OZE PAX
To quote the title of one of the installations by Aida Čeponytė and Valdas Ozarinskas, it’s always “better to do something than nothing at all”. OZE PAX is a self-portrait by Ozarinskas that is shown here for the first time. In this video, his head slowly revolves in the centre of the screen as if it does not belong to the artist. This asteroid floats in an irregular orbit in Ozarinskas’ own office at the CAC, which he has just finished designing. Finally, again, Ozė has launched into orbit. Or perhaps he is now stuck in an orbit that is restricting his free flight? Opaque at first sight, just like the dark glasses he wears in the video, the title of the work (why is it “pax”, as in “peace”?) is a reference to a 2001 Hollywood film, in which Kevin Spacey’s character spends his days in a psychiatric hospital waiting to return to his planet K-PAX, located, according to him, approximately a thousand of “our” light-years away. “So far ahead of time”, Rolandas Rastauskas will later say about the set design and costumes for the theatre performance “Tomorrow at Four” (later renamed “The Clinic”), made collaboratively by Ozarinskas and Čeponytė in 1996. In the words of the theatre critic Vaidas Jauniškis, the protagonist of this play “is recovering from the Communist mentality and the virus of his father’s past. Treating others at the hospital and catching the disease himself, in order to become a tabula rasa.” Performed only a couple of times, the play was set in the claustrophobic space of an abandoned army barracks swimming pool, clad with stark white tiles that swallowed the actors’ voices like an abyss. The props of this production consisted exclusively of medical equipment, and all of the characters were dressed in white — both the doctors and the patients, the relatives and friends visiting them, and, of course, the laboratory rat.
from the Union, in which they spoke about the position of this port “in the constellation of astronomical deep sky objects” and its placement into “the intergalactic algorithm”. Their proposal for the port was to install indicators of geographic location pulsating with bright light that would send signals to the Earth’s satellites, which in turn would generate daily photographs of the harbour. “Feedback” is probably the key idea of this proposal, which stands in sharp contrast to the far less optimistic view of satellite surveillance systems that prevails today. In 2018, feedback manifests not by way of elegant snapshots but of missiles and social profiling. The images generated by surveillance equipment are for the most part no longer meant for the human eye — they are only ever “seen” by computers. On the other hand, aerial photographs remain not just objects of fascination but also instruments of education, and as such haven’t lost one bit of social value in all this time. In the same year that the proposal was presented for the competition, the project for the Port of Fredericia was partly realised on the façades of the Contemporary Art Centre, where several of these modified “satellite dishes” remain to this day. The project, titled “Points of Attraction”, was implemented during the 8th Baltic Triennial, in which architects — the duo of Ozarinskas and Čeponytė, and the Dutch studio MVRDV — took part in a large scale contemporary art exhibition alongside visual artists for the first time in Lithuania.
One of the most important works in this retrospective is also one of the earliest — an object made together with the exhibition’s architect Audrius Bučas in 1989. Nicknamed “Cockroach”, it was assembled from scraps generated by the disintegrating industry of that time. Though the object itself has survived relatively well, in this exhibition it is presented in the photographs by Remigijus Pačėsa taken in the basement of the Lithuanian Union of Architects. At that time the three the architects and the photographer had studios or also lived in the premises of the Architects’ Union, and it was there that the earliest exhibitions (art installations) by Ozarinskas, each seen by just a handful of people, were held. In these photographs, the decaying walls of the building perform yet another important role — their mouldy and disintegrating surfaces have become cosmic nebulae and galaxies in the nocturnal sky of the Universe, a background for an architekton which has suddenly turned here into a space station floating in open space. Is this irony, a declaration of the shortcomings and faults of one of the most important architectural organisations in the country? Probably. Yet the photographs also speak of the boundless ambition and poor economic circumstances of that time. Was no hint of irony in the proposal that Ozarinskas and Čeponytė submitted for the open competition of the Port of Fredericia’s development in Denmark in 2002, far
“Cockroach” (with Audrius Bučas), 1989
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Proposal for the Port of Fredericia in Denmark (with Aida Čeponytė), 2002
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