Deimantas Narkevičius (born 24 May 1964) is one of the most consistent and widely recognised Lithuanian artists on the international art scene. Originally trained as a sculptor, Narkevičius has mainly worked with film and video. Employing documentary footage, voice-overs, interviews, re-enactments and found photographs, his films submit historical events to the narrative structures of storytelling and cinema. In his artistic practice Narkevičius examines the relationship of personal memories to political histories, particularly those of his native Lithuania. For the artist, history itself has become both material and methodology.
Since 1992 Narkevičius has exhibited extensively in important contemporary art venues and events worldwide, including Centre Pompidou (Paris), Museo Nacional Centro De Arte Reina Sofia (Madrid), Tate Modern (London), Museum of Modern Art (New York), Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam). He represented Lithuania at the 49th Venice Biennale in 2001 and two years later exhibited at the 50th Venice Biennale in Utopia Station curated by Molly Nesbit and Hans Ulrich Obrist. Narkevičius's work was shown at Manifesta II (Luxembourg, 1998) and Manifesta X (St. Petersburg, 2014). Amongst his most recent solo shows are 20 July.2015 at Maureen Paley (London, 2017), Books on Shelves and Without Letters at The Blank Contemporary Art (Bergamo, 2016), Archeology of Memories at former KGB building (Riga, 2015). Narkevičius's major retrospective opens at the National Gallery of Art in Vilnius, Lithuania, in December 2017.
Narkevičius's works are a part of major private and public collections such as Tate Modern (London), Moderna Museet (Stockholm), Modern Art Museum (Vilnius). In 2008 for his achievements in art Narkevičius has been awarded the Vincent Award and the Lithuanian National Prize for Culture and Arts. His film Restricted Sensation (2011) was a nominee for the best short feature at the 2012 Silver Crane film awards.
Narkevičius lives and works in Vilnius, Lithuania.
Biography
Childhood in Utena
Deimantas Narkevičius was born in Utena, Lithuanian SSR, in 1964 at the time when Lithuania was part of the Soviet Union.
In several interviews such as the 2003 interview with curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, Narkevičius reflected on the importance of films he saw in his early childhood. His first experience of cinema was watching movies with his parents in the theatre or at home on television. Films by prominent Soviet directors such as Sergei Eisenstein, in particular his Ivan Grozny, Part II (1958), which he saw at the age of five, and Bronenosec Potiomkin (1925), were among his earliest cinematic experiences that in Narkevičius's own words had a dramatic impact on him.
Later in early adolescence Narkevičius familiarised himself even further with the cinema of his time by seeing Sergei Parajanov's Hakob Hovnatanyan (1967), which again had a significant impact on the young artist. It was then that he became fascinated with the films produced in the studios of the Soviet republics, which revealed local identities, traditions and languages. In another interview from 2011 Narkevičius described technological and stylistic aspects of Parajanov's film that moved him as a young person:
Growing up Narkevičius was often ill which meant he had to stay home. As a result, he spent a considerable amount of time watching Soviet television. The documentary material on 16mm film used on TV in the 1970s made an impression on Narkevičius, who later used the same type of film extensively in his artistic practice. Interviews were filmed with 16mm cameras and were then processed and made ready for the evening news on the same day. Since they were done in quite a rush, it provoked considerable experimentation. These films were screened and then broadcast, raising a range of possibilities for using film. Narkevičius, who grew familiar with these images, admitted to the ingenuity of their production and the effect it had on him even after many years: "I sometimes look back at them, and I see how creative they were – how creative the camerawork and the editing was".
The early influences of cinema and television describe Narkevičius's artistic style and means of production. They can potentially be seen as a factor that affected his decision of selecting filmmaking as opposed to object making early in his career. The history and context of the Soviet Union in which these early experiences were produced had become the principal subject of Narkevičius's oeuvre.
Student years in Vilnius and London
At the age of fourteen Narkevičius was sent to Vilnius by his parents to study at the art boarding school where he matured surrounded by students who came from similar backgrounds. According to the artist, during this period in the Soviet Union everything was quite impersonal, and at the beginning of his artistic career, he tried to personalise what he was doing to motivate himself. Artists at that time were seen as advertisers for the regime – which compared with post-war Stalinism was relatively liberal. However, the primary purpose of artists was still to provide an ideological service, which they always had to be prepared for.
After finishing secondary school at the age eighteen, Narkevičius worked for a year and a half in a museum that exhibited a collection of Soviet art. In an interview with Melissa Gronlund, he admitted that he was amazed at how funny the artwork was to him. Later, in 1987, Narkevičius enrolled in Vilnius Art Institute (now Vilnius Academy of Arts) where he chose to study sculpture. The academy's curriculum was rigid and did not excite him as much as he would have expected. In his own words, prominent Lithuanian expatriate artists Jonas Mekas and George Mačiūnas meant more to him than any teacher he had at that time.
