Vilnius is Burning is an exhibition and a live event that draws on the legacy of the renowned film Paris is Burning (1989) and a variety of creative experiments coming from and via Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania. The project introduces the work of a number of Vilnius artists as well as those living in San Juan, Brussels or Berlin.
The flow of simultaneity, cerebration of life, continuous slippage and creative misreading (Paris is Burning is not exactly about Paris and not about burning) informs the show, which is linked to Lithuania’s participation in the Torino International Book Fair. A special book of Vilnius is Burning will be released to contextualise the show not only within a framework of collage making and anamorphic quotations, but a collective novel writing too. The experience of the show is as anamorphic as most of the works and ideas in its flow: poetic photographs appear to be a documentation of a Concept while Concept (Lith. Konceptas) appears to be the name of an existing village in Lithuania, covered with radio beams that you will hear in the gallery space (Gintaras Didziapetris). The stuffed head of a wild boar looks back not only at it’s past as an aristocratic trophy brought to a museum but also at its future programmed by his adopted author (Juozas Laivys). The space of the Fondazione Sandretto contains a mix of air from another museum, the airport of Vienna and a tire of Fiat car brought in a sealed bag by the same artist. The exhibition is discovered trough getting lost in the corridor perforated by curtains made out of several thousands of Soviet-design-conscious plastic lids of glass jars by Valdas Ozarinskas, Hansabank award winner of 2007 and LT Identity award winner of 2006. They lead to folds and breaks of the colourful life of Stasys Banifacijus, an eccentric who attempts to creatively survive not in the secure art context but in the everyday while enigmatic anonymous young talents B.A.B.A compress their quirky and smart visions in a jpg on Internet. Sandra Straukaite, a fashion designer, introduces the magic of her conceptual work that could be worn not only by the art-world.
