Four exhibitions by the Lithuanian National Museum of Art enrich the Lithuanian Season in France

The Lithuanian National Museum of Art (LNMA), together with their French partners, present four exhibitions as part of the Lithuanian Season in France. The Ambassadors/Les ambassadeurs, a group exhibition of contemporary art opens 11th October, at the industrial Fiminco spaces in Romainville, near Paris. The exhibitions of Aleksandra Kasuba and Marija Olšauskaitė at the Carré d’Art-Musée of Nîmes in southern France open on 25th October. In June, the LNMA opened a jewellery exhibition Tell Them of Amber, Metal, and Life: Contemporary Lithuanian Jewellery 1990-2023, hosted by the Musee du Bijou Contemporain in Cagnes-sur-Mer of the Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur region. The prelude of the Lithuanian season was enriched by the Amber Road in France, a project by Palanga Amber Museum of the LNMA.  

International exhibitions opening opportunities to get to know the Other 

“The organizers of the Lithuanian season in France invite the communities of two countries for a beautiful and noble act – to get to know the other via cultural experiences and to open up for a dialogue. It is very nice that the Season’s programme involves the museums that have great experience to create unique spaces for surprise and interaction. During the Season, together with our partners, we open the world-level exhibitions of Aleksandra Kasuba and Marija Olšauskaitė, and of contemporary Lithuanian art. An exhibition of Lithuanian jewellery is already on display. Jointly these events will invite the French to rediscover Lithuania and the Lithuanian artists. I also hope that the collaborations built with the French museums will grow into continual and close relationships that will yield aesthetic gratifications to the museum visitors in France and Lithuania,” Dr Arūnas Gelūnas, director general of the LNMA, says. 

The vigorous ambassadors of culture

The exhibition The Ambassadors/Les ambassadeurs by the LNMA in cooperation with the Fondation Fiminco opens 11th October. Conceived by Monika Kalinauskaitė and Aušra Traškelytė, curators at the LNMA, the event presents vigorous, multiplicitous and rebellious Lithuania, its society and contemporary Lithuania’s art scene represented by the artists of different generations: Gediminas G. Akstinas, Eglė Budvytytė and Bart Groenendaal, Adomas Danusevičius, Karla Gruodis, Lina Lapelytė, Mindaugas Lukošaitis, Rūtė Merk, Beatričė Mockevičiūtė, Robertas Narkus, Valdas Ozarinskas, Gerda Paliušytė, Artūras Raila, Ieva Rojūtė, Ieva Kotryna Ski and Janina Sabaliauskaitė, Anastasia Sosunova, Rimaldas Vikšraitis.     

The exhibition is structured around the theme of vitality that is capable to endure both in historically dangerous and destructive environment. 

“We still have scars, wounds and curses that are spelled out in foreign alphabets. We encounter structures and circumstances that do not necessarily suit us, we feel global threat and we are in a close proximity to its likely epicenter, – Kalinauskaitė and Traškelytė, curators the exhibition, speak of Lithuania’s experience. – The choice to stay on the side of the living is a choice to dive into a lake, to sing drunk songs, to live out your passion, not to hide your pain, to hum a tune in the forest, and zip into a vague future.” 

The videoart, drawings, photography and installations on display communicate a collective pursuit of stability, the resilience and the complications on the way, with subtle humour. There are also reflections of the genius loci and of bodily life, of aesthetic and conceptual dialogues that take place on the art scene, including the histories of the formative institutions. 

Quite a few of the participants of Les ambassadeurs can be encountered at other events of the Season, therefore the curators of the former suggest to approach their event as an experimental index of diverse creative histories. 

The works for the exhibition have been selected from the collections of the LNMA. Gediminas G. Akstinas and Ieva Rojūtė created the work specially for the exhibition and the setting of industrial architecture. 

The exhibition hosted by the Fondation Fiminco will run until 1st December. 

The colourful futures by Aleksandra Kasuba 

October 25th, the LNMA and the Carré d’Art – Musée d'art contemporain in Nîmes open an exhibition Aleksandra Kasuba. Imagining the Future. It is the first exhibition of this scale by the Lithuanian and American artist Aleksandra Kasuba (1923 – 2019) in France and Europe in general. 

“Aleksandra Kasuba is a visionary of the era of space exploration. Her retrospective is constructed as a bright and inspiring story about loss and opportunity, and the visions of the future prevailing despite troubled times,” – curator of the exhibition, chief researcher of the Department of Fine Arts at the LNMA, Elona Lubytė introduces the exhibition. 

Aleksandra Kasuba. Imagining the Future is a story about an artist who fled her home country after World War II. A student of sculpture and textile art at Kaunas Institute of Applied and Decorative Art, and of Vilnius Academy of Art, Aleksandra Kasuba with her husband, a sculptor, left Lithuania in 1944 to escape the occupation by the Nazis and Soviets. The family lived in Munich’s DP camp in Germany until 1946, in 1947, they departed for the USA. In 1963, Kasuba with her family settled in New York to become an innovative creator of spatial environments of tensile membranes. These dwellings came to embody her imaginary future without right angles as an environment for a wandering soul. Kasuba’s flexible dwellings of soft and organic shapes are an expression of the artist’s pursuit of harmonious relationships between humans, nature, and technologies. 

