FORUM RESIDENT: VALENTINAS KLIMASAUSKAS
A NARRATIVE IS A SELECTION.
Resident at Hordaland Art Centre, Vilnius based curator and writer Valentinas Klimašauskas, was very pleased to find the archives of documentation of Norwegian public art projects (1977-2001) in his Bergen studio. Having no prior knowledge of the Norwegian (public) art scene he consciously has chosen to use this chance of incompetence as an opportunity to test his own knowledge and imagination by preparing a selection of documentation and comments for the slide night as a way to present his practices. The presentation is accompanied by home made soup to everyone attending.
He has titled his presentatin he has "A Narrative Is A Selection. A Preview Of Selected Documentation Of Norwegian Public Art Projects (That Were Chosen For Personal Reasons), In Chronological Order (1977-2001)" and with this he asks: How do you construct the story about a subject that is unknown to you?
A highly imaginative German writer called Karl May never visited the exotic locales featured in his stories, but still this didn’t stop him writing books that haunted the imagination of the whole world. What would have happened if Karl May had been visiting and really knew the places he only was imagining? Would he still write about them?
We may be reminded about the case of Solaris, a 1961 Polish science fiction novel by Stanisław Lem. As we all know science fiction is a genre of fiction dealing with the imaginary. The Solaris novel radicalizes the concept of the sci-fi genre by revealing that our expectations and imagination is always limited to our own experience and projections, as in the case of meeting the other in the form of the planet Solaris.
The public is invited to recollect, invent, and create memories of the public art projects to be shown during the slide night preview.
-----
Valentinas Klimašauskas is a curator and writer from Vilnius who writes shows and curates texts. While being interested in speculative economies of language, he is into linking concepts and readers into language based performative systems. He is also a founding co-editor of Baltic Notebooks of Anthony Blunt and a curator at Vilnius Contemporary Art Centre.