Gintaras Didžiapetris

The multifarious practice of Vilnius-based artist Gintaras Didžiapetris (b 1985) thrives on paradox, and the navigation between past and present. Didžiapetris often uses memory as a springboard from which to articulate, question, or proliferate meaning. And while the base elements of logic or myth are perhaps insufficient ways to form narrative paths through the artists’ work, the unlikely collision of both go some way in describing Didžiapetris’ conceptual challenges.

One work within the artist’s oeuvre, ‘Konceptas’, 2006, takes the form of a document of sorts. Combining a radio broadcast, a map made from memory and photographs, ‘Konceptas’ logs the journey in and around a small village in Lithuania from which the work takes its title. The viewer’s vision of the village is both built from, and thwarted, by the disparate media that poses as corroborative evidence. Yet, ultimately, belief can never entirely be suspended, and instead the breach that widens between narrative and vision emerges as the primary character of ‘Konceptas’.

For this commission Didžiapetris explored the archive of the Institute of Lithuanian Literature and Folklore based in Vilnius. The commission takes as its backdrop, the historical productivity of Lithuania’s ethnographers and anthropologists. The discipline of ethnography and, more broadly, the structures through which knowledge can be created and disseminated, are key to the work. Didžiapetris frames his inquisitive project through the perspective of the self-reflexive ethnographer who negotiates an ambiguous relationship to the material he produces.

Presented here is a series of images that show a subjective fragment of the archive. They serve as a primer to a longer, spoken word piece that was broadcast as part of this commission on Resonance 104.4fm.

See resonancefm.com for further information
Ginitaras Didžiapetris: Rendez-vous, Institute d’art contemporain, Villeurbanne, 14 September–29 November; Sculpture of The Space Age, David Roberts Art Foundation, London, 2 October–19 December