Greatest Hits
Saturday, 21 December 2013
Work from their oeuvre.
“It was the winter of 2001 — dark and cold, as usual. During the launch of the event we initiated a conversation with the audience about their experience on the subject of aliens. This discussion yielded very unexpected results: in a culture of few words, people picked up the microphone, one after the other, and talked about what they saw and what they thought about it. It was a genuine and warm conversation. It made me realise that aliens are a great subject to engage people, not only in general discussion, but also in discussions about contemporary art. In other words, aliens could open the door to contemporary art for the uninitiated.
In the beginning I thought this path must belong to art’s populist tricks, like using footage of sexual imagery or domestic violence. Later I figured out that perhaps what was also at play here was a tautology. Contemporary art is as detached from traditional human cultures as aliens are. This is exactly where the value of both lie: the potential of introducing unknown ways of being and thinking to the domains of familiarity.
From this moment on I became a proponent of ‘alienship’ in art. I claimed that contemporary art is always a matter of collaboration between individuals and an alien, and it should remain so if it wants to stay true to its nature as a reality-bending discipline. I even compared an institution I worked with to a large alien in the middle of a city, producing and distributing realities that were not yet there.”- Raimundas Malašauskas