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Deimantas Narkevičius (1964, Utena, Lithuania), last year’s winner of The Vincent Award and one of the most important artists from Eastern Europe, makes idiosyncratic comments upon the drastic changes that have overcome his country and region since the fall of the Wall. On the occasion of a big solo exhibition in the Van Abbe Museum, a talk with the man who is trained as a sculptor, but is primarily known for his video work. On a chilly November day in Vilnius, I visited the Museum for the Victims of the Genocide. It is housed in a large neoclassical building, which until the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 had been the Lithuanian headquarters of the KGB. Numerous objects and photographs tell of the terrible price that Lithuanians paid for their independence. In the building’s cellars, the past comes alive. Those who opposed the regime were imprisoned, interrogated, tortured, deported and executed here. There are cells where so many prisoners were propped together that they could only sleep standing up. In a musty isolation cell, padded with thick cushions and a rubber floor, prisoners tied in straitjackets were detained in pitch darkness. Few survived this ‘soft cell’ more than three days. There are also the so-called wet cells, whose floors were flooded with ice-cold water, in which an extremely slippery stand, measuring 30cm in diameter, was the only escape for the barefooted prisoners. In cell number 16, hundreds of partisans were executed with pistols. Their bodies were buried in the park across from the building, or thrown out on the street as a warning to the population. A visit to these caverns of the Secret Service of the USSR sends shivers down the spine. When I met Deimantas Narkevičius in a coffee house, the artist told me that the Museum for the Victims of the Genocide was one of the most impressive museums that he knew. ‘De KGB cellars there are very authentic,’ he said, ‘and the presentation is not too dolled up. Many of the museum guides were even imprisoned there.’ There are other reasons why this Lithuanian artist appreciates the museum. His films and sculptures can be characterized as an investigation of the relationship between memory and documentation in times of political repression. His film Once in the XXth Century (2004) is well known, made up of television images of the dismantling of the statue of Lenin, which had for decades looked out on the KGB offices. Because of the way the film is edited, it seems as though the bronze leader of communism is not being disassembled, but lifted onto its pedestal. The work raises questions about how we deal with, or work through, the past, about the hasty removal of monuments after independence was declared and the affect it had on public perception of history. Not least, the film is a wink of the eye to the technical gimmicks with which news reports are manipulated. Deimantas Narkevičius (b. 1962, Utena, Lithuania) is a well-spoken artist with laughing eyes and a voice that betrays almost perpetual surprise. Since he represented his country at the Venice Biennial in 2001, his reputation has grown rapidly. He is part of a vanguard that has given new impetus to visual arts in the Baltic states, not only in his role as an artist, but also in his former position as a curator at the Contemporary Art Centre (CAC) in Vilnius. The Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam recently presented Narkevičius the Vincent Award for outstanding European art. Now, an exhibition at the Van Abbe Museum in Eindhoven is bringing together most of his work. His nine films, two installations and photographic works are being presented in a specially designed setting in the old section of the museum. Among the works selected for the exhibition is Narkevičius’ first film, Europa 54° 54’-25° 19’ (1997), a kind of short road movie, shot on 16mm film. The camera follows the artist on his journey to the geographical centre of Europe, identified by the French Geographical Society as being about 20 km northeast of Vilnius. ‘The film is about how we orientate ourselves in terms of the centre and the periphery. So what happens? The centre of the continent was the most western point of the Soviet Union, and now, in the European Union, it is the easternmost point. All that was there was a stone plaque with the coordinates. You had to imagine what was special about the place in your mind. Now, there is a monument there.’ Irony will have it that that same geographical society has since used more advanced equipment to come up with a new measurement, showing that the true centre of Europe is actually a couple of kilometres away. Narkevičius, familiar with the unreliability of monuments, can laugh heartily at that. Nor does reconstructing the past offer any sinecure. In His-Story (1998), for example, youthful memories are mixed with the traumatic history of political repression. What at first sight seems to be a documentary proves to be an extremely subjective and expressive travelogue. ‘In the film, I take a train journey that I had often taken in the past with my parents, from the south of Lithuania where they lived, to the coast. That repetition puts me in a position to tell the story of my father, a story about duress, exclusion and human suffering during the Soviet regime.’ The artist chose what he calls an ‘archaeological’ approach. ‘I wanted to make a film the same way films were made in the days of the Soviet Union, only not about heroes, but about ordinary people. It was made exclusively with cameras, microphones, cables and rolls of film manufactured by the Soviets during the 1970s. I wanted to make a film about the time when I was growing up, with the kinds of images that were made then, in order to tell a story that would have been impossible to tell back then.’ In 1998, at Manifesta 2, where Narkevičius’ His-Story was premièred, the film was projected on old Russian 35mm projectors. Because the projectors were not built to handle so many hours of continuous projection, they overheated, and the film has now been transferred to suit modern equipment. The characteristic chemical smell has been lost, but the grainy quality of the image remains.I asked the artist how he remembered television from his youth. ‘There were two stations, one Russian and one Lithuanian. They were not so bad. Almost every evening, films were broadcast, mostly from Armenia, Ukraine, Georgia and other parts of the USSR. What struck me were the news reports. They were made quickly and were roughly edited. More than once, I would be sitting watching a blank television screen. The film had broken and people were busy behind the scenes trying to get it fixed. That has influenced my perception of analogue film technology. With every film I make, I ask myself how I want to relate to film and to media in general. That self-awareness is not necessarily critical or negative. It is a challenge to regular cinema and produces films that you would not be very likely to come across in regular movie theatres.’ One film that specifically relates to classical cinema is Revisiting Solaris (2007). It is Narkevičius’ answer to Solaris (1972), the science fiction film by the legendary Russian filmmaker Andrej Tarkovsky. Solaris was commissioned by the Soviet state, which wanted something that would stand up against American conquering of space in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). Tarkovsky was able to turn the film to his own hand and created a reflection of the impenetrable limits of intimacy. A Lithuanian actor, Donatas Banionis, played the astronaut, Chris Kelvin, who in the silence of the infinite universe was visited by materialized memories of his deceased wife. Thirty-five years later, Banionis returns as the astronaut in Revisiting Solaris.‘Ever since I first saw Solaris, I have been tearing my hair out about what makes that film so fascinating and so confusing. You see actors and actresses who interpret characters, but also actors and actresses who do not play existing people, but are images of so-called embodied dreams. With the introduction of this duplicity, Tarkovsky resolutely broke away from the accepted perception of cinema. Another reason for making Revisiting Solaris was that I really wanted a chance to work with Donatas Banionis, one of the best-known film stars from the Soviet Union in the 1980s. In Russia, he is still immensely popular. When I asked him if he would be part of my film, his reaction was cautious. I told him that I wanted to repeat the scene from Solaris in which the old astronaut warns his younger colleague not to be too rash about travelling into space. In my film, Banionis plays the older cosmonaut, the same person as the younger cosmonaut in Tarkovsky’s film. He is not the person he was back then, and yet he is, so you get that ambiguity. In Revisiting Solaris, expressing memories is impossible, because it is a life or death issue, just as it was in the former KGB prison where the scene was filmed.’

Artistic Manifesto

Deimantas Narkevičius recognizes an artistic kindred spirit in the British filmmaker Peter Watkins, who lived in Lithuania for many years. Watkins’ best known and most controversial work is The War Game (1965), a film about the potential consequences of a nuclear attack on England, presented in the format of a news report. The BBC, who commissioned the film, found it so frightening that it took 20 years before they dared broadcast it. Narkevičius interviewed Watkins for The Role of a Lifetime (2003), a film that is practically an artistic manifesto. Both artists share comparable aspirations. Both plead, as Watkins put it, ‘for the dismantling of the conventional visual language of historic events in developing cinematography that does not make history subservient to the powers of ideological assimilation and commercialization by the mass media.’Those who expected that the disappearance of censorship would stimulate a blossoming of film culture in Lithuania are unfortunately sorely disappointed. ‘Cinema in Lithuania is in deep crisis,’ explains Narkevičius. ‘It is the lack of ideas. As brilliant a director and media theorist as Watkins was completely negated here. Nobody wanted to hear his ideas. Here, filmmaking means that you obey the rules of the profession: do not film against the light, do not record sound if there is noise, etc.. The rules prescribe what good filmmaking is. For me, that is the end of cinema. Everything that is made here is mediocre, clichéd and dysfunctional. There is no art, no entertainment, just ordinary trash.’ If there was indeed any new élan in the years following independence, it was in the visual arts. Video artists in particular made innovative and experimental work, and the CAC was their most important podium. ‘The 1990s were exciting – bad economy, good energy! There was a desire for change. We had broken with the past and developed a critical vocabulary for art. That was the only way, and you can see how the climate for the visual arts since then has slowly but surely improved. But that did not happen in film. There, the same bureaucrats from the old establishment still call the shots. I have never received a grant to make a film. Year in year out, all my applications are rejected. When I was invited to participate in Utopia Station at the Venice Biennial in 2003, funding was refused, with no explanation. Since then, I have stopped applying for support.’Narkevičius was originally a sculptor. The sculptures he produced in the early 1990s have seldom been exhibited and have only recently been purchased by major museums, including the Tate. For a hospital in Vilnius, he made a replica of the column from Buddha’s fourth-century cave, now divested of its structural function. In response to the question of why he did not continue that direction and instead began making films, he answered, ‘I have never seen much difference between film and sculpture. Both have to do with space and motion. You have to walk around a sculpture. You learn to understand it in successive views of it. Something of the same nature happens in film, where the sequence of images generates an illusion. It is, of course, not the same thing, but both are based on the aspect of the passage of time. I presented my first films as installations, with the projectors as objects in space, and viewers were free to walk around the exhibition space. You can read that presentation as an extension of my sculptural work.’ Choosing film also had to do with Narkevičius’ scepticism about official sculpture during the communist era. ‘Under the Soviets, art was subject to restrictions, and there was no free exchange of ideas. But life itself was pretty interesting, if I can put it that way. It was difficult, but also creative, in the way that people dealt with the restrictions of the regime. It was a creativity that could not be expressed in official visual art. Sculpture, for example, was limited to bombastic monuments. Under those circumstances, everyone was creative, except the sculptors. That is why I sought other references, in the story of Fana, for example, who survived the Holocaust in the ghetto in Vilnius (Legend Coming True, 1991). Stories like that are about the past, the way people personally experienced it. My contemporaries in the West often refer to the history of art. I refer to other histories.’ The tension between sculpture as state art and sculpture as an innovative and creative practice was clearly expressed in The Head (2007), Narkevičius’ contribution to Kasper König’s unsurpassed Skulptur Projekte Münster. ‘Germany is reunited and Europe has become one, but there are still enormous differences in the way people think about sculpture in public space. Münster has a history of countless interesting proposals that are realized every ten years at the Skulptur Projekte. A city like Chemnitz, formerly Karl Marx Stadt, has a tradition of state art, which its colossal head of Karl Marx symbolizes. I thought it would be exciting to confront the two traditions, by moving the Marx head to Münster for the duration of the exhibition. When I spoke to the Chemnitz authorities about it, they sounded exactly like the bureaucrats in Lithuania and were just as dismissive. Individual initiative is not appreciated. They only do something when someone higher up makes them do it. Such structures as these are still deeply rooted in many places in Europe. Practically and financially, it was feasible, but it foundered on their lack of willingness. With the film, The Head, I was still able to bring something of that aesthetic to Münster, as an incentive to reflect on the huge differences within Europe and in the different ways art is developing.’The Head shows high-spirited sculptures in the studio of sculptor Lev Kerbel, the festive unveiling of the Marx monument and reactions from children. The film was put together from historic material from several different German archival institutes. Many hours of video images were edited back to 12 minutes. ‘I cut out all the political vulgarity, such as the obligatory ‘correct’ answers on the part of the artist to questions from the interviewer. I wanted to relieve everyone in the film of the political weight that was being brought to bear on them. I wanted to show real people, a sculptor who was simply at work, and children who talk like children, people for whom you could feel some sympathy. In many of my films, you see people who talk about the Soviet past in a way that is shockingly different than what we are accustomed to – human and personal.’Lukiskiu Aiksté, the city square over which Comrade Lenin used to tower over the masses, is empty. Luxury fashion chains have set up their first boutiques. This year, Vilnius, with its beautiful old city centre and baroque architecture, is the Cultural Capital of Europe. Among other things, a museum of modern art is being opened. ‘We are in dire need of it,’ says Narkevičius. ‘There is almost no modern art here to be seen. The museum will house an unbelievable collection of state art from the Soviet era and art that has been made since then. I have my doubts about its national focus, but okay, you have to start somewhere. Initiatives like that have to be encouraged, and the selection of Vilnius as Cultural Capital can be a catalyst. A lot still has to change, but you can see in the younger artists that they are already much freer in their attitudes towards old structures. I have lived in London and Berlin, and for an artist, Vilnius is certainly not the worst city in Europe.’ Dominic van den BoogerdDeimantas Narkevičius: The Unanimous LifeVan Abbemuseum, Eindhoven 28 February – May 2009Once in the XXth Century can be seen in Questioning History, at the Netherlands Museum of Photography, Rotterdam, 13 December 2008 – 22 February 2009translation: Mari Shields