Gabriel Lester: The Nine Day Week
November 25th, 2016 through January 15th, 2017
Opening November 25th, 6pm
Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius
Vokiečių 2
LT-01130 Vilnius
Lithuania
“We often substitute inspiration for claiming those things in the world, which we believe belong to our narratives, right? And now imagine a vast universe of compressed fragments and simultaneities, harmonies and disharmonies, grooving together, spinning in accelerated cycles. This is why it clicked while reading about the Nine Day Week. Supposedly the reality of an archaic lunar calendar that once governed time in Lithuania. It rattles and unwinds to imagine how it defies authority. Of course, it’s an old reality, but it’s new, too. Imagine a chair with one extended leg or a stick insect with the desire to be recognized for what it really is, an insect not a stick. Such examples could contextualize things. As if it’s a week with an extended leg, craving to be more than a week, different, an alternative. Not unlike parents who bought the cheapest houses in the poorest part of the country and started a cooperative and anti-authoritarian, organic agricultural commune, back in the 1970s. Looking for an alternative lifestyle. It’s very likely this unusual upbringing has endorsed a life of artistic promiscuity, forming a practice around the impurity of an art that is composed of the kind of catch one fishes out with a net. Or well, cinema of course! The art amalgam, that melting pot.”
The Nine Day Week exhibits a selection recent artworks alongside guest appearance, special guests, dialogue, mixes and re-mixes created by Carlos Amorales, Maria Barnas, Omri Bighetz, Job Chajes, Antanas Gerlikas, Valentina Desideri, Boyon Kang, Jonas Lund, Robertas Narkus, Raimundas Malašauskas, Teatr Doc Moskou, Monadnock, Lennart de Neef, Lisa Rosenblatt, Jennifer Tee, Kazys Varnelis, Freek Wambacq and the Vilnius Philharmonic Orchestra.
Gabriel Lester (b. Amsterdam 1972) is an inventor, film-maker, musician and visual artist who’s works have been exposed or concealed internationally the past twenty years. He is best known for his spoken word performances, spatial installations, films and architecture. Since 2001 he has collaborated with Raimundas Malašauskas on a number of exceptional projects, including the scenography of re-used mobile museum walls, for the shared Lithuanian and Cypriot pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennale in Italy.
