With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and the declaration of a global quarantine, imagination and fantasy have become the only escape for most. Therefore, the International Festival of Extraordinary Textiles (FITE), which takes place every two years in Clermont-Ferrand (France), offered artists to imagine - a different world, to reflect not only the present but also the future, to ask whether art can change the world, to rebel against indifference and resignation, to turn hope into revolution, kindness - by political action. This is how the exhibition "IMAGINE!" was born, which is coming to the History House of the Lithuanian National Museum on June 7.
The festival, which takes place every two years, chooses a partner country - this time it was Lithuania. And for this exhibition to be held in our country as well, Lithuanian National Museum cooperated with the Vilnius Academy of Arts and thus once again proved that togetherness helps to achieve excellent results.
Textiles as a way to communicate
"When chaos and antagonism prevail in the current world, such international projects become extremely relevant, giving hope that art and culture in general can help to coexist, teach to communicate through images, dare to dream not about a dystopian, but about a utopian future." It is also important that modern artists help museums to renew tradition, rethink it, look at it in a new way, and next to the exhibits of modern textile works from the collections of the Bargoin Museum of Textiles and Archeology and the National Museum of Lithuania offer to discover links or deconstructions between tradition and today, to look for differences and similarities between different cultures", says the director of the Lithuanian National Museum, dr. Rūta Kačkutė.
Textiles are not only traditional patterns, which once inspired the famous artist Kazi Varnelis, not only decorative or practical bedspreads, tablecloths woven exclusively by women. Textiles can speak, ask questions, make you think. For example, Zimbabwean artist Moffat Takadiwa uses objects found in landfills in his works because he can tell the story of his country through them. French designer Arnaud Cohen once started making slippers out of sheep's wool, thinking about the end of the world, and now works with old textiles, giving them additional meanings. The artist from Brazil, Gustavo Cabos, reveals the history of displacement of the indigenous people of Brazil through his works. The Frenchwoman Jeanne Vicérial says that the uniqueness of the human body disappeared when, in the XNUMXs, it was divided into sizes S, M, L to meet the standards of the textile industry. According to her, in a sense, skin has become a fabric of the XNUMXst century, designers are modern surgeons, and the relationship with the body has begun to disappear. The Dutch artist Guda Koster claims through her work that there is a paradox hidden in textiles, as in every person: it is both a strong and vulnerable medium. According to her, in the future each of us will be half human, half thing.
Textile art from Lithuania
At the festival in France, alongside artists from other countries, the works of as many as fifteen Lithuanian creators were presented, most of them teachers of the Vilnius Academy of Arts.
"The broad geography of the artists in the exhibition allows you to get to know different cultural contexts, different artistic practices, emphasizing human feelings as the creative and driving force of society. Unexpected cross-cultural dialogues are born in the exhibition, and historical museum exhibits (from the collections of Bargoin and the Lithuanian National Museum) created alongside modern ones create conceptual connections that are timeless," says Severija Inčirauskaitė-Kriaunevičienė, co-curator of the exhibition, artist, head of the Department of Textile Art and Design at VDA.
Lithuania was represented in France by well-known artists of the country: Jurga Sharapova, Monika Žaltauskaitė-Grašienė-Žaltė, Eglė Ridikaitė, Morta Jonynaitė, Severija Inčirauskaitė-Kriaunevičienė, Rūta Šipalytė, Eglė Ganda Bogdanienė, Laima Oržekauskienė, Lina Jonikė, artist group "Baltos kandys" (Austė Jurgelionytė -Varnė, Karolina Kunčinaitė, Miglė Lebednykaitė, Rasa Leonavičiūtė, Laura Pavilonytė-Ežerskienė and Julija Vosyliūtė).
Their works also speak about today's most pressing issues. The creator Jurga Sharapova calls herself not an artist or an author, but one of the objects of the exhibitions. For her, textiles are a very unstable, human material, under which we usually hide and at the same time try to show who we are. The group of artists "Baltos kandys" criticizes consumption with its work and raises the question of the value of objects and art. And Eglė Ganda Bogdanienė states that although modern textiles, which are mainly produced in Asian countries, are mass, surplus production, at the same time, they are a space for raising and solving the problems of the Atropocene era. Textile creators become a tool for social activism and protest.
So what does it mean to visualize through textile works? This is to allow the mind to travel to unknown territories, where control is lost, to travel through unimaginative brambles without any destination or landmarks. This is to imagine other possibilities, to respond to the current problems of the world. Finally, imagination is curiosity that prevents you from getting stuck in the same place, trying to find or at least imagine other ways of seeing the world, trying to understand other cultures, because curious people tend to care, not destroy.
International festival exhibition "IMAGINE!"will be held in the House of Stories, T. Kosciuszko st. 3, Vilnius, and will be open to visitors from 2023. June 8 until October 29