Between 1992 and 1993, while still a member of the Vilnius Academy of Arts, Narkevičius lived in London, UK. In England, he explored the possibilities of object making and approaching the medium from a conceptual standpoint. London was an exciting place to be for the emerging artist. This period, which was marked by intensive learning, had a significant impact on Narkevičius's understanding of contemporary art as he was exposed to London's art milieu: for example, artists of the Young British Artists (YBA) generation, but more so for his motivation for becoming an artist. A dense concentration of artists and a competitive artistic climate meant that the standards for art were set high, but it also led to a strong sense of community. Artists often collaborated and helped each other in different ways. Narkevičius, who was one of them, was able to benefit from these processes.
After his return from London Narkevičius was interested in site-specific objects and continued producing sculptural works. However, after a short while, he realised that he was leaning towards storytelling and felt that he needed to find a better media for that. As a result, he began recording interviews with people from his environment. For the emerging artist, it proved to be a perfect medium for developing narratives as well as for exploring sound and visual language.
Film career
Since the late 1990s, Narkevičius has worked mostly in film and video, experimenting with film structure and thematising the weight of individual memories and personal revisions of history. The majority of his films deal extensively with the cultural legacy of Communism and attempts to erase it after the fall of the Warsaw Pact regimes in 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union two years later, with an emphasis on statues, sculptors, artists and moving images. These themes first emerged in his early films Europa, 54° 54' – 25° 19 (1997), Legend Coming True (1999), and Energy Lithuania (2000). A seven-minute 35mm film His-story (1998) shown at Manifesta II in 1998 gained the artist international recognition, making Narkevičius a leading contemporary Eastern European filmmaker.
In 2001, Narkevičius represented Lithuania at the 49th Venice Biennale. Two years later he came back to Venice to show his work in the Utopia Station curated by Molly Nesbit and Hans Ulrich Obrist. Describing his work's relationship with his nation's past in an interview with Obrist, Narkevičius said, "Memory is a funny thing. I think our brain has a filter: you remember what you want to remember. And you recreate the stories of the memory in a way that you want to remember them and how you would like to create them".
In perhaps his best-known film The Role of a Lifetime (2003), commissioned by UK-based organisation Art and Sacred Places for a parish church in Brighton, Narkevičius asked what it meant to be a filmmaker with a social conscience. The centrepiece of the film is an interview with British director Peter Watkins whose politically-charged, fictionalised documentary-style works had addressed the Hungarian uprising, The Battle of Culloden (1964), and the La Commune (Paris, 1871) (2000), and who had left the UK in frustration with censorship and neglect, settling in Vilnius. The interview is juxtaposed with 1960s Super-8 footage of Brighton and Hove and sketches by Lithuanian artist Mindaugas Lukošaitis of Grūtas Park, the sculpture garden 80 miles south of Vilnius where many of the country's Soviet monuments ended up after the fall of the Soviet Union. Noting that some people considered the decision to save the statues "a disaster", Watkins described the park as a place to contemplate "man's unbelievable folly and inhumanity ... and sadly, the endless repetition of history".
Narkevičius's next film, Once in the XX Century (2004) played with Lithuanian television footage broadcast across the world of the statue of Lenin being torn down in Vilnius's Lukiškės Square in 1991. Recutting it in reverse, Narkevičius showed a jubilant crowd cheering the monument as it was hoisted from the back of a vehicle onto a plinth, being reunited with its legs. In Once in the XX Century he continued to explore and contextualise the problematics of public monument and monumentality – a central theme in Narkevičius's artistic practice.
The Head (2007) consisted entirely of photographs and archival footage made for East German television. The film documents the creation of the world's second-largest head sculpture – a seven-metre-high profile of Karl Marx by Soviet socialist-realist Lev Kerbel (1917–2003) – from its conception in 1968 to its unveiling in Karl-Marx Stadt (now Chemnitz) in 1971. Narkevičius commented on his film by saying: "Objects from that period are not a crime. They are rather testimonies to historical crimes, visual heritage of an era to be kept and appreciated: if we want to feel any compassion for what the people who lived then lost, and in order to separate individuals from their creatively inhibited artworks – even if the consequences of this aesthetical repression can still be felt in the Eastern Bloc ...".
For Revisiting Solaris (2007) Narkevičius adapted the final chapter of Stanisław Lem's novel Solaris (1961), which Andrei Tarkovsky left out in his 1972 film. In Narkevičius's film Lithuanian actor Donatas Banionis reprised his role as Chris Kelvin after more than 30 years. In Revisiting Solaris Narkevičius used a series of photographs taken by prominent Lithuanian symbolist painter Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis in Anapa (now Russia) in 1905 to represent the foreign planet, as well as Eduard Artemyev's iconic score from the original film. Revisiting Solaris marked an outstanding interdisciplinary effort by the Lithuanian filmmaker to join multiple talents from different periods making it into a timeless monument.