Curator
Vernissage 20. June at 19:00
The exhibition is opened from 21.06 until 02.08
Curator: Lars Bang Larsen (DK)
Participating artists: The Otolith Group, Armando Andrade Tudela, Vytautas V. Landsbergis, Jonas Mekas, Søren Andreasen, Dave Hullfish Bailey, Inspection Medical Hermeneutics, Till Mycha/Fungiculture journal, Magma, Kiwa
+ Rein Raamat, Ando Keskküla & Priit Pärn
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t:h:e: r:e:a:l: is a though experiment on psychedelia as an idea, a theory or a method, proposing to see the term as an anachronic mover of critical thinking. From today’s point of view, the exhibition wishes to investigate the psychedelic promise of becoming through historical breaks and continuities, as well as through contemporary artistic and theoretical perspectives. In the 1960s counter-culture hallucinogenic experiences were valorised in terms of ‘mind expansion’, and the scandal of drug-taking usually defended with holistic and totalising metaphors. The exhibition’s point of departure is instead to view intoxication independently of political and moral judgment, as a critical technology and creative mode. In this way it is committed to explore psychedelia as an at all times irritated practice that understands the nervous system as a site of production.
The thought experiment is to make psychedelia owe up to its promise of transformation by approaching it through artistic production. A dynamic meeting between the somatic and the symbolic. Psychedelia provides disappearance and disparity where power demands presence and sameness. Instead of clear lines of information, interference; instead of productivity, vegetative retreats. The hypothesis of this exhibition is that a psychedelic line of thinking-sensing is uniquely equipped to meet a social reality that depletes language and ideas through control and anxiety, and to confront a culture that manipulates experience through commercialisation.
In the exhibition’s title, the real has developed a typographic rash and isn’t itself anymore. It is the Real as Lacan was given to understand it, as what we (cannot) meet in death or psychosis: something ineffable, a fog, a miasma, that which always recedes and slips away from our attempts at grasping it. Perhaps this is the reason why the exhibition offers so many attempts at mapmaking; mappings of different locales, different places in the world, and the way in which they turn out to contain multiple itineraries, material movements, and layers of history.
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Exhibition is organised in collaboration with the Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius, The Contemporary Art Museum of Estonia (EKKM) and Vilnius Academy of Arts
Supported by: Cultural Endowment of Estonia, The Lithuanian Council for Culture, The Danish Arts Foundation, Plungės baldai, Estonian Film Institute