The 2024 edition in Vilnius, Same Day, explores the relational lifespan of artworks
The first time I tried to experience Andrius Arutiunian’s Armen (2023) I missed my ride. The three early-1990s Mercedes Benzes that convey participants (and drivers) through the artist-composer’s 42-minute performance cruised past me from the dingy sculpture-yard-turned-temporary-parking-lot of Vilnius’s Contemporary Art Centre (CAC). I was luckier later, at sunset. Arutiunian’s piece was among a series of performances organised by curatorial team Tom Engels and Maya Tounta to mark the opening of the 15th Baltic Triennial, Same Day. Timed to match the two sides of a cassette tape that plays during the journey, the work entailed a petrol-infused dérive across the city while listening to a mix of diasporic Armenian pop, disco and chanson trumpeting from the ageing taxi’s sound system. The sensation was mind altering, and in retrospect the ride summarised my experience of the 50-artist show – a moody, winsome, dizzying spin.
Same Day is an antitheme exhibition indebted to the legacy of experimental practices in the Baltics that functions as a call to experience aliveness and ‘the everyday’. At a press conference last year, Engels and Tounta described the show as one attuned to the “sensitising capacities of poetic experience in its material, gestural and written forms”. On the ground, this approach requires some unpacking. Unlike previous editions, this international and intergenerational exhibition is held exclusively at the CAC, where no scenography or labels are offered, only a guidebook and floorplan, but this minimalist approach works in the curators’ favour. Artworks punctuate the space in discreet albeit lively ways, drawing visitors towards intersections of private life and dynamic motion. After all, poetry is a praxis.
Take the visual rhythms that dot the main hall, including Kitty Kraus’s Untitled (2024), a menacing, spinning trolley handle on a motor that hangs at eye level, the handle stolen from Lithuania’s largest retail chain, Maxima; Kazimierz Bendkowski’s Centre (1973), a film that spellbinds with its cityscape of flashing neons and cacophonic sounds; Matt Browning’s I Still Believe in Your Eyes (2024), freestanding, interlocking chains carved from Douglas fir; and Villu Jōgeva’s Blue (1973/2004), a quirky kinetic object that reverbs into the hall. Some of the most arresting pieces are the smallscale ‘free drawings’ by self-taught artist Elene Chantladze from the last two decades, made from gouache, product packaging, copy paper, cardboard, abandoned hospital documents, matchsticks, food extracts and coffee stains. The fast brushstrokes straddle abstraction and figuration, shedding light on the artist’s personal life while working in health centres and sanatoriums.
Engels and Tounta were tasked with opening the exhibition at the end of the CAC’s three-year refurbishment, some of which coincidentally resonates here: Toine Horvers’s performance Rolling 1 (1986/2024) consists of an eight-person snare drum sequence whose volume is aligned with the strength of the daylight in the room and lasts from 5.30am until last light. From a distance it sounds like a malfunctioning industrial air-conditioning unit, enveloping the entire exhibition in a sonic cloud. In a nearby room, Marina Xenofontos’s installation Control Board #1 & #2 (2023–24) consists of lengths of copper pipe attached to the wall, rotating on their axes through a synchronised motor. When the piece was shown at a previous venue, a system of sound and motion sensors connected to control boards maintained its structural integrity; here, it’s no longer responsive to those and is bound to break. These instances complexify the relational lifespan of said artworks – some live for a day or collapse along the way. While the curators’ intent is to take time and stretch it across a hypothetical day, some of the works, such as the performances, leave no trace. But maybe that’s the point; the emphasis on time offers an interval unavailable in other large international shows. In Same Day, the minutiae of daily life are met with gentle grandeur, revealing that there is more to the surface of the everyday than meets the eye.
15th Baltic Triennial: Same Day at Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius, through 12 January
From the November 2024 issue of ArtReview – get your copy.
