Aurelijos Maknytės paroda "Tėvų kambarys" kaip laikovaizdis

The concept of time-image (image temps) coined by Gilles Deleuze could be applied to analysis of works of art that juxtapose objects from different periods of time and combine them into spatial installation-projects. Such exhibitions are designed for the visitor to create their final and ideal version, and have to be "performed". This leads to the obliteration of clear concepts as well as to the process of self-creation. Agnė Narušytė uses the concept of time-image as well as Erika Fischer-Lichte’s theory of performative aesthetics in her phenomenological analysis of the exhibition "Parents’ Room", which was installed by the Lithuanian contemporary artist Aurelija Maknytė at the gallery Artifex in 2015. In "Parents’ Room", Maknytė created layers of different periods and places as experienced by different people: a tailor who wrote letters to her daughter from 1965 to 1990, Maknytė’s parents, already dead, and herself in two roles: that of a daughter and of a step-mother. The artist does not mask the separateness of the layers; she even reveals the sources: fragments of a family’s life, printed materials she collects, artefacts made for different purposes (soviet folded tables for celebrations, shoes for funerals, a sewing machine, sewing patterns cut from soviet newspapers), her own works (an artist’s book compiling the tailor’s letters, "Father’s Act" created in 2001 from her father’s autopsy report and "The Role" – an appropriated film by Rūta Šimkaitienė, "The Gardener goes to the Cemetery" (1992) where Maknytė played a step-mother). Both comic and macabre, the stories of other people’s lives are condensed in the exhibits installed in the three spaces of the gallery. Like in multiple exposure photographs, the exhibition connects realities that "have no clue" about each other but are interlinked through accidental coincidences, invisible to them, but planned by The viewer becomes an all-seeing privileged connoisseur from the "future" who gets also involved into the exhibition’s narrative, thus forming an additional layer. The viewer who walks around the exhibition and sees, hears as well as feels its elements one by one links them to each other and deciphers different flows of time in this Deleuzian time-image (image temps). Therefore, this actual viewer performs the exhibition and creates herself, and through her, exhibition is created (actualized) as well. Although Maknytė has planned the audience’s movements and responses, it is impossible to envision the final result, which is characteristic of performative acts. Thus, Narušytė’s walk through the exhibition, while carrying out an experiment of phenomenological investigation of lived experience, should be also considered as part of the exhibition creating itself and her own self as becoming