Arūnas Svediolas’s essay The Sieve, the Fog and the Honeycomb: Features of Contemporary Lithuanian Cultural Time and Space will be published in Latvian as part of the Translations series of kim? