Aurelijos Maknytės paroda „Tėvų kambarys“ kaip laikovaizdis

Abstract

The concept of time-image ( image temps ) coined by Gilles Deleuze could be applied to analysis of works of art that juxtapose objects from different periods of time and combine them into spatial installation-projects. Such exhibitions are designed for the visitor to create their final and ideal version, and have to be ‘performed’. This leads to the obliteration of clear concepts as well as to the process of self-creation. Agnė Narusytė uses the concept of time-image as well as Erika Fischer-Lichte’s theory of performative aesthetics in her phenomenological analysis of the exhibition Parents’ Room , which was installed by the Lithuanian contemporary artist Aurelija Maknytė at the gallery Artifex in 2015. In Parents’ Room , Maknytė created layers of different periods and places as experienced by different people: a tailor who wrote letters to her daughter from 1965 to 1990, Maknytė’s parents, already dead, and herself in two roles: that of a daughter and of a step-mother. The artist does not mask the separateness of the layers; she even reveals the sources: fragments of a family’s life, printed materials she collects, artefacts made for different purposes (soviet folded tables for celebrations, shoes for funerals, a sewing machine, sewing patterns cut from soviet newspapers), her own works (an artist’s book compiling the tailor’s letters, Father’s Act created in 2001 from her father’s autopsy report and The Role – an appropriated film by Rūta Simkaitienė, The Gardener goes to the Cemetery (1992) where Maknytė played a step-mother). Both comic and macabre, the stories of other people’s lives are condensed in the exhibits installed in the three spaces of the gallery. Like in multiple exposure photographs, the exhibition connects realities that ‘have no clue’ about each other but are interlinked through accidental coincidences, invisible to them, but planned by the artist. The viewer becomes an all-seeing privileged connoisseur from the ‘future’ who gets also involved into the exhibition’s narrative, thus forming an additional layer.