Deimantas Narkevičius
"Deimantas Narkevičius" by Steven Matijcio, Winter 2007, p. 93
In the labyrinthine lower level of the Vienna Secession, the Lithuanian artist Deimantas Narkevičius has mounted a series of recent video works that do well in accommodating themselves to their surroundings. The circuitous path that the viewer must follow through this maze of dimly lit rooms mirrors the twisting chronology that informs Narkevičius’s alloys of historical narrative.
The artist studied sculpture in Vilnius in the age of social(ist) realism, but is best known for his work in video and his engagement with questions of ideological obligation. In this context, Narkevičius merges documentary material with interviews, reenactments and art-historical imagery to create an alternative to the linear trajectory of political rhetoric. His most successful works achieve cross-cultural resonance, fusing the artist’s sculptural instincts and personal history into meaningful social archaeology.
With a nod to cinema’s role in the construction of history, Revisiting Solaris (2007) recasts Donatas Banionis (who played the lead in Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1972 adaptation of the seminal novel) with the intent of completing the narrative Tarkovsky left incomplete (he omitted the final chapter of Stanislaw Lem’s original story). However, as Banionis plods through the assigned monologue, his sober words fail to congeal with the work’s other elements: film clips and photos by an early-20th-century Lithuanian artist. The result is an anachronistic collage of cinematic alienation. In contrast to this mismatched ode, Disappearance of a Tribe (2005) translates personal material into a haunting communal elegy. Weaving a succession of black-and-white stills of his late father into a stirring filmic frieze, Narkevičius transcends biographical specificity to traverse generations and geography.
Another pair of disparate works illustrates the challenges of deconstructing Lithuania’s ideological constitution. In The Role of a Lifetime (2003), the words of the British filmmaker Peter Watkins suffer a similar fate to those of Banionis in Revisiting Solaris, failing to find synergy with drawings of Lithuania’s Gruto Park and found footage of Brighton, England. The inability of these elements to coalesce contrasts with the focus evident in the neighbouring video, Once in the XX Century (2004). By reversing documentary footage of the removal of a monument to Lenin from a public square in Vilnius, Narkevičius turns a jubilant demolition into a surreal resurrection. In the process, the fallacy of viewing a deposed monument as a sign of ideological transformation is toppled by the resumption of a disquieting sameness.
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