Loss of Heat (1994, 20 min.) is an evocative portrayal of queer love that challenges preconceived notions on the “reality” of living with the invisible disability of epilepsy. It is a poetic, immersive interpretation exploring the interplay of the emotional and the physical across boundaries of sexuality, dependence, and desire.

Loss of Heat is shown in the context of The Work We Share, a film program of ten newly digitized films from the Cinenova collection. Produced between 1972 and 1994, the films address oppositional histories and questions of difference through the lenses of gender, race, sexuality, health, and community.

The Work We Share gathers a number of films that previously existed in precarious conditions, in some cases, with negatives being lost or distribution film prints being the only copy. This program intends to acknowledge Cinenova’s interdependency: from organization to filmmakers, cultural workers, communities, and individuals. How can we acknowledge our interdependent relationships? How can we recognize our place in a network of communications, relationships, and resources, particularly as an un-funded volunteer organization? What different strains of labor does our work rely on? How do we sustain this work mutually?

Cinenova is a volunteer-run charity preserving and distributing the work of feminist film and video makers. It was founded in 1991 following the merger of two feminist film and video distributors, Circles and Cinema of Women, each formed in 1979. Cinenova currently distributes over 300 titles that include artists’ moving image, experimental film, narrative feature films, documentary, and educational videos made from the 1910s to the early 2000s.

Noski Deville (United Kingdom) is a cinematographer and film artist working across film, music, and sound. As Workshop Co-ordinator at the London Filmmakers Co-Op in the 1980s, she developed her skills on the JK Optical Printer. Deville has over 25 years of experience as a cinematographer and is well known for her award-winning work with internationally acclaimed artists, including Isaac Julien, Steve McQueen, Alia Syed, Daria Martin, and Jananne Al-Ani. In 2015 she won the Jules Wright Prize for her cinematography in the field of visual arts. An industry-recognized Director of Photography and member of the Guild of British Camera Technicians, Deville is also a committed film educator, having headed up the Cinematography Department at UCA, Farnham Film School.

Now Pretend (1991, 10 min.) is an experimental investigation into the use of race as an arbitrary signifier. Drawing upon language, personal memories, and John Howard Griffin’s 1959 text, Black Like Me, it deals with Lacan’s “mirror stage” theory of self-perception and the movement from object to subject.

Now Pretend is shown in the context of The Work We Share, a film program of ten newly digitized films from the Cinenova collection. Produced between 1972 and 1994, the films address oppositional histories and questions of difference through the lenses of gender, race, sexuality, health, and community.

The Work We Share gathers a number of films that previously existed in precarious conditions, in some cases, with negatives being lost or distribution film prints being the only copy. This program intends to acknowledge Cinenova’s interdependency: from organization to filmmakers, cultural workers, communities, and individuals. How can we acknowledge our interdependent relationships? How can we recognize our place in a network of communications, relationships, and resources, particularly as an un-funded volunteer organization? What different strains of labor does our work rely on? How do we sustain this work mutually?

Cinenova is a volunteer-run charity preserving and distributing the work of feminist film and video makers. It was founded in 1991 following the merger of two feminist film and video distributors, Circles and Cinema of Women, each formed in 1979. Cinenova currently distributes over 300 titles that include artists’ moving image, experimental film, narrative feature films, documentary, and educational videos made from the 1910s to the early 2000s.

L. Franklin Gilliam (b. 1967, United States) believes that, in a broken world, the vision and creativity of artists are critical to transformative systems change. Gilliam’s creative practice is research-based and multidisciplinary. It has taken the form of film/video art, installation, games, and illustrated lectures. Gilliam’s projects explore the interplay between obsolete technology formats and the faulty transmission of historical knowledge and difference. Their projects have been screened and presented at the 1997 Whitney Biennial (New York), the New Museum (New York), the Oberhausen Short Film Festival, the Institute for Contemporary Art (London), and are featured in Anäis Duplan’s book BLACKSPACE: On the Poetics of an Afrofuture (2020). They have taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and Vermont College of Fine Arts. They held various positions at Bard College, including director of the Integrated Arts Program. In 2022, they were artist-in-residence at the Centre for Afrofuturist Studies in Iowa.

