Dalia Dudenaite & Elena Narbutaite. Sleeper
26 May–15 July 2011
PEEP-HOLE
via Panfilo Castaldi 33
I-20124 Milan
Opening hours: Tuesday–Friday 3–7:30pm
In the context of the project Six Ways to Sunday, Peep-Hole presents Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius:
Sleeper. An exhibition as a house observed by an animal from a shadow of a forest, cars passing by. A collection of works by Dalia Dudenaite and Elena Narbutaite.
So it all began in the streets of Vilnius, a city with big gasoline stations where the periphery is all over the centre. You walk a few steps and the city becomes an open field, a few more and it turns into a village. If it was winter we’d talk inside a car, and in the summer we’d open the doors and you could sometimes even hear the fields. This situation of rapidly changing distances would often remain unnoticed, but would penetrate the mind anyways. Was it the memories and the speed of driving that created those fast connections?
The cities with big gasoline stations can suddenly cut up the urban boundaries, like an animal that observes people and like people who sometimes notice it. Such acts of observing are on display at the exhibition Sleeper.
“Right, a cow’s eye, that’s exactly what I was thinking about. Maybe it’s possible to create a clear view to be seen from one side, and from another side—another view, as if seen through the binoculars. Or like when the observer and the observed switch positions constantly. So that you could adjust the distance very fast.”
“This appeared to me too: that there needs to be some way to translate this relation between the city and the gas station that allows this extremely easy access to periphery—when the city and forest, work and idleness, thinking and staring become very close to each other. This translation could become the grounds for the exhibition.”
Sleeper is curated by Virginija Januskeviciute and Valentinas Klimasauskas on behalf of the Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius (www.cac.lt) in the context of the project Six Ways to Sunday, and produced by the CAC, Vilnius together with Peep-Hole. Six Ways to Sunday is an annual programme in which Peep-Hole dedicates an event to a partnership with a foreign art institution, becoming its temporary satellite project room. The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalogue designed with Mike Malkovas, published and distributed by the CAC, Vilnius and Mousse Publishing.
Elena Narbutaite’s (b. 1984 in Vilnius) recent exhibitions include Exhibition of Distances, Tulips&Roses, Brussels; The Clifford Irving Show, Objectif Exhibitions, Antwerp; All the Things You Are (with Gintaras Didžiapetris) at Salzburger Kunstverein, 2010.
Dalia Dudenaite (b. 1984 in Vilnius) showed in Urban Stories – X Baltic Triennial of International Art in Vilnius and Swan Swallow Bonfire Rosemary Recital in Cesis, Latvia, both organised by the CAC, Vilnius.
Mike Malkovas (b. 1955 in Biysk, Russia) is an illustrator and paper engineer; he has illustrated Oxford American dictionaries and produced pop-up editions for numerous occasions.
The production of the publication has been funded with support from the Culture 2007–2013 programme of the European Union within the framework of the Survival Kit project.
