The group exhibition "Bakakay" opens at the gallery "Atletika", featuring artists Stephanie Baechler, Sara Bjarland, Ina Budrytė, Polyrabbit Duplicate, Monika Kornilova, Simonas Nekrošius, Artūras Mitinas, Hanna Umin. Curated by Bakakay collective (Monika Kornilova and Artūras Mitinas).
The Bakakay exhibition combines ideas of childishness, uncertainty and the uncomfortable. Babies who babble are known to be able to produce all the sounds of human speech, but when they learn to speak one language with its specific sounds, they lose this ability. Thinking not only about verbal communication, but about the multifaceted human activity, the exhibition focuses on the potential of formlessness and the experimental and sensory approaches that open it up.
The curators of the exhibition consider what positive or infantilising forces are at play in contemporary society - between a lulling self-centredness and an experimental openness, between escapism and a productive disinterest, between alienation from one's own body and a repressed, uncomfortable corporeality.
The artists participating in the exhibition reflect on these themes or states through their artistic practices, through open, draughty creative processes. By playfully revealing the possibilities and tactics of the material, they seek a relationship between narrative and bodily experience. The exhibition includes everyday finds turned into aesthetic objects, DIY sound objects, experimental painting, ceramics and animation. The artworks create a dialogue with the building and the history of the surrounding area.
The history of the building that houses the Atletika Gallery has been shaped by the founders, philanthropists, architects, staff and pupils of the boarding school for children with intellectual disabilities. The social landscape of the area has changed dramatically over the last two centuries, as monasteries and gardens have given way to prisons, boarding schools and power structures. The curators and researchers of the exhibition seek to look into personal and communal pasts, discovering the relationship between the distant signs of the past and the active processes shaping the present.
The research accompanying the Bakakay exhibition is published in the thematic journal Artnews.lt and will be presented at a separate closing event at the cultural complex SODAS 2123.
