2003 17 minutes, Colour/B&W, Stereo, 4:3 Original format: 8mm, Super 8mm and 35mm film

Deimantas Narkevičius: The Role of a Lifetime (film still), 2003. Drawing by Mindaugas Lukošaitis

It is perhaps The Role of a Lifetime (2003) that most evocatively and thoughtfully ties together Narkevičius's interests in the uncertainties at the heart of post-Soviet Lithuania with the implications of his own work in creating film and video.

In works like Punishment Park (1970) or La Commune (Paris, 1871) (2000), Watkins has challenged what he calls the "monoform": cinematographic editing that reduces disparate visual and acoustic parts to a narrative whole. Narkevičius undoes the monoform by putting together images and sounds that do not match each other in what appears to be a biographical documentary. The film scenes are too idyllic and too recent for the traumatic World War II childhood that Watkins recollects; a summer hum of birds and insects accompanies his description of the Soviet monuments collected in Grūto, and the pencil sketches of the park show a thick layer of snow covering the defunct socialist heroes. Maybe the wizened man in the stills is not Watkins but the protagonist of yet another history.

More dialogical than monological, The Role of a Lifetime ends up highlighting distinct bodies of work and visions: Narkevičius's audio interviews with Watkins, drawings by Mindaugas Lukošaitis (filmed by Audrius Kemežys, who catches Lukošaitis's hand), and archival footage of Brighton filmed by Geoffrey Cook in the 1960s. In his role as a master editor, Narkevičius mismatches these silent images and invisible sounds not only to question the documentary's veracity but also to begin the elusive discussion with the audience, who must put the parts together. Experiencing the gap between Watkin's eloquent remarks on creativity and Cook's quirky views of Brighton comes close to participant observation. Cook's Brighton initially appears to be part of Watkin's childhood memories, only to emerge as the eye of yet another filmmaker; in this shift the cathartic hit of nostalgia, instantly delivered by Super 8, dissolves into two visions of the past whose incommensurability makes them all the more fascinating.

In Narkevičius's video, Lenin's ghost statue is reinstalled. Recutting the action in reverse, Narkevičius shows a violently enthusiastic crowd cheering a statue as it is paraded on the back of a vehicle, and raised into the air to then swing uncannily into place, as Lenin is seamlessly reunited with his legs.

Revisiting Solaris

Lithuania, 2007 18 minutes, Colour/B&W, Stereo, 16:9 Original format: 35mm film

Deimantas Narkevičius Revisiting Solaris (film still), 2008.

Narkevičius first saw Andrej Tarkovsky's film in the 1970s. In an interview with Larissa Harris he admitted that then, when he was about sixteen or seventeen, he did not get it at all, simply not understanding what was going on in the film. Nevertheless, it engaged him and raised his curiosity. Later on Narkevičius watched Solaris over and over again. "I kept watching it until, having reached my thirties, I finally liked it a lot. Perhaps that was also due to the fact that I started to lose people who were close to me". His one-year stay in London was crucial in this regard because it was there that he introduced ready-made objects into his artistic practice. He builds his creative platform by siting them in the historical context of the environment they belong to. In such a way Narkevičius creates a new semantic field to communicate his ideas via the physical form.

The work Too Long on a Pedestal was made in 1994, when the Lithuanian public was still affected by the huge political and social shifts of the early 1990s. The stagnant and morally compromised ideological system that had dominated social life for nearly 50 years was being replaced by a new one. This work, tinged with subtle humour, is a reflection on how the heritage of the political system becomes history. The means of expression selected by the artist, a pair of worn-out classic-style shoes, now filled with coarse salt, points to the statues of heroes that used to embody the value system of the former epoch, but the people promptly removed them from their pedestals, as politics changed its course.

Filmography

Europa, 54° 54' – 25° 19 (1997) His-story (1998) Mass for the Truth of Blacksmith Ignotas (1998) Legend Coming True (1999) Energy Lithuania (2000) Kamietis (Countryman) (2002) Role of a Lifetime (2003) Scena (2003) Once in the XX Century (2004) Disappearance of a Tribe (2005) Matrioškos (2005) The Head (2007) Revisiting Solaris (2007) The Dud Effect (2008) Into the Unknown (2009) Ausgeträumt (2010) Restricted Sensation (2011) Books on Shelves and Without Letters (2013) 20.July 2015 (2016)

Medialization of Monuments; Monumentalization of Media, Temporary Gallery, Zentrum für zeitgenössische Kunst e.V. / Centre for contemporary art, Köln.

Deimantas Narkevičius, Books on Shelves and Without Letters, The Blank Contemporary Art, Sala alla Porta Sant’Agostino, Bergamo.2015Archeology of Memories, Corner House, KGB former building, Riga.

Fact or Fiction, Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival, Berwick.

Sad Songs of War, gb agency, Paris.

Deimantas Narkevičius, Maureen Paley, London.

Da Capo, MSU, Museum of Contemporary Art Zagreb.2014Cupboard and a Song, MNAC, National Museum of Contemporary Art, Bucharest.

Sounds Like The XX Century, Galerija Vartai, Vilnius.

Deimantas Narkevičius, 60th Oberhausen International Short Film Festival, Oberhausen.

Cupboard and a Play, gb agency, Paris.2013Da capo, Le Magasin, Grenoble.

Da capo, Marino Marini Museum, Firenze.

Deimantas Narkevičius, Independent, gb agency, New York.2012About Films, Deimantas Narkevičius, Para/Site Art Space, Hong Kong.

A Tang of Lomo Film, Galerie Barbara Weiss, Berlin.2011Architektur und Film, Blue Box, Deimantas Narkevičius, The Head, Sprengel Museum, Hannover.

Solo film programme, 15th International Short Film Festival, Winterthur.

Deimantas Narkevičius, Restricted Sensation, gb agency, Paris.2010Getting a lost tune, Artra, Milano.

Darkroom Series: Deimantas Narkevičius, Turku Art Museum, Turku.

Sarabande, (with Žilvinas Kempinas), Frac Basse Normandie, Caen.

The Unanimous Life, Kunsthallen Brandts, Odense.

The Unanimous Life, Brandts Kunsthallen, Odense.2009Deimantas Narkevičius, gb agency, Paris.

Deimantas Narkevičius, BFI Southbank Gallery, British Film Institute, London.

The Unanimous Life, Kunsthalle, Bern.

The Unanimous Life, Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven.

Deimantas Narkevičius, Mamco, Genève (2009/2010)

The Dud Effect, Mala Galerija, Museum of Modern Art, Ljubljana.2008The Unanimous Life, Museo Nacional Centro De Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid.

Jan Mot, Brussels.

Galerie Barbara Weiss, Berlin.

Genius Seculi, The Center of Contemporary Art, Thessaloniki.2007The Role of a Lifetime, Index, Stockholm.

History Continued, Mücsarnok Kunsthalle, Budapest.

Revisiting Solaris, Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius.

Revisiting Solaris, Daadgalerie, Berlin.

Among the Things We Touched, Secession, Vienne.

The Documentary FilmPlatform ZONE, The Arts Center Buda, Kortrijk; The University Movie Theater Film Plateau, Ghent; MuHKA media, Antwerpen.2006Screening, Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris.

This not What you See, Gallery of Contemporary Art Bunkier Sztuki, Kraków.

Plug In, Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven.

Once in the XX Century, Arnolfini, Bristol.

Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst Leipzig.

Films screening, Tate Modern, London.

Foksal Gallery, Warsaw.

Galerie der Stadt, Schwaz, Tirol.

Deimantas Narkevičius Screenings, Roseum Contemporary art Center, Malmö.

Legend Coming True, Musée d'Art et d'Histoire du Judaïsme, Paris.2003The Role of a Lifetime, Art and Sacred Places, St. Peters Church, Brighton.

Kaimietis, Jan Mot, Brussels.

Either True or Fictitious, Frac des Pays de la Loire, Carquefou.

Energy Lithuania, LISTE 03, gb agency, Basel.2002gb agency, Paris.

Deimantas Narkevičius' Project, Kunstverein, Munich.2001Energy Lituania, Jan Mot, Bruxelles.

Lithuanian Pavilion, 49th Venice Biennial, Venice.

One day film and video screenings, Moderna Museet, Stockholm.20008 x 16 x 35, Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius.1994'''Unforced Reality, Akademija Gallery, Vilnius.

Collections

Musée d'art moderne de la ville de Paris (Paris) Frac Pays de la Loire (Carquefou) Fonds National d'Art Contemporain (France) Louis Vuitton Art Collection (France) Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia (Madrid) Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona, MACBA (Barcelona) Lithuanian Art Museum (Vilnius) Modern Art Museum (Vilnius) Tate Modern (London) Van Abbemuseum (Eindhoven) Museion, Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (Bolzano) Moderna Museet (Stockholm) The Louisiana Museum of Modern Art (Humlebæk) Oslo National Museum for contemporary Arts (Oslo) Muzej Suvremene Umjetnosti (Zagreb) Mrs and Mr Ruiz Picasso Collection (Paris/Malaga) Muzeum Sztuki Nowoczesnej w Warszawie (Warsaw) Hoffmann Collection (Basel) Museum Folkwang (Essen)

Selected publications

Lithuanian Pavilion – 49th Venice Biennial (2001). The Role of a Lifetime (2003). Once in the XX Century (2006). The Unanimous Life (2009). Deimantas Narkevicius: Da Capo. Fifteen films'' (2015).

Awards and honours

The Vincent Award (2008) Lithuanian National Prize for Culture and Arts (2008)