Darius Žiūra was born in 1968 in Joniškelis, studied painting at the Vilnius Academy of Arts in 1991-1997, and in 2017 he was awarded a Doctor of Arts degree from the Vilnius Academy of Arts. He lives and works in Vilnius. As his surname suggests, he is unusually sensitive to the promises and pitfalls of looking - this fundamental activity. Lately, his gaze is mostly filtered and captured by the lens of a camera, although he has also worked extensively with video since the late 1990s. He is prepared to go far for his "visual material" as he calls it. For him, it embodies a mental space that will always be constructed, an aspect of human existence that can be captured (and perhaps even understood) precisely because it allows itself to be transformed into an image. He visualises things that others have overlooked because they find them either too vague or too disturbing - too complex. The viewer is particularly interested in portraits. In the early years of the new millennium, he spent a lot of time on the road - in Lithuania and abroad - earning his living as a street portrait painter. In the village of Gustonii in northern Lithuania, where he spent a large part of his childhood, he has been making one-minute video portraits of the entire population every three years since 2001. And in Vilnius, he has made 5-second video clips from enamelled photographic portraits of people buried in cemeteries, or photographed the girls he brought to the studio from the railway station. But he also travels to rarely visited places to depict motifs such as abandoned farmhouses on both sides of the Latvian-Lithuanian border or the desperate reality of the Udmurt Republic in Russia. Žiūra has participated in numerous group exhibitions in Lithuania, including the national survey exhibitions Lithuanian Art 1989-1999: Ten Years, Self-Respect. Lithuanian Art 01", "Lithuanian Art 2000-2010: Ten Years" at the Vilnius Contemporary Art Centre and the 10th Kaunas Biennial in 2015. His work has also been shown internationally, perhaps most notably in the 5th and 7th European Biennials Manifesta in San Sebastian (Spain) in 2004 and Bolzano (Italy) in 2008, and in the international exhibition "Institute of Temporary Futures" at the M HKA Museum of Contemporary Art in Antwerp in 2017. Among his solo exhibitions, the most notable are those at the CAC: the performative installation "Another Space" in 1998, "Portraits - Presentation of Photographic and Video Works" in 2006 and "SWIM" in 2014.