The Nîmes exhibition presents the artwork and the digital images of the artist’s documents donated by her to the LNMA in 2014 – 2019. The originals of these documents are kept by the Art Archives of American Art, the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. On display is also a spatial environment Spectrum. An Afterthought (1975) realised together with the artist in 2014 in Vilnius. 

In addition, the exhibition includes contributions by the artist’s friends – by perfumer Danutė Pajaujis Anonis, actor and cinematographer Pola Chapelle, Fluxus artist Jurgis Mačiūnas, and avant-garde film maker Jonas Mekas. It is also accompanied by the first French edition of Kasuba’s illustrated manifesto Utility for the Soul (1975) and a visualization of the text in the form of a computer game Weekend Warriors (2020). The reconstruction of colour smells is by perfumer Laimė Kiškūnė. 

The exhibition Aleksandra Kasuba. Imagining the Future will run until 23rd March, 2025. 

The glass world by Marija Olšauskaitė 

Presented alongside with the exhibition of Aleksandra Kasuba by the Carré d’Art, the artwork by Marija Olšauskaitė (b.1989) strikes as an extension of the ideas by her elder who perceived architecture as a means to contemplate and to reinvent human relationships affirming the social role of architecture and art. The exhibition The Softest Hard features new work by Olšauskaitė, a reflective parallel between the traditions of craft and ornament and the social role of sculpture. Curator Jean-Marc Prévost established the artist’s long-lasting fascination with glass as the centre of the event. 

The glass screens produced for this exhibition in Nîmes refer to domestic space, to what can be made visible, to the fragility of relationships. Ponds is a set of large horizontal glass sculptures. Glass production usually requires a light table to discern imperfections of the product. This piece intends to revisit the relationship between form and function, with forms dropping their function and the instrument transformed into a mysterious object reminiscent of a luminous, translucent block of ice. 

Marija Olšauskaitė’s sculptures seem to have a life of their own, passing through a random alchemical process from liquid to solid state. These forms, which can sometimes seem to come straight from the future, are objects that question the sensations they evoke and bring us to ponder how we share them. As the artist puts it, all the objects in the exhibition are twins, brothers or sisters in a family dynamic. 

The exhibition The Softest Hard will run until 23rd March 2025. 

Letters about amber, metal, and life 

Tell Them About Amber, Metal, and Life: Contemporary Lithuanian Jewellery 1990–2023 (Parlez-leur d’ambre, de métal et de vie: bijou contemporain lituanien 1990–2023), an exhibition, curated by Jurgita Ludavičienė and Olga Zobel Biró for the Musee du Bijou Contemporain of Cagnes-sur-Mer, spans the years since the regained Lithuanian Independence until nowadays. Twelve artists of different generations articulate their ideas on what is the foundation of Lithuanian identity.  

‘When I talk about contemporary Lithuanian jewellery, I am frequently overcome by the feeling of struggling to encompass the unencompassable: I start with the legends about the founding of Vilnius, with the nameless lakes floating in the skies, with the fairy-tales about an amber palace, then I take a leap to reality: to rural mindset, to the decades-long Soviet occupation, then to Sąjūdis, the Independence Movement that led us to reclaim Independence,  to emigration and other things all constituting the present-day Lithuanian reality. Every contemporary jewellery piece from Lithuania is like a letter from some vaguely familiar (or altogether unfamiliar) territory, and each speaks about the things that matter to us most, even if it has not been a conscious intent,” co-curator Jurgita Ludavičienė introduces the exhibition.    

The Lithuanian identity in the opinion of the curators, is established by three pillars: individual connectedness to nature, the foundation of history and mythology, and the construction of the present set on a free course by the 1990 restoration of Independence.  

The exhibition Tell Them About Amber, Metal, and Life features art pieces by ASOL (Solveiga and Alfredas Krivičius), Eglė Čėjauskaitė-Gintalė, Ieva Grigienė, Karina Kazlauskaitė, Eimantas Ludavičius, Vita Pukštaitė-Bružė, Paulius Rukas, Benas Staškauskas, Biruta Stulgaitė, Sigitas Virpilaitis, Šarūnė Žygienė from the LNMA and private collections. Included are also photographs by Vytautas Daraškevičius, Artūras Raila (from the series The Power of Earth) and Simone Simon (France). 

The Amber Road and the threads of conversations across France 

The official opening of the Lithuanian Season in France was preceded by Palanga Amber Museum of the LNMA: their project the Amber Road linked three small towns in France Saint Gilles Croix de Vie, Angers and La Croix-en-Tourain, delivering lectures, discussions, and educational activities. 

The staff of the LNMA also participate in other events organized by the Museum’s partners. October 16th, Dr Aistė Bimbirytė, director of Vilnius Picture Gallery, will take part in a round-table public discussion Rethinking Identity: Museums and Heritage in the Context of War, held by the Louvre Museum at the Centre Dominique-Vivant Denon.