Is the 20th century the censorship and propaganda machine set up by dictators continues to affect our times? Or maybe the ideological clichés of the occupiers are repeated in the rhetoric of today's aggressors? Russia's war against Ukraine shows that it is. The Kremlin's ongoing attempts to destroy Ukraine force us to look back at the painful experience of the occupations and rethink the imperial narratives introduced in the territories occupied by the Soviets after the Second World War.
The National Museum of Lithuania opens two exhibitions at the same time in the New Arsenal - "Unsolved composition. The Second World War in the Art of Soviet Lithuania" and "Shards of Time and Echoes: Soviet Censorship in the Work of Rimantas Dichavičius".
"Unresolved composition" is a favorite phrase of Soviet art censors, which criticizes the artistic level of the work and the interpretation of the plot that does not conform to the official ideological line. In the context of the exhibition, she refers to the complex vicissitudes of the art life of occupied Lithuania, the distorted accents of the historical narrative during the Soviet era and the conflicts of our memory that still arise today. The exposition deconstructs the most famous works of Soviet Lithuanian art, which embodied the propaganda narrative of the "Great Patriotic War" (DTK) and were on the margins of history.
The DTK narrative became one of the tools of Soviet colonization, and its visual consolidation was perceived as a necessary element of the legalization of the occupation and the sovietization of Lithuania: monuments to the "liberation" battles and heroes of the Red Army were rapidly erected in city squares, the names of streets and other public spaces changed, the plots dictated by artists were oriented towards the promotion of the ideological concept of war, the highest union awards were given to the authors who imagined DTK, this theme became mandatory in the works of art students, museum expositions and exhibitions.
In order to consolidate this narrative, the occupation regime focused a lot of attention on visual propaganda - removing the symbols of independent Lithuania from the public space and the creation of pro-Soviet productions. The exhibition will reveal the main ideological highlights of DTK's narrative, and the duality of the theme will be illustrated by radically different works.
"Shards of Time and Echoes: Soviet Censorship in Rimantas Dichavičius's Work" is a case study of an "unresolved composition" that illustrates the crossroads and challenges of creativity in the Soviet era. 20th century In the 1970s and 1990s, the works of R. Dichavičius, a former exile, were both banned and criticized by the Soviet censorship, and those that passed the inspection filters without obstacles were usually already partially deformed by the author's self-censorship. In the exhibition, the work of Rimantas Dichavičius will be shown in three sections, which will be highlighted by photographs prohibited by censorship, works that received criticism and corrections from censorship, and works that met the rules of Soviet censorship.
Exhibitions are held in the New Arsenal, which is closed for reconstruction - the main unit of the National Museum of Lithuania. Until 1968, when the first exposition of the then Museum of History and Ethnography of the LSSR was opened, the building served a military function for almost two centuries. The selected representative territory of the capital, depicted in part of the exhibition exhibits, the museum walls demolished for architectural research will conceptually complement the narrative of the exhibition and symbolically complete this stage of the New Arsenal's history.