A B D G I J L N P R S Š U V Z Ž

g. 1968

Darius Žiūra was born in 1968 in Joniškėlis. He studied at the Painting Department of the Vilnius Academy of Arts in 1991–1997 and received a PhD in Fine Arts from the Vilnius Academy of Arts in 2017. Žiūra lives and works in Vilnius. One intriguing piece of information about him is that his surname means ‘looking’, and he is in fact unusually sensitive to the promises and pitfalls of this fundamental activity. In recent years he has mostly relied on the photographic lens to filter and fix his gaze, although he has also worked extensively with video since the late 1990s. Žiūra is prepared to go far for his ‘visuals’, as he calls them. For him they embody a mental space that will always be under construction, an aspect of human existence that can be seized (and perhaps even understood) precisely because it allows itself to be turned into image. He visualises things that others have overlooked, because they regard them as either too undefined or too upsetting, too difficult. Portraiture is a significant concern for Žiūra. In the early years of the new millennium he would spend a significant part of his time on the road, in Lithuania or abroad, earning money as a street portrait artist. In the village of Gustoniai in northern Lithuania, where he spent much of his childhood, he has been making one-minute video portraits of all the inhabitants every third year since 2001. In Vilnius he might make 5-second video clips of the enamelled photographic portraits of the deceased in the cemeteries, or he might bring girls from the railway station to his studio and photograph them. Yet he also travels to rarely visited locations to portray motifs such as the deserted farmsteads on each side of the Latvian–Lithuanian border or the forlorn reality of the Republic of Udmurtia in Russia. Žiūra has participated in a number of group exhibitions in Lithuania, among them three national survey exhibitions at CAC Vilnius (‘1989–1999: The Ten Years’, ‘Self-Esteem: Lithuanian Art 2001’, ‘Lithuanian Art 2000–2010: Ten Years at CAC Vilnius’) and the 10th Kaunas Biennial in 2015. His work has also been featured internationally, perhaps most significantly in the 5th and 7th editions of the pan-European biennial Manifesta (in San Sebastian, Spain, in 2004 and in Bolzano, Italy, in 2008) and in the group exhibition ‘A Temporary Futures Institute’ at M HKA, the Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp, in 2017. Among his solo exhibitions, those at CAC Vilnius stand out: the performative installation ‘Another Space’ in 1998, ‘Portraits’ in 2006 and ‘SWIM’ in 2014. His solo exhibitions at Gallery Antje Wachs in Berlin should also be mentioned: ‘Collection’ in 2007 and ‘Selected Takes’ in 2010.

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Dead Water, 1994 (120x120x15)

God’s Pine Grove (1995, each piece 160 × 160 × 16 cm, collection of the National Gallery of Art, Vilnius)

Dead Water: Coffin, 1996, (80 × 80 × 80)

Mould (1998, 15 × 7.5 × 3.75 cm; collection of Kiasma, Helsinki)

Exhibition 'Another Space'

Exhibition 'Another Space' (1)

Exhibition 'Another Space' (2)

Exhibition 'Another Space' (3)

Palanga (2000, DV, 90’)

Palanga (2000, DV, 90’) (1)

Palanga (2000, DV, 90’) (2)

Palanga (2000, DV, 90’) (3)

Gustoniai (2001, DV, 59’)

Gustoniai, 2004, DV, 67'

Gustoniai, 2007, HDV, 59'

Gustoniai, 2010, HDV, 57’

Gustoniai, 2013, HDV, 60'

Gustoniai 2016, HDV, 87'

Gustoniai, airphoto series

Collection (2003, DV, 8’33”)

Collection (2003, DV, 8’33”) (1)

Project 'Portraits' (2005, 22 colour prints, each 60 × 60 cm; compilation of one-minute video clips, DV, 60’)

Project 'Portraits' (2005)

Visuals, 2006, C-print mounted on glass, 24 × 24 cm

Visuals/Udmurtia, 2007, 12 C-prints mounted on aluminium, each 74.5 × 74.5 cm

Visuals/Borderland, 2007, 9 C-prints mounted on aluminium, each 60 × 60 cm

Selected Takes, 2010, colour prints, 30.6 × 30.6

Selected Takes, 2010, colour prints mounted in light boxes, 40 × 30.6

Exhibition SWIM, 2014

Monument for Utopia, 2015

Žiūra's first mature body of work is also, incidentally, the only one represented in the collection of the National Gallery of Art. Pushing his painting practice into three-dimensionality and challenging the expectation of what an image should contain, the various works sharing the title Dead Water all incorporate surfaces poured over with paraffin (sometimes mixed with kerosene to soften it), frames (covered in paraffin, stearin and wax mixture) and glass plate. The first work in the series (1994, 120 × 120 × 12 cm) was an attempt to simultaneously create and negate 'the perfect image', stripped of all pictorial content and accessible only through the glassed frame. The second manifestation of this idea included a triptych subtitled God's Pine Grove (1995, each piece 160 × 160 × 16 cm, collection of the National Gallery of Art, Vilnius) that further accentuated the stasis of the image, while the third and final stage of the project was called Dead Water: Coffin (1996, 80 × 80 × 80 cm) and transposed the image into an object that responds to the visual convention of a fish tank with, or without the dead weight of water.

To date, Žiūra's only substantial continuation of the three-dimensionality in Dead Water: Coffin is the work Mould (1998, 15 × 7.5 × 3.75 cm; collection of Kiasma, Helsinki). In his own words, it is 'made out of coins collected from the fountain in the park outside the former palace of Count Tiškevičius in Palanga on 28 August 1997 and 31 August 1998. Small change, thrown into the fountain "for luck" by around 6,000 people of different ages, nationalities and social status.' These coins had accumulated during two summers in the popular Baltic Sea resort. The coins were of different provenience and made from different alloys, which is why the block of metal is 'pockmarked' by incompatibilities and impurities rising to the surface during the melting-together process.

Mould was first shown in Žiūra's solo exhibition Another Space at CAC Vilnius at the end of 1998. Curated by Raimundas Malašauskas, this decidedly 'environmental' project consisted of three parts, all presented in a space whose walls had been covered with a deep blue plastic film and accompanied by ambient sound. First, Mould was shown on a plinth, upholstered in blue velvet. The second visual element was a video projection of underwater plants moving in a cold-water current. Finally, there was a projection of six slides of a young woman, draped in white fabric and lying in a glass case gradually becoming opaque from the condensation produced by her breathing. Žiūra was constantly present in another room, observing all the goings-on in the exhibition hall on surveillance monitors and sometimes communicating with the visitors through a microphone and headphones placed in front of this projection. Two kinds of texts were also presented as part of the installation: a theoretical explanatory essays about the installation, and excerpts from Žiūra's virtual book Journey, an indirect continuation of the exhibited images. Another Space marked Žiūra's departure from the production and presentation of material three-dimensional art objects; thereafter he has worked almost exclusively with lens-based imagery.

Palanga (2000, DV, 90') is a montage from 40 hours of video material, shot during a summer spent at the Lithuanian seaside drawing portraits of holidaying passers-by. Like any such material, this long video becomes a time-capsule of something that was once the everyday: the off-duty behaviour of cash-strapped Lithuanians towards the end of the 'period of transition' that followed the recreation of their country's independence in 1990-1991. And the physical environment of Palanga has already deteriorated inexorably as a result of city development in the first boom years a decade ago. More than anything, Palanga shows us Žiūra's interest in portraiture and visualisation from a panoramic angle.

In 2001 Žiūra visited the village of Gustoniai in northern Lithuania, where he spent much of his childhood. He made 59 one-minute video portraits of its inhabitants. This first installment of the series Gustoniai(2001, DV, 59') was premiered in the exhibition 'Self-Esteem: Lithuanian Art 2001' at CAC Vilnius, curated by Anders Kreuger. Žiūra committed himself to repeating this action every three years for at least 15 years, and so far another five versions have been released (2004, DV, 67'; 2007, HDV, 59'; 2010, HDV, 57'; 2013, HDV, 60'; 2016, HDV, 87').Gustoniaimay be considered in the context of other projects following the same group of people over a number of years, usually documentary films for cinema or television such as Die Kinder von Golzow (GDR, 1961-2006), theUp!series (UK, 1964-ongoing) orBarnen från Jordbro(Sweden, 1972-1994). Yet Žiūra's work steers clear of any language-based narrative and portrays the microcosm of the village (as an image of the macrocosm of society) exclusively by letting us meet the gaze of all these people looking into his video camera. For the group exhibition 'A Temporary Futures Institute' at M HKA, the Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp, in 2017, Žiūra re-edited the six existing versions ofGustoniaiinto a six-channel video installation.

Gustoniai was also where Žiūra realised his first photographic project, in the winter of 2004. Together with a professional photographer he portrayed all its families (30 colour prints, each 40 × 40 cm) and they also took detailed aerial views, from a balloon, of the villagers' houses embedded in vast stretches of snow-covered fields and with a decommissioned narrow-gauge railway line in the background (3 colour prints, each 100 × 100 cm). These images were shown in his solo exhibition Other Voices, Other Rooms at the Magazzino d'Arte Moderna gallery in Rome in 2005, organised and funded by the gallery and curated by Cloe Piccoli. After this exhibition Žiūra continued to work experimentally with photography on his own.

The first version of the Gustoniai video was also screened at Manifesta 5 in San Sebastian, Spain, in 2004. Around this time Žiūra also worked on other lens-based projects, notably Collection (2003, DV, 8'33"). The title is straightforward but also provocative; the work consists of 100 video clips, each five seconds long, of enamelled photographic portraits on tombstones in Lithuanian cemeteries, mostly in Vilnius. Žiūra makes his viewers browse through this collection of attractive girls and women, many of whom died too young, and wonder what might have happened to them. The shifting light only heighten the sense of guilty pleasure at the core of Collection, which was also the title of Žiūra's first solo exhibition at Gallery Antje Wachs in Berlin in 2007.

In his second solo exhibition at CAC Vilnius in 2006 Žiūra showed the project Portraits (2005, 22 colour prints, each 60 × 60 cm; compilation of one-minute video clips, DV, 60'). He travelled extensively in Lithuania for a whole year, photographing and filming a large number of pre-pubescent girls - no longer children, not yet women. Throughout the series we also see the seasons changing - from early spring to the beginning of winter - which emphasises the models' relation to the landscape they inhabit. The photographs are full-figure, while the video clips show only their faces. Portraits is at least as voyeuristic as Collection. Yet it is also, like Gustoniai, a visual social analysis of contemporary Lithuanian society with its remaining differences between rural and urban populations.

The next step for Žiūra, after focusing explicitly on portraiture for a few years, was to explore other, but no less intimate, aspects of contemporary visuality by paying close attention to his physical surroundings. In 2006 and 2007 he laid the foundations for a distinctly pictorial approach to the photographic image, using good analogue and digital equipment. He chose to give these new photographs the overarching title Visuals.

The second illustration is taken from the series Visuals/Udmurtia (2007, 12 C-prints mounted on aluminium, each 74.5 × 74.5 cm), which was created for the group exhibition The Continental Unconscious: Contemporary Art and the Finno-Ugrian World at KUMU in Tallinn in 2008, curated by Anders Kreuger. Selected images from this series were also shown in Manifesta 7 in Bolzano the same year. Žiūra spent a few weeks in November 2007 driving through the towns and villages of Udmurtia, an autonomous republic in north-eastern European Russia, and photographing the material traces of its inhabitants. 1941-1945 are, of course, the dates of the Great Patriotic War, which is how the Second World War is still referred to in Russia.

The third illustration exemplifies the content of the series Visuals/Borderland (2007, 9 C-prints mounted on aluminium, each 60 × 60 cm), shot in abandoned buildings on both sides of the Lithuanian-Latvian border. This may not seem to be a very remote or extremely deprived area, but in each country the borderlands are, relatively speaking, far from the capital and have therefore been much affected by the neglect and emigration to western Europe that gained momentum after the Baltic States joined the European Union in 2004

In his second solo exhibition at Gallery Antje Wachs in 2010 Žiūra showed works from the series Selected Takes (2010, 5 colour prints (of faces) mounted in light boxes, each 30.6 × 30.6 cm; 5 colour prints (of figures) mounted in light boxes, each 40 × 30.6 cm; Faces, HD video rear projection, 23', Selected Takes, HD video rear projection 20'). These are images of young women who sell access to their bodies in the area of the railway station in Vilnius. Žiūra paid the girls, many of whom have Slavic names, for the time it took to photograph them, thus breaking the unwritten laws of both sex trade and art production.

'SWIM' was Žiūra's third solo exhibition at CAC Vilnius, in 2014. Realised in collaboration with the curators Virginija Januškevičiūtė and Anders Kreuger and accompanied by a publication with the same title, the exhibition was part of his doctoral research programme at the Vilnius Art Academy. It presented works from two different series. Photographs of mushrooms, mushrooms growing in glass cases and a stop-motion film from Forbidden Fruit, 2010-ongoing, were shown together with lightboxes from Faces and Figures, 2008-ongoing. The latter is a continuation of Selected Takes, as is the film Faces, 2008-ongoing, which was shown in a special one-off screening in the CAC cinema. The four letters in the exhibition and book title is an acronym sometimes used in online forums by writers trying to avoid incriminating themselves or asking questions about some illegal activity or its consequences. In those circumstances the acronym is usually deciphered as 'Someone Who Isn't Me' - but as Žiūra points out, it might as well be interpreted as 'Someone Who Is Me'…

Monument for Utopia, 2015, combines the personal stories of three friends of different nationalities who met during their military service in Khabarovsk in the Soviet Far East in 1987-1990. They shared similar aesthetic interests and vague visions for a future within the world of art. Later each went on with his life and they lost touch. Vyacheslav Kovalenko became a sculptor in Saint Petersburg, mastering the Russian tradition of academic realism. S. left Latvia and immersed himself in explorations of the gay scene in Dublin. For the past eight years he has been stealing books from various bookstores there. Žiūra ended up articulating his ideas within the framework of 'contemporary art'. In preparation for his participation in the 10th Kaunas Biennial in 2015 (curated by Nicolas Bourriaud), he proposed to Kovalenko that he commemorate the anniversary of their friendship with a monumental sculpture and left him free to interpret the theme as he saw fit. Žiūra also proposed to S. that the books he had stolen (over two tonnes of printed matter) become part of the monument. Monument for Utopia was installed in the old Central Post Office in Kaunas during the biennial. It was accompanied by The Making of a Monument, a video documentation (90') of Žiūra's 13-day visit to Saint Petersburg and of the process of manufacturing the sculpture. In order to avoid incrimination, the identity of S. has been concealed.