Evaldas Janss' (b. 1969) films and performance art move through the edges and underground strata of everyday life, responding to its meaninglessness with (self-)destructive and creative outbursts. Often seen as transgressive, his work infuses autobiographical experiences into broader social or creative contexts and analyses the role of the artist as a social agent in society. Jans' position is aptly captured in his book Ode to Routine (2000), published by the Vilnius Centre for Contemporary Art, in which he recounts rough everyday events from his life and conversations with his colleagues about the films he has seen. Showing the inherent intertwining of art and everyday life. In his later films, he uses computer animation to create narratives based on the logic of dreams or the absurd, imbued with parody and the grotesque.Since 2009, Jans has increasingly turned to painting, experimenting with the tradition of visual culture and combining mythical, pop-cultural, art-historical, and pornographic imagery. In 2020, he established an art space in the basement of the Paviljonas bar, the Ewald Jans Museum. In his first exhibition at the new museum, the artist presented his most significant works of the 1990s (Inclusion. A Slaughterer's Knife", 1993; "In One's Own Juice", 1998; "Greetings", 1998). Both the space and the exhibition, according to the artist, are an ironic response to the nearby private MO museum. In his exhibition, Jans offered a radically different understanding of Lithuanian art of the 1990s than the one shown together in the MO Museum's exhibition Origin of Species: DNA of the 1990s. The Evaldas Janss Museum hosts exhibitions and performances by him and other Lithuanian artists.Evaldas Janss graduated in painting from the Vilnius Academy of Arts. His works have been exhibited at the Contemporary Art Centre, Vartai Gallery, Jonas Mekas Visual Arts Centre in Vilnius, Rauma Biennale Balticum in Finland (2012). His films have been screened at the Vilnius International Film Festival "Kino pavasaris" in Lithuania and Rencontres Internationales in Berlin and Paris (2007, 2008).
