Deimantas Narkevičius

His most recent work, 20 July.2015 (2016), traces the removal of several socialist realist sculptures from the Green Bridge in central Vilnius, Lithuania, which had been erected in 1952. Presented in immersive 3D – Narkevičius's first use of the medium – it culminates in the final removal of the monuments at 2 a.m. on 20 July 2015.

Deimantas Narkevičius, 20 JULY.2015, Maureen Paley, London.

Solo film programme, 15th International Short Film Festival, Winterthur.

Restricted Sensation (2011) was Narkevičius's first long feature shown in cinemas: a 45-minute film depicting the abuse of a talented young gay theatre director in the Lithuanian SSR in the 1970s, with the post-Stalinist re-criminalisation of homosexuality representing the oppressive cultural policy that took hold as Stalin assumed total power in the late 1920s. Although it can be read as a comment both on that period's homophobia and Vladimir Putin's current persecution of Russia's LGBTQI population, Narkevičius said he was not aiming to depict the explicit, illegal life of gays in the Soviet Union. Rather, the film comments on "the distrust and intolerance of what is perceived as foreign to a particular country’s culture" and was "an attempt to identify the causes of the increasing prevalence of intolerance".

Narkevičius's works are a part of major private and public collections such as Tate Modern (London), Moderna Museet (Stockholm), Modern Art Museum (Vilnius). In 2008 for his achievements in art Narkevičius has been awarded the Vincent Award and the Lithuanian National Prize for Culture and Arts. His film Restricted Sensation (2011) was a nominee for the best short feature at the 2012 Silver Crane film awards.

The Head (2007) consisted entirely of photographs and archival footage made for East German television. The film documents the creation of the world's second-largest head sculpture – a seven-metre-high profile of Karl Marx by Soviet socialist-realist Lev Kerbel (1917–2003) – from its conception in 1968 to its unveiling in Karl-Marx Stadt (now Chemnitz) in 1971. Narkevičius commented on his film by saying: "Objects from that period are not a crime. They are rather testimonies to historical crimes, visual heritage of an era to be kept and appreciated: if we want to feel any compassion for what the people who lived then lost, and in order to separate individuals from their creatively inhibited artworks – even if the consequences of this aesthetical repression can still be felt in the Eastern Bloc ...".

For Revisiting Solaris (2007) Narkevičius adapted the final chapter of Stanisław Lem's novel Solaris (1961), which Andrei Tarkovsky left out in his 1972 film. In Narkevičius's film Lithuanian actor Donatas Banionis reprised his role as Chris Kelvin after more than 30 years. In Revisiting Solaris Narkevičius used a series of photographs taken by prominent Lithuanian symbolist painter Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis in Anapa (now Russia) in 1905 to represent the foreign planet, as well as Eduard Artemyev's iconic score from the original film. Revisiting Solaris marked an outstanding interdisciplinary effort by the Lithuanian filmmaker to join multiple talents from different periods making it into a timeless monument.

In 2005 Flash Art used an image of the figure of Lenin from Narkevičius's film to promote the 2nd Prague Biennale (2005). The description mistakenly said it was the statue of Lenin being removed from Kaluzhskaya Square (former October Square) in Moscow, Russia. In reality, the Lenin statue is still in Kaluzhskaya Square.

Narkevičius's next film, Once in the XX Century (2004) played with Lithuanian television footage broadcast across the world of the statue of Lenin being torn down in Vilnius's Lukiškės Square in 1991. Recutting it in reverse, Narkevičius showed a jubilant crowd cheering the monument as it was hoisted from the back of a vehicle onto a plinth, being reunited with its legs. In Once in the XX Century he continued to explore and contextualise the problematics of public monument and monumentality – a central theme in Narkevičius's artistic practice.

Once in the XX Century (2004) is based on video documentation of the removal of a monumental public sculpture of Lenin from Lukiškių Square in Lithuania in 1991. The artist acquired footage from the Lithuanian National TV archive and a freelance video reporter to have a two-camera perspective on the event. These images of the figure hanging above the crowd with his hand raised have been broadcast hundreds of times by CNN and other news channels over the last decades as a symbol of the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the failure of Communism.

In several interviews such as the 2003 interview with curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, Narkevičius reflected on the importance of films he saw in his early childhood. His first experience of cinema was watching movies with his parents in the theatre or at home on television. Films by prominent Soviet directors such as Sergei Eisenstein, in particular his Ivan Grozny, Part II (1958), which he saw at the age of five, and Bronenosec Potiomkin (1925), were among his earliest cinematic experiences that in Narkevičius's own words had a dramatic impact on him.

In perhaps his best-known film The Role of a Lifetime (2003), commissioned by UK-based organisation Art and Sacred Places for a parish church in Brighton, Narkevičius asked what it meant to be a filmmaker with a social conscience. The centrepiece of the film is an interview with British director Peter Watkins whose politically-charged, fictionalised documentary-style works had addressed the Hungarian uprising, The Battle of Culloden (1964), and the La Commune (Paris, 1871) (2000), and who had left the UK in frustration with censorship and neglect, settling in Vilnius. The interview is juxtaposed with 1960s Super-8 footage of Brighton and Hove and sketches by Lithuanian artist Mindaugas Lukošaitis of Grūtas Park, the sculpture garden 80 miles south of Vilnius where many of the country's Soviet monuments ended up after the fall of the Soviet Union. Noting that some people considered the decision to save the statues "a disaster", Watkins described the park as a place to contemplate "man's unbelievable folly and inhumanity ... and sadly, the endless repetition of history".

It is perhaps The Role of a Lifetime (2003) that most evocatively and thoughtfully ties together Narkevičius's interests in the uncertainties at the heart of post-Soviet Lithuania with the implications of his own work in creating film and video. The film combines three distinct elements. The first one is an interview with the British filmmaker Peter Watkins that Narkevičius recorded in Lithuania. Known for his pioneering docudrama films Culloden (1964) and The War Game (1965), which politicised and fictionalised the documentary form, Watkins lived in Vilnius for many years in the course of his self-imposed exile from Britain. The second is a sequence of drawings of the Lithuanian landscape by Lithuanian artist Mindaugas Lukošaitis. A number of these drawing show Grūto Park, a kind of Soviet theme park in the south of Lithuania, that acts as a repository of Social Realist sculptures from the post-war era. The third is footage of Brighton life shot by amateur film enthusiast Geoffrey Cook which Narkevičius found in archives in Brighton.

In 2001, Narkevičius represented Lithuania at the 49th Venice Biennale. Two years later he came back to Venice to show his work in the Utopia Station curated by Molly Nesbit and Hans Ulrich Obrist. Describing his work's relationship with his nation's past in an interview with Obrist, Narkevičius said, "Memory is a funny thing. I think our brain has a filter: you remember what you want to remember. And you recreate the stories of the memory in a way that you want to remember them and how you would like to create them".

The work Too Long on a Pedestal was made in 1994, when the Lithuanian public was still affected by the huge political and social shifts of the early 1990s. The stagnant and morally compromised ideological system that had dominated social life for nearly 50 years was being replaced by a new one. This work, tinged with subtle humour, is a reflection on how the heritage of the political system becomes history. The means of expression selected by the artist, a pair of worn-out classic-style shoes, now filled with coarse salt, points to the statues of heroes that used to embody the value system of the former epoch, but the people promptly removed them from their pedestals, as politics changed its course.

Since 1992 Narkevičius has exhibited extensively in important contemporary art venues and events worldwide, including Centre Pompidou (Paris), Museo Nacional Centro De Arte Reina Sofia (Madrid), Tate Modern (London), Museum of Modern Art (New York), Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam). He represented Lithuania at the 49th Venice Biennale in 2001 and two years later exhibited at the 50th Venice Biennale in Utopia Station curated by Molly Nesbit and Hans Ulrich Obrist. Narkevičius's work was shown at Manifesta II (Luxembourg, 1998) and Manifesta X (St. Petersburg, 2014). Amongst his most recent solo shows are 20 July.2015 at Maureen Paley (London, 2017), Books on Shelves and Without Letters at The Blank Contemporary Art (Bergamo, 2016), Archeology of Memories at former KGB building (Riga, 2015). Narkevičius's major retrospective opens at the National Gallery of Art in Vilnius, Lithuania, in December 2017.

Between 1992 and 1993, while still a member of the Vilnius Academy of Arts, Narkevičius lived in London, UK. In England, he explored the possibilities of object making and approaching the medium from a conceptual standpoint. London was an exciting place to be for the emerging artist. This period, which was marked by intensive learning, had a significant impact on Narkevičius's understanding of contemporary art as he was exposed to London's art milieu: for example, artists of the Young British Artists (YBA) generation, but more so for his motivation for becoming an artist. A dense concentration of artists and a competitive artistic climate meant that the standards for art were set high, but it also led to a strong sense of community. Artists often collaborated and helped each other in different ways. Narkevičius, who was one of them, was able to benefit from these processes.

Since the late 1990s, Narkevičius has worked mostly in film and video, experimenting with film structure and thematising the weight of individual memories and personal revisions of history. The majority of his films deal extensively with the cultural legacy of Communism and attempts to erase it after the fall of the Warsaw Pact regimes in 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union two years later, with an emphasis on statues, sculptors, artists and moving images. These themes first emerged in his early films Europa, 54° 54' – 25° 19 (1997), Legend Coming True (1999), and Energy Lithuania (2000). A seven-minute 35mm film His-story (1998) shown at Manifesta II in 1998 gained the artist international recognition, making Narkevičius a leading contemporary Eastern European filmmaker.

After finishing secondary school at the age eighteen, Narkevičius worked for a year and a half in a museum that exhibited a collection of Soviet art. In an interview with Melissa Gronlund, he admitted that he was amazed at how funny the artwork was to him. Later, in 1987, Narkevičius enrolled in Vilnius Art Institute (now Vilnius Academy of Arts) where he chose to study sculpture. The academy's curriculum was rigid and did not excite him as much as he would have expected. In his own words, prominent Lithuanian expatriate artists Jonas Mekas and George Mačiūnas meant more to him than any teacher he had at that time.

In Solaris, before Banionis as Chris Kelvin leaves Earth, the old pilot Burton attacks him as "not fit to go into space" and "an accountant, not a scientist". In Revisiting Solaris, Banionis/Kelvin and an unnamed woman who is played by Narkevičius's wife say these words to the artist who in such a way himself becomes young Chris Kelvin. The difference between Tarkovsky's and Narkevičius's versions of the scene is that take-off does not happen. The image of the planet Solaris is represented as Banionis/Kelvin's memories. The mysterious planet is revisited by evoking both the memories of a man who was "there" some time ago and also viewers' collective memories of Tarkovsky's film. "There" happened in the form of a fiction film in 1972, but Narkevičius accepts it as reality.

As with his other work, Narkevičius is awaking something anachronistic, something that has gone from the everyday (or contemporary media) experience. By bringing a real man, a witness to an outstanding cinematographic achievement like Solaris by Tarkovsky, he emphasises that some dimensions of the film remain relevant. The presence of Banionis is also a link between "then" and "now", between created reality and its impact on a viewer many years later. "The man is among us, the way he moves is the same, his look is the same, so 1972 is still 'present'.”

Growing up Narkevičius was often ill which meant he had to stay home. As a result, he spent a considerable amount of time watching Soviet television. The documentary material on 16mm film used on TV in the 1970s made an impression on Narkevičius, who later used the same type of film extensively in his artistic practice. Interviews were filmed with 16mm cameras and were then processed and made ready for the evening news on the same day. Since they were done in quite a rush, it provoked considerable experimentation. These films were screened and then broadcast, raising a range of possibilities for using film. Narkevičius, who grew familiar with these images, admitted to the ingenuity of their production and the effect it had on him even after many years: "I sometimes look back at them, and I see how creative they were – how creative the camerawork and the editing was".

In works like Punishment Park (1970) or La Commune (Paris, 1871) (2000), Watkins has challenged what he calls the "monoform": cinematographic editing that reduces disparate visual and acoustic parts to a narrative whole. Narkevičius undoes the monoform by putting together images and sounds that do not match each other in what appears to be a biographical documentary. The film scenes are too idyllic and too recent for the traumatic World War II childhood that Watkins recollects; a summer hum of birds and insects accompanies his description of the Soviet monuments collected in Grūto, and the pencil sketches of the park show a thick layer of snow covering the defunct socialist heroes. Maybe the wizened man in the stills is not Watkins but the protagonist of yet another history.

Narkevičius first saw Andrej Tarkovsky's film in the 1970s. In an interview with Larissa Harris he admitted that then, when he was about sixteen or seventeen, he did not get it at all, simply not understanding what was going on in the film. Nevertheless, it engaged him and raised his curiosity. Later on Narkevičius watched Solaris over and over again. "I kept watching it until, having reached my thirties, I finally liked it a lot. Perhaps that was also due to the fact that I started to lose people who were close to me".

Most of the selected locations seen in Revisiting Solaris are functional architecture from the period of radical modernisation. They are linked with the recent past, which for Narkevičius was very much about creating a future. In comparison, in Solaris, the future is represented by the beautiful shots of the roads and highways Tarkovsky took in Tokyo in 1970. Narkevičius chose the locations for Banionis to discover them. When talking to L. Harris, he said that he wanted him to establish contact with those spaces, accommodate them with his presence while being filmed. The room with two telephones, for example, is a former KGB prison, now the Museum of Genocide Victims in Vilnius where decades ago people were killed for political reasons. For that scene, Narkevičius chose an excerpt from Lem's book that talks about the nature of human thoughts. "What potential dangers can result from materialisation of some thoughts? What "phantoms" were generated by human minds in recent history?” Narkevičius rhetorically asks the viewers of his film.

Later in early adolescence Narkevičius familiarised himself even further with the cinema of his time by seeing Sergei Parajanov's Hakob Hovnatanyan (1967), which again had a significant impact on the young artist. It was then that he became fascinated with the films produced in the studios of the Soviet republics, which revealed local identities, traditions and languages. In another interview from 2011 Narkevičius described technological and stylistic aspects of Parajanov's film that moved him as a young person:

Deimantas Narkevičius (born 24 May 1964 in Utena, Lithuanian SSR) is one of the most consistent and widely recognised Lithuanian artists on the international art scene. Originally trained as a sculptor, Narkevičius has mainly worked with film and video. Employing documentary footage, voice-overs, interviews, re-enactments and found photographs, his films submit historical events to the narrative structures of storytelling and cinema. In his artistic practice Narkevičius examines the relationship of personal memories to political histories, particularly those of his native Lithuania. For the artist, history itself has become both material and methodology.

Deimantas Narkevičius was born in Utena, Lithuania, in 1964 at the time when Lithuania was part of the Soviet Union.

More dialogical than monological, The Role of a Lifetime ends up highlighting distinct bodies of work and visions: Narkevičius's audio interviews with Watkins, drawings by Mindaugas Lukošaitis (filmed by Audrius Kemežys, who catches Lukošaitis's hand), and archival footage of Brighton filmed by Geoffrey Cook in the 1960s. In his role as a master editor, Narkevičius mismatches these silent images and invisible sounds not only to question the documentary's veracity but also to begin the elusive discussion with the audience, who must put the parts together. Experiencing the gap between Watkin's eloquent remarks on creativity and Cook's quirky views of Brighton comes close to participant observation. Cook's Brighton initially appears to be part of Watkin's childhood memories, only to emerge as the eye of yet another filmmaker; in this shift the cathartic hit of nostalgia, instantly delivered by Super 8, dissolves into two visions of the past whose incommensurability makes them all the more fascinating.

Deimantas Narkevičius, 60th Oberhausen International Short Film Festival, Oberhausen.