While in Graham’s “Vexation Island” (1997) a 17th century pirate, played by the artist himself, wakes up in the British Virgin Islands in order to get hit by a coconut falling on his head and lose consciousness all over again, in “Suspended” (2012) by Stasiulytė a basketball is stuck on the top of a huge Soviet-built weathercock in Vilnius. Both works are unceasing loops, allowing for a multiplicity of mechanical ends and beginnings, though at the same time leaving plenty of space to experience the unfolding present. Although the two revolve around different forms of trauma – either historical or physical – they also share the brilliance of deadpan humor. Thus, the bumps in this exhibition (be it of a coconut, a basketball or the seed of corn in Stasiulytė’s film, flying straight into the camera after being smashed by a laboratory device in Lithuanian University of Agriculture) are as playful or painful as the world around them allows them to be. Accordingly, this first show at Montos Tattoo could be seen as setting up the premise for different collisions and evocations to come, yet without a commitment to invention.

 

 

Gerda Paliušytė