CODE SHARE: 5 continents, 10 biennales, 20 artists
Public Programs
February 18 – March 11, 2009
Vokieciu g. 2,
LT-01130 Vilnius, Lithuania
T: +370-5-212 1945
F: +370-5-262 3954
info [at] cac.lt
curated by Simon Rees
CODE SHARE takes its name from the commercial airline practice of sharing passengers, services, landing rights, and technical resources based upon partnership agreements. This strategy, and reference, is especially prevalent at this moment when national carriers all over the world are facing administration or take-over. (On Friday 16 January the day that the exhibition opened “FlyLAL/Lithuanian Airlines” declared bankruptcy and immediately stopped operating potentially stranding the participating artists). Similar patterns have emerged within the circuits of contemporary art exhibition culture in which large-scale festival events – especially biennales – dominate international press coverage, and consume corporate and governmental sponsorship. A definite hierarchy of exhibitions, and exhibiting institutions, has formed in concert with these processes (in colonial and capitalist order).
CODE SHARE attempts a double-agency. It is a model festival exhibition: produced in dialogue with curators and artistic directors of ten biennales; and part of the national program of the “Vilnius – European Capital of Culture 2009″. Yet, artists, and artworks have been selected that reflect upon the conditions of their production and processes of cultural and socio-political displacement and alienation (in the place they were made) – in denial of representativeness. The exhibition also ironizes the fact that from its position at [the] capital of culture in Europe art from Istanbul, New York, Sydney, and Taipei is presented as being peripheral.
Public programs at the CAC:
Wednesdays February 18–March 11, 5pm
SCREENINGS new feature film by Sherman Ong
Recently premiered at the Rotterdam International Film Festival, participating artist Sherman Ong’s (Singapore-Malaysia) first feature film, HASHI is a drama that interweaves the lives of three women, from three generations, in Fukuoka, Japan.
Monday 1 March–Friday 6 March, 11am to 5pm daily
WORKSHOP with Alfredo & Isabel Aquilizan
The Australian-Philippine artists Alfredo & Isabel Aquilizan will conduct a workshop with students from the Vilnius Art Academy based upon their work Hot Room in the exhibition; for which they commissioned a Manila street-painter to make three kitsch South East Asian landscape scenes that are produced for tourists (and restaurants and food halls) throughout the region on a billboard sized scale.
Friday 6 March, 6pm
SCREENING & LECTURE by Tony Rayns
The acclaimed British writer, film critic, translator, film festival programmer, and screen writer will deliver an illustrated lecture on the topic of Cinema’s Role in Asian Cultural Renewal since the 1970s.
Tuesday 10 March, 6pm
LECTURE by Nikos Papastergiadis
Papastergiadis who is Professor of Cultural Studies and Media & Communication at the University of Melbourne will deliver a lecture analyzing the cross-cultural flows and circuits comprising the Global South that now run counter to long established Northern Hemisphere colonial hegemony. He will focus on the role of contemporary art in broaching new discourses within this ‘southern’ context.
CODE SHARE is presented in the national program of “Vilnius – European Capital of Culture 2009″
principally funded by:
The Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Lithuania
Vilnius City Municipality
CODE SHARE has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council
The Australia Council for the Arts, its arts funding and advisory body
And received support from National Arts Council Singapore
For more information contact: info@cac.lt or T: +370-5-262 3476