If green is elemental, terrestrial, fundamentally of the earth—sharp blade of the palm, soft chorus of the grass, superabundance—it is also thoroughly modern. Green screen, chroma key, green as a ghost. Neon, billboard, bleeding light. What green did she see?

Colorless Green Freedoms Sleep Furiously (2023) is a newly commissioned video essay and installation by the Bosnian-Dutch artist Miloš Trakilović that explores visibility and freedom in the digital age through the lens of his family history. The work is rooted in the account of his mother, Milijana Mendeš, who survived the atrocities of the Bosnian War and fled to the Netherlands with her two children in 1995. In 2018, Trakilović conducted an extensive interview with her about her experiences from the Bosnian War. In this conversation, she vividly recalls some of her first moments once outside of the war zone: “When I arrived in The Netherlands as a refugee, the first thing I remember doing was sitting in a park for hours. I could not stop staring at the grass. It was so lush and green. I’ve seen grass many times in my life before, but I’ve never again seen it so bright. I remember sitting there and thinking; this grass here is so green, it is free, and in that moment, I felt free too. I felt liberated from my past.” 

Twenty-eight years after their arrival, Colorless Green Freedoms Sleep Furiously embodies Trakilović’s speculative quest to make his mother see that same shade of green once more. Trakilović entwines her heartfelt triangulation between green, grass, and freedom with the coded and simulative nature of digital technologies in which green plays an imperative role, such as the green screen or chroma key, and computer-generated imagery. Filmed in the Netherlands and Bosnia and Herzegovina, and oscillating between simulated and “real” landscapes, Colorless Green Freedoms Sleep Furiously unfolds as an inquisitive and poetic dream sequence that challenges the hegemonic role of vision and truth in the narratives of war and visual culture at large. Here, Trakilović invokes the invisible, unrelenting spectral forces that constitute the experience and memory of war and its aftermath.

Colorless Green Freedoms Sleep Furiously will be presented alongside All But War Is Simulation (2020), a two-channel video installation that explores representations of violence and the visualization and mediatization of warfare in an age of digital expansion. Blending historical record with speculation and theory, it takes as its starting point an artifact from the Bosnian War: a soon-to-be refugee’s Post-It note detailing a list of possessions to be taken before the family’s eviction. All of the items are related in some way to the preservation of memory—highlighting both the longing for an ideal past and a boundedness to the everyday experiences of war, where survival becomes routine and one’s life is reduced to a few simple objects. Neither an image nor a poem, the yellow record speaks to the multiple dimensions of loss associated with the experience of war and displacement.

Colorless Green Freedoms Sleep Furiously is accompanied by a publication of the same name, with contributions by Edwin Nasr, Jelena Petrović, and Miloš Trakilović. It is edited by Tom Engels and designed by Julie Peeters.

Miloš Trakilović (b. 1989, SFR Yugoslavia, now Bosnia and Herzegovina) is an artist based in Amsterdam and Berlin. Recent exhibitions include All But War Is Simulation, Kunstfort bij Vijfhuizen (2021), and Callie’s in collaboration with FRAGILE, Berlin (2020); Things we sense about each other, Badischer Kunstverein, Karlsruhe (2021); ISKRA DELTA: MGLC 34th Ljubljana Biennale of Graphic Arts (2021); Perception of Contemporaneity, Danube Dialogues, Novi Sad (2019); Farocki Now: A Temporary Academy, Harun Farocki Institut, Berlin (2017); and The Clouds is Where We Want To Be, Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin (2017), among others. MISSION ACCOMPLISHED: BELANCIEGE (2019), a video installation developed in collaboration with Hito Steyerl and Giorgi Gago Gagoshidze was presented at Trafó Gallery, Budapest (2023), MMCA (National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art), Seoul (2022), MUNCH Triennale, Oslo (2022), Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2022), Centre Pompidou, Paris (2021), K21 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf (2020), Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna (2020), and Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, Berlin (2019). Colorless Green Freedoms Sleep Furiously is his first institutional solo presentation in Austria.

Colorless Green Freedoms Sleep Furiously is commissioned by Grazer Kunstverein and realized with the generous support of the Mondriaan Fund, Dommering Foundation, and Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten. The exhibition is supported by ifa – Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen and Stichting Stokroos.

