The Radvila Palace Museum of the LNMA presents Dainius Liškevičius’s exhibition, which invites to rethink the nature of a museum and the stories museums hold on to

At 6 pm 21 March the Radvila Palace Museum of the LNMA invites to the opening of Dainius Liškevičius’s solo exhibition Obsessions. The artist employs different media to revisit and rethink the function of a museum as an institution and its role in society, questioning at the same time the objectivity of the stories, which museums maintain and their significance. The exhibition is open for public until 2 June. 

“It is not the first time that the Lithuanian National Museum of Art invites the community of its visitors to discuss the museum as a concept. Two years ago, also at the Radvila Palace Museum, together with the Italian artist Aldo Giannotti, we challenged the public to experience the museum differently from the usual. Last year’s National Gallery of Art event, curated by Giedrė Jankevičiūtė, offered to explore the beginnings of the LNMA Collection and to contemplate the museum from a historical perspective. The current exhibition by the outstanding artist Dainius Liškevičius will urge the public to penetrate even deeper and to reflect on the very idea of a museum as such. I hope that the exhibition will be received as a provocation by all the visitors and will stimulate them to reflect on these questions”, Dr Arūnas Gelūnas, director general of the LNMA, expresses his expectations.  

“Dainius Liškevičius’s exhibition proposes a conceptual take on the collections of the Radvila Palace Museum, on its spaces and processes, and invites to reflect on the role of a museum as an institution acting as a keeper and maker of stories and to call into doubt the objectivity of these narratives. The exhibition is important also an as opportunity of self-reflection for the museum, as it suggests to revisit the proportion of the museum as an accumulation of artwork and artefacts on the one hand and a place for the emergence of new significant narratives on the other, it also invites to share private and collective experience,” Justina Augustytė, director of the Radvila Palace Museum, notes.  

The exhibition Obsessions to show something stranger than art 

The exhibition Obsessions by Dainius Liškevičius, an artist recognized by the Lithuanian National Prize for Culture and Arts, raises questions about museums as institutions safeguarding material and spiritual treasures, and speculates what happens when on display at the museum is brought very museum. Is it possible to deconstruct the physical, cultural and legal structures which serve to highlight the continuously changing history narrative?  

The issues and problems of history construction, of sustainability of the collections, and the nature of a museum as an institution which inform the exhibition Obsessions, are also the artist’s recurrent themes. Their first manifestation was the project Museum, which represented Lithuania at the 56th Venice Biennial in 2015. 

This time the artist entangles the visitor into multiple obsessions by him, which are different interlacing routes of voyages into the world of things and resources. According to the creative team of the exhibitions, visitors, when setting on these voyages, risk to see something stranger than art, perhaps even their own expectations in an empty frame. 

One of the key parts of the exhibition are historical picture frames from the LNMA Collection. Other relics of the museum’s activity, the collection of photographs by the artist and a film created specifically for this exhibition invite the public to think about the margins and paradoxes of history and the sustainability of culture within the world of real challenges and threats. 

“In the collection of photographs, I have designed a multilayered narrative connected by complex logical threads. The exhibition broadcasts personal and universal memory voyage across the stories of the Radvila Palace, across political systems, biopolitics, ecology and disasters eventual approaching the antiutopian future constructed by the subconsciousness of our times”, Dainius Liškevičius elaborates on his ideas. 

The artist tests the boundaries of the genres, and employs installation, photography, performance and other media to create his art. He uses these means to explore different types of human behaviour and experience, identity and cultural values, the encounters of public and private spaces, of collective and individual memory. 
Dainius Liškevičius belongs to the generation of artists who marked the turning point in Lithuanian art by reinventing the artistic expression following the restoration of Lithuanian independence.    

Organizer Radvila Palace Museum of the LNMA 

Coordinators: Monika Kalinauskaitė, Lina Jonkuvienė 

Architect Vladas Suncovas 

 Coordinating architect Aleksandras Kavaliauskas 

Designer Marek Voida 

Lightning designer Milvydas Kezys 

 

The Lithuanian National Museum of Art is one of the largest national art museums in Lithuania with the aim of building, safekeeping, researching, conserving, restoring, curating and exhibiting the collections of the arts and cultural artefacts of national significance at its nine divisions in Vilnius, Klaipėda, Palanga, and Juodkrantė.