grazerkunstverein

(Lecture, Performance)

We all feel better in the dark

Raimundas Malašauskas

25/03/2023

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).

01Photo: Alexandre Guirkinger.