2019

2019 is an exploration of a year poised on the brink of change – a moment both recent and elusive, suspended between the mundane fabric of daily life and the pull of an unanticipated future. The air of 2019 carried the hum of the ordinary: city streets pulsing with rhythms, handshakes sealing fleeting alliances, clouds forming with unsettling indifference. But beneath that hum was something else – a frantic, fractured culture teetering under the weight of its own choices and regrets, imposed and self-inflicted, bloated by its own consumption. And now, in the stillness left behind, you might sense it too: the bustling sigh of a world unready for the storms that followed. 

In retrospect, 2019 stands as the closing act of a waning era, now familiar as a turning point in the cycle of time, yet too fresh for scholarly distance to dissect. 2019 features works that were variously created that year, corrupted by its events, or tinged with its prophetic undercurrents. But this is not nostalgia. This is not history. This is 2019, a portrait of a year unraveling at the seams and unprepared for what came next. A year at the edge of its own comprehension.

Artists in 2019 include Alix Eynaudi, Alexandra Sukhareva, Ana Jotta & Pierre Leguillon, Ariana Reines, Bradley Kronz, Cathy Weiss & Fred Holland & Ishmael Houston-Jones, Elena Narbutaitė, Gintaras Didžiapetris, Henrik Olesen, Jason Dodge, John Menick, Julie Peeters, Koenraad Dedobbeleer, Malak Helmy, Morgan Quaintance, Pratchaya Phinthong, Rosalind Nashashibi, and Simone Forti.

On the opening night of 2019, Ariana Reines will perform 2019: an endurance, expanding on her contribution to the exhibition and introducing a forthcoming publication by Grazer Kunstverein. Further public programming will be announced at a later date.

2019 also marks the launch of Suzon: Selected Writings by Raimundas Malašauskas, which combines a reprint of Malašauskas’s out-of-print 2012 publication Paper Exhibition with a new collection of texts written since then. The book is edited by Tom Engels, Yana Foqué, and Krist Gruijthuijsen, designed by Goda Budvytytė, and published by KW Institute for Contemporary Art (Berlin), Kunstverein Publishing (Amsterdam), Grazer Kunstverein (Graz), Baltish Arts Magazine (Vilnius), and Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther und Franz König (Köln). Suzon can be purchased here.

Curated by Tom Engels and Raimundas Malašauskas, 2019 follows their previous collaboration Circa 2022, an exhibition delivered by post from Montos Tattoo in Vilnius.