BILL is a “magazine without words” conceived and edited by Grazer Kunstverein’s in-house graphic designer Julie Peeters. Each year, BILL publishes an issue that uses the logic of the image to collect photographic stories and archival material from artists, architects, photographers, fashion designers, and graphic design colleagues, including Martin Margiela, Hans Hollein, Rosalind Nashashibi, Jason Dodge, Linda Van Deursen, and Jochen Lempert, among others. As part of the opening weekend of sekretas by Marija Olšauskaitė, BILL celebrates the launch of its 4th issue. The presentation of BILL4 will be accompanied by the release of a newly conceived limited-edition newspaper.

Benedikt Reichenbach in Camera Austria about BILL: “In terms of empowerment, where identity is typically formed merely in relation to a dominant structure, looking at BILL seems to bring you closer to yourself, without ever leaving it static at what that is. […] By putting you in the middle of its content, which at no point has anything to prove, you’re asked to articulate your own point of view to what you’re seeing. And if Peeters merely refers to the ornithological meaning of name and logo, it might just express the nature of BILL: a refusal to speak or have things resolved.” 

Julie Peeters (b. 1983, Belgium) is a designer and editor based in Brussels. Since 2022 she has been responsible for the graphic identity of the Grazer Kunstverein in collaboration with Sophie Rentien Lando (digital) and Chiachi Chao (typeface). She is the founder and creative editor of BILL, an annual magazine of photographic stories and a publishing project focusing on the printed image.

As part of the opening night of sekretas, Antanas Lučiūnas / Ragemore introduces the opening weekend by way of a listening session. A long-standing friend and collaborator of Olšauskaitė, Lučiūnas builds a sonic environment in which sampling, field recordings, and their own compositions set the stage for a sensory unraveling of the exhibition. 

Antanas Lučiūnas / Ragemore (b. 1997, Lithuania) is a visual artist and musician living in Vilnius. Their work combines performance, writing, and sculpture with a strong emphasis on collaboration. Intimacy, subculture, and desire systems are the focal points of their work. Lučiūnas’ work unfolds itself through the mannerisms of popular music and club-like situations, often complemented with leisured choreography and imbued with tropes of physical culture. 

As part of the opening night of sekretas, London-based music producer Lauren Duffus joins with dancehall-indebted rhythms, layered atmospherics, and beguiling vocal samples. Duffus’ natural flair for emotional expression has quickly singled her out as a captivating addition to London’s experimental electronic scene. Simultaneously playful and tender, her unique chopped-n-stretched, hyper-choral sketches articulate something heartfelt and cinematic in the offbeat vocals, dub-pop rhythm, and ambient. Duffus’ debut EP Sulk was released on the Body Motion imprint in 2021.

Annie Parker about Lauren Duffus’ music: “Listening to her productions, it’s clear that the uncanniness of these inspirations is right on brand. Tangible are the bad-dream atmospherics, chopped ‘n’ screwed beats, and irreverent tones which paint the witch house genre (grey), as well as the cinematic drill instrumentals typified by Chicago rapper Chief Keef. But far from the codeine’d quality of Salem’s quasi-noise productions, the antagonism in Duffus’ music is often appeased with blithe glimmers, sometimes even choral singing. Her music’s equal proclivity for both caustic indignation and moments of tenderness justify previous comparisons to the likes of aya and Loraine James, both of which extend to her fusion of prismatic club beats and soft melodics.”

Excuse My Dust is a music program selected and performed by the pianist Han-Gyeol Lie. Responding to sekretas, Marija Olšauskaitė’s exhibition, Lie’s program meanders from French Baroque to late 20th-century composition, ranging from Jean-Philippe Rameau to Gérard Pesson. The pieces are gathered based on resemblances and affinities in tonality rather than geographical or temporal criteria and are organized according to the key in which they are performed. Throughout, slight shifts in key occur as the concert progresses. Related but different keys hide within each other, parallel tonalities rub against counter-parallels, holding the pieces together in amicable accord. The program will be performed on an untuned Grotrian-Steinweg grand piano built in 1927.

