Because I'm only human,
[Chorus] And I'm only human.
Don't blame me,
[Chorus] Don't blame me.
And I'm only human, and I've made some mistakes.
[Chorus] And I'm only human.
I am not a prophet, the Messiah.
[Chorus] And I am only a human being.
Look elsewhere, further away.
[Chorus] And I am only a human being.
Monika Radžiūnaitė (b. 1992) is a member of the younger generation of painters in Vilnius. The artist's style is characterised by irony, transformation of historical and cultural plots - not appealing to the factual, chronological or thematic reality of the past, but rather, exploring new connections of symbols, allusions and images.The starting point of the work is the Kazis Varnelis House-Museum exhibition - an installation based on the aesthetic and meaningful consonances of exhibits from different epochs, a space of timeless museum sacredness beyond the limits of the everyday. Varnelis's conception of space has been strongly influenced by his long-standing practice in the field of church art, but there are no direct references to sacred art in the museum.
The concept of the exhibition is based on the creative strategy of error developed by Radžiūnaitė. "The "erroneous" reading is revealed in the artist's re-creation of iconography, in the titles of paintings translated into Latin with Google Translate, and in the glitch1-gothic architecture of the exhibition. The viewer is provoked to critically reflect on the interaction between text and image, the error that is inevitable even in the age of technology, and the overly serious attitude towards the heritage of a bygone era.
A new religion of contemporary images is born in the gallery, one that is not yet familiar to us. What image, which has always been the faithful servant of religions, could today complement sacred texts? And what new religion would emerge from today's image culture? This is a play on images that arise in the viewer's consciousness, inviting an exploration of subjective visual experiences. A museum exhibit - a monstrance case - appears at the heart of the exhibition. The empty object, both in the physical and museum sense, becomes a metaphor for Radžiūnaitė's creative strategy - forgotten iconographic motifs are filled with new meanings in the paintings and create their own semantic system.
