2021
Video and TV broadcast in Lithuania
ONLINE 20.8.2021
On some Lithuanian TV channels around the year 2000, following the completion of the respective day’s TV programme, a video of a car driving through Vilnius at night was shown instead of a test card. It was a street view shot from the perspective of a front car window – a road movie, generating a hallucinatory light show full of real-time abstractions. Seen from the car’s vantage point, the video exposed the city as a field of energy, overlapping paths and constant change. The journey from one place to another as a form of serialised time travel, producing an exhibition of serendipitous occurrences and affects.
I found it interesting to think about how the architecture of light evolved through the decades. Yet the search for this material was unsuccessful. One of the TV channels had its archives burned down in 2009. Nobody remembers this specific content, as it was shown so late, though some of my friends whom I talked to almost believed that they had seen it in. Who knows, maybe I made it up in my memory. I thought it would be so great to produce my own new night-drive archive for the future. To document the Vilnius city light architecture. To emphasize the genre. To seize the possibility for a retrospective view. To offer this new material to TV channels so that they could use it instead of a test card, when their programmes would end and the night drive could begin.
Laura Kaminskaitė (born in 1984, lives and works in Vilnius, Lithuania) has exhibited her works in solo exhibitions, including Double double, Contemporary Art Center (CAC), Vilnius (2021); Today is the Color Day Meets at Day (with Antanas Gerlikas), P////AKT, Amsterdam (2018); Today , Editorial, Vilnius (2017); Turn Smile Laugh Sashay Conversation Smile Laugh Spring Up Smile Laugh Talk, Podium, Oslo (2017); Something something, Vermilion Sands, Copenhagen (2016); Exhition, BWA Warszawa, Warsaw (2013); Walking in a Title, The Gardens, Vilnius (2012); Exhibition, Objectif Exhibitions, Antwerp (2012); and in group exhibitions, including Cavemen & Gardeners, FUTURA Centre for Contemporary Art (CCA), Prague (2020); Palydos, Swallow, Vilnius (2020);Who's Werner?, Kunstverein, Amsterdam (2019); XII Kaunas Biennial, After Leaving | Before Arriving, Kaunas (2019); XVII Century, Autarkia, Vilnius (2019); The Guest, Kim?, Riga (2017); A Rock That Keeps Tigers Away, Kunstverein Munchen, Munich (2017); XII Baltic Triennial at Dailes Theatre, Riga (2016); A Million Lines, Bunkier Sztuki Contemporary Art Centre, Krakow (2015); Helsinki Group, Hiap Augusta gallery, Helsinki (2015); A Cab, Kunsthalle Athena, Athens (2014); The Moderna Exhibition 2014 - Society Acts, Moderna Museet Malmö, Malmö (2014); The Excluded Third, Included , Galerie Emanuel Layr, Vienna (2014); Vilnius Pavilion, National Contemporary Art Centre (NCCA), Moscow (2013); Thinging , Frutta, Roma (2012); Sparrows, CAC, Vilnius (2012).