Four hours in an art gallery

[lovingboth]

I am in Vilnius, Lithuania at the moment.

The Founding General Meeting for the new pan-European bi+ organisation, Bi+ Equal, finished before lunch today, after two and a half days talking about the journey to get here - the Dutch / French organisations that have done most of the work started about 18 months ago - and sorting out the details. There were other things you could do, but this was a much more 'work' conference than any BiCon.

I'll have more to say about it later, but partly so I can tell people who are still here and not going to the ILGA Europe conference that's happening somewhere else in the city, I want to post about what I did this afternoon.

The main modern art gallery's English name is the Contemporary Art Centre. Their current show is called 'Bells and Cannons: Contemporary Art in the Face of Militarisation'. There's an online review complaining that there's not much to see, and that's true: it's not a large gallery compared to say Tate Modern etc.

But it is extremely good.

In their large reading room are some photos and videos from the Goldsmiths-based Forensic Architecture group on ecocide in Gaza: satellite photos showing the Israeli destruction of a large majority of the area's greenhouses since 2023; video and photos on the way that pre-2023 herbicide spraying at the border was done with - at best - wilful disregard of the effects on agriculture near it, but only on the Gaza side.* There's also a video on the effects of palm oil plantations in Indonesia.

In the basement is a programme of two videos. The central bit of the one that was playing when I went down is the oral history of a Jewish woman who escaped from the Vilnius Ghetto during World War 2 minutes before the Nazis and collaborators "liquidated" it. She joined the partizans in one set of forests - another lot in another forest were not enthusiastic about having Jews join them.

I could tell it was quite long, but I stayed through the one that's a shorter** version of Koyaanisqatsi, with scenes including military and enabling companies (Google, Meta etc) around California, to see the start of it. When I left, I noticed the info near the door for the first time and saw it's actually 68 minutes. It felt half that length.

Upstairs is a video installation on the theme of the use of faked forensic science to help justify Russia's second invasion of Chechnya. Putin was running to become President at the time.

There's a video in a big room that had assorted content warnings around flashing lights and possible hypnotic effects. It was OK and I had far more fun playing with a pair of doors from a military facility that were being prevented from opening or closing from one or both directions based on what was happening in four mostly violent video games streaming nearby.

Another room had large installation with lots of metal pipe work and video on the Nord Stream pipelines that were built to take liquid natural gas from Siberia to Germany. The skies over the Ruhr may be less polluted and bluer but there are effects along the line, and the money for the gas that was delivered helped fund Russia's war machine. Some good history on the Russian expansion into Siberia and the century-long collaboration over pipelines between Germany and Russia too.

The last room had some paintings - most interesting to me were some on war-related sites in Berlin - and more video installations: one on AI recognition training data, one on the close*** border that features very high-ISO video (i.e. mostly noise as the camera tries to capture every last photon and some bits of the sensor trigger randomly) and a soundtrack taken from people trying to cross it (including who gets welcomed - white political refugees - and who doesn't get allowed across - people from Syria et al) for one reason or another. Oh and video of a performance in Kiev last year with a banging electronic dance music soundtrack with at least the drums played live.

So plenty of video and attached installations. I don't usually do this, but I watched every second, including the best half of the last one twice.

Oh, it's four hours after I arrived and it's now dark outside.

After a last play with those doors and a chat with the person on the ticket / reception desk who'd admitted me, gone off to eat, and returned to notice I was still there, I left.

I hadn't noticed this in advance (or even noticed the sign by the main door) but it turned out that Wednesday is their half-price day, and this all cost €4.

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* They burn a tyre to check the wind is blowing in the right direction before spraying from a drone just on the Israel side of it. In typical Forensic Architecture style, the video shows the calculations that result from film of the drone working out exactly where it is and where the mix of herbicides are going to end up. There are also photos of the results on crop leaves up to 600m away from the border.

** And not so well soundtracked!

*** I'm just over 30km from the border with Russian client state Belarus at the moment, possibly the closest to a hostile border - a couple of Russian drones crashed on the wrong side of it presumably en route to Ukraine in the past few months - that I've ever been. (Ah, privilege...) There's also a border directly with Russia further to the north east.