"Deimantas Narkevicius: The Role of A Lifetime"
2007-08-29 until 2007-10-21
Index - Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation
Stockholm, , SE

Documentary film is a broad category of visual expression that is based on the attempt, in one fashion or another, to "document" reality. Documentary aspects has had an obvious centre of attention within contemporary art besides that it has become important for the way we interpret our surrounding world. During the summer and fall, Index shows Lithuanian artist Deimantas Narkevicius’ The Role of A Lifetime (2003), a film that both broadens and challenges the concept of the documentary. The film intertwine three distinctively different elements: the artist’s interview with British filmmaker Peter Watkins, resident and working in Lithuania since several years: drawings of landscapes in Gruto Park, the place where a lot of post-war socialistic sculpture in Lithuania resides; and films by an amateur filmmaker depicting Brighton, Great Britain. The interview with Watkins joins recorded text with the visual documents that the drawings and films are representing. The Role of A Lifetime is a meta film, a film that, in the words of Andeas Gedin, avoids falling into the pitfalls of documentarism, and makes the viewer become part of the melancholic and matter-of-fact process that recreating the past always will imply.

Issues surrounding the document are recurrent in the works by Deimantas Narkevicius. He has consequently used the media of film to explore complex and personal stories against the background of the political changes that his home country has been exposed to during recent years. The Role of A Lifetime, 17 mins, was produced by Art and Sacred Places for Brighton Parish Church of S:t Peter, Brighton. The film has lately been screened in institutions such as Tate Modern, London, Secession, Vienna and Akademie der Künste, Berlin. Curator is Andreas Gedin, artist, critic and PHD student at Valand Art Academy, Gothenburg. In connection with the opening on 29 August, Deimantas Narkevicius visits Index and discuss his work with Andreas Gedin.

Peter Watkins is well know for his genre-breaking fictive documentary The War Game (1965). His first film, The Forgotten Faces, a fictive mise-en-scene of the Hungarian uprising in 1965, will be screened at Index together with Deimantas Narkevicius’ The Role of a Lifetime, and with a short introduction by Andreas Gedin (26 September, 6 pm).

Filmklubben screens Peter Watkins extensive film project La Commune (1999) with a closing seminar, chaired by Filmklubben (4 October 6–8 pm and 6 October, 12–6 pm).

Related Links:

Indepth Arts Resources for Sweden

Other Important Exhibitions in Sweden

Call for Artists : Community Arts Initiative - The Artist Project - Museum of Fine Art Boston Alexis Harding : Bi-product Depositories - Mummery + Schnelle Gallery der PROZESS : hunchentoot goes out 2 - Enda Odonoghue to Take Part - hunchentoot Galerie INTIMACY AND DESECRATION : The Body, Gender and Identity - CACT - centro d'arte contemporanea ticino Mark Edward Harris : The Art of the Japanese Bath - Kopeikin Gallery Call for Artists : 13th Annual Subtle Technologies Festival Explores Sustainability - Subtle Technologies, University of Toronto Art in Mind : Work by Natalia O'Neill - Brick Lane Gallery The Ione Citrin Collection - Poway Center for the Performing Arts Gallery Parallel Realities : Aishan Yu's First Solo Show in the UK - Peifen Fine Art Secrets and Confessions : Peter Sudar, John Stark, Leonard Vartic, Ioan Cristea - Ana Cristea Gallery Call for Artists : The Beast In Me, Johnny Cash - Art Influenced by the Struggle of a Man' - Nave Gallery Notations - Bruce Nauman: Days and Giorni - Philadelphia Museum of Art Beauitful Elsewhere : Fusion and Con-fusion - Migrating Cultures and the Dynamic of Exchange - Universita di Napoli - Partenope Animal Nature : Powerful Paintings, Drawings and Digital Prints by Hyacinthe Kuller-Baron - Computer Arts Gallery