The axis of the exhibition is the work of Jonas Mekas (1922-2019) and the concept of the film diary he developed. In the film “Walden (diaries, notes, sketches)” (Walden. Diaries, Notes and Sketches, 1969) and later works “A Walk” (A Walk, 1990) and “Sleepless Nights Stories” (Sleepless Nights Stories, 2011), the camera becomes not a storyteller but a sensitive recorder of being in the world. Everyday fragments become important in J. Mekas’s work – friends’ faces, changes in light, seasons, urban spaces, and fragile flashes of life.
Read more Massive fires in the US: hundreds of buildings turned to ashes
Jonas Mekas’s son Sebastian Mekas, who contributed to the preparation of the exhibition, says that in his later years his father watched with playful curiosity how other curators and artists interpreted and presented his work and films.
“In this exhibition, several of his most important film diaries are exhibited together with works by other authors,” says S. Mekas. “Audra Vau immortalized Jonas Mekas during his last trip abroad, when he used his new video camera – a small device, even smaller than an iPhone. Meanwhile, Ugnius Gelguda, using the palimpsest of stories and their retelling, brings together one of Mekas’s earliest video works ‘A Walk’ and the story of the Tree of Paradise. The diary-like perspective permeates the entire exhibition, connecting different decades, technologies, and artistic practices.”
Ugnius Gelguda’s video work “Tree of Paradise” (2011), inspired by J. Mekas’s film “A Walk,” resonates with it as an archaeology of memory. In an hour-long walk through the rain-soaked Soho district of New York, Mekas intimately and fragmentarily tells the story of the district’s creation, recalls the first tree he and George Maciunas planted in this industrial area, and reflects on the unrecognizably changed streets of Soho and their inhabitants.
“Back in 1990, Jonas Mekas, walking through the changing New York, reminded me of the loft district on Taras Shevchenko Street, which was experiencing the first steps of gentrification,” Ugnius Gelguda says about his video work. “This Vilnius district still had its Tree of Paradise in 2011, foretelling new hopes of newcomers in the former gray industry. I was struck by the immediacy of Mekas’s film ‘A Walk’ – it felt as if you were walking alongside and experiencing everything together, the entire city’s transformation and the cooling rain in this huge organism.”
Read more “Mediazona” editor moves to France: It will be increasingly difficult in Lithuania
Audra Vau’s video portrait of Jonas Mekas “Poets Never Sleep” is like a meditation. The artist created this video work in 2017 when she unexpectedly had the opportunity to film Jonas Mekas in London, where he had come to present his book “Dance with Fred Astaire.”
“This video work of mine was born from a short, barely half-hour filming. A small space accidentally found in a hotel became a place for an intimate meeting with a person who filmed the world as an unending miracle throughout his life,” says A. Vau.
The title of Audra Vau’s work, which also migrated into the exhibition’s title, is taken by the artist from one episode of J. Mekas’s “365 Days Project,” when Mekas, unable to fall asleep on a plane, says: “Everyone is asleep. I am not sleeping. Poets never sleep.”
The exhibition “Poets Never Sleep” invites viewers to slow down their gaze, allow themselves to notice fragile moments of everyday life, and rediscover poetry as a way of being in the world.
Read more State and municipal budgets supplemented by 11 billion euros in half a year