Gérard Pesson, Excuse my Dust, 1999-2008
Ludwig van Beethoven, Bagatelle in C major op. 33.5, 1803-1804
Frédéric Chopin, Prélude in C major op. 28.1, Prélude in a minor op. 28.2, 1836-1839
Jean Philippe Rameau, Allemande, from Suite in a minor, 1727
Johann Sebastian Bach, Prélude, from English Suite No.1 in A major, 1715
Franz Schubert, II. Andantino in fis moll from Sonata in A-dur D 959, 1828
Ryūichi Sakamoto, Germination, 1983
Elena Narbutaitė, blue diamond, 2019
John Cage, Dream, 1948
Gérard Pesson, La Lumière n’a pas de bras pour nous porter, 1994/1995

With the support of Klavierhaus Streif, Graz. 

Han-Gyeol Lie (b. 1982, Germany) is a pianist living in Vienna. Her repertoire focuses on the French Baroque and the late piano works of Franz Schubert and Frédéric Chopin. With philosopher Gabriele Geml, she is the founder and director of .akut – Verein für Ästhetik und angewandte Kulturtheorie (Association for Aesthetics and Applied Cultural Theory). She curated concerts for the Austrian Film Museum, the Picture Gallery of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, Wien Modern, Tanzquatier Wien, and the Vienna Folk Song Society. As a visiting lecturer, she lectures on music and art at the Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre in Vilnius and the Sandberg Institute – Department of Fine Arts in Amsterdam, influenced by the aesthethic theories of Theodor W. Adorno. Currently, she works closely with dancer and choreographer Alix Eynaudi and sound artist Paul Kotal in various constellations.

On the occasion of sekretas’ opening weekend, digestivo responds to the exhibition and its contributors by way of the palate. Acting at times as host to other artists’ practices, digestivo’s role hovers mostly in and around the kitchen, providing food and fostering a space for encounters. Thinking through the means of hosting, they aim to investigate the reach of materialities that develop around acts of foraging, fermenting, or preserving: promoting leftovers and immersing them in a future prospect of sharing. Throughout the afternoon, digestivo will serve edible offerings that swerve along the logic of sekretas, its materials, and its riddles.

digestivo is a collaborative initiative founded in 2019 by artists Lucía Bayón and Lukas Meßner as an itinerant project space in Rotterdam. Past events include: Tempest Gourmand with Pedro Herrero Ferrán at Haus Wien, Vienna (2020); A voice can only break a glass that already has a crack in it with Hrefna Hörn Leifsdóttir, Rotterdam (2020); Colofonia líquida y saliva with María Nolla Mateos, Rotterdam (2019); and Moodring II, Rotterdam (2019).

Lucía Bayón (b. 1994, Spain) centers her practice around sculpture and writing. She lives in Madrid. 

Lukas Meßner (b. 1989, Italy) is an artist working with sculpture, text, and images. He lives in Vienna.

By way of movement and speech, curator and writer Raimundas Malašauskas will elaborate on sekretas, a peculiar Lithuanian term that both means secret and secretary, the old-fashioned piece of furniture that serves as a place for reading, writing, and storing paper. sekretas is also the title of Marija Olšauskaitė’s exhibition and the name of a popular game played by youngsters in Lithuania. Playing it, children would enter a courtyard or a garden and place small objects under a piece of glass: flower petals, pictures, a note, golden bottle caps, shells, and other characteristic elements would be organized and composed into a material expression of friendship. Altogether, Malašauskas will dive into the word’s complexity, its multiple meanings, and the many (hi)stories it provokes.

Raimundas Malašauskas (b. 1973, Lithuania) has co-written an opera libretto (Cellar Door by Loris Greaud, Palais de Tokyo, 2008), co-produced a television show (CAC TV, Vilnius, 2004 – 2006), served as an agent for dOCUMENTA (13), released Paper Exhibition, the book of his selected writings (Sternberg Press, 2012), co-curated 9th Baltic Triennial of International Art, Vilnius (2005), the 9th Mercosul Biennal, Porto Alegre (2013), the 9th Liverpool Biennale (2017), and exhibited his childhood paintings in a choregraphic composition by Alix Eynaudi (2019). His most recent projects are trust & confusion, an eight-month-long live art exhibition at Tai Kwun Contemporary, Hong Kong (2021), 914, the Russian Pavilion in the 59th Venice Biennale (closed), and Mars Returns, a 14-hour long event at Mykolas Žilinskas Gallery, Kaunas (2022).

sekretas (Lithuanian for secret) is an exhibition by Marija Olšauskaitė that peers into her long-standing affinity with the glares of glass. It focuses on a particular facet of her work that is attentive to the ways in which sculptural practice and the social lean into one another.

sekretas assembles suspended surfaces to look through, resting vessels to hold, vividly colored benches to carry, a vitreous pond, hand-blown tableware, reproductions of flowers in so far as the logic of glass permits, words jotted in notebooks, plants picked in Uzbekistan, and the company of friends and neighbors to keep.

sekretas borrows its name from an urban leisure activity practiced by youngsters in Lithuania and many other countries that were part of the former Soviet Union. Zestfully, children would enter a courtyard and place small objects under a pane or a found shard of glass: flower petals, golden bottle caps, shells, beautiful rubbish, and other idiosyncratic elements to be organized and composed into material expressions of friendship. The glass would then be covered with soil or dust, as a sekretas recedes from view. A fortunate passer-by or friend on the lookout might then find these secrets, these minute compositions of mundane, seemingly nonsensical elements, which would carry the greatest meaning for those who knew.

sekretas looks into that joint where sculpture, composition, and the making of social bonds revel in each other’s presence. Here, glass takes on a distinct role. It frames and shelters composition and friendship, both concretely and symbolically, while simultaneously prefiguring their fragility and potential shattering.

sekretas presents works that are imbued with a whimsical and slippery attitude toward the fixity of sculpture. They quiver between traditions of craft and ornament, the social role of sculpture, and the ways in which objects populate daily lives and customs. At the same time, Olšauskaitė’s pieces also harbor the idiosyncrasies of cryptic abstraction and enigmatic composition. Throughout her work resounds the tradition of stained-glass production, which flourished in post-war Lithuania, then often seen in public sculptures and state commissions. The artisans who remain in these glass workshops and whom Olšauskaitė continues to visit embody and transmit this artistry, which she, in turn, transforms and bends.

sekretas is punctuated by the appearance and vanishing of works by fellow artists, friends, and guests. Unannounced, their liminal presence will manifest itself throughout the exhibition.

sekretas is accompanied by an extensive public program that will unfold throughout the opening weekend. Moving between sonic contributions, a lecture performance, publications, and edible offerings, sekretas will be activated by Lauren Duffus, Antanas Lučiūnas / Ragemore, digestivo (Lucía Bayón and Lukas Meßner), Raimundas Malašauskas, BILL (Julie Peeters), and Han-Gyeol Lie.

sekretas will also be accompanied by secrets, a publication that gathers words, plants, and glass contributed by Elena Narbutaitė, Marija Olšauskaitė, Maria Tsoy, Aleksandra Krivulina, and Tom Engels, designed by Julie Peeters.

Marija Olšauskaitė (b. 1989, Lithuania) lives and works in Vilnius. Her solo exhibitions include Song Sing Soil (with Eglė Budvytytė), Vleeshal, Middelburg (2023); I Want to Stuff My Heart with Moss, Editorial, Vilnius (2022); Witness on our behalf, Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius (2019); and Marija & Petras Olšauskai: Miss Bird, Art in General, New York City (2014), among others. Olšauskaitė participated in group exhibitions internationally, including The Milk of Dreams, the 59th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia (2022); and suddenly it all blossoms, RIBOCA2, Riga International Biennial of Contemporary Art (2020); Homegrown, Hauser & Wirth, online (2020); I walk the night, PM8/Francisco Salas, Vigo (2019); Joy and Mirror. Port city, Fourtoseven gallery, Riga (2016); and Karaoke Police, Kunstverein, Amsterdam (2015), Nomas, Rome (2014), Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius (2013), among others.

sekretas is realized with the support of the Embassy of Lithuania in Austria and the Honorary Consulate of Lithuania in Graz.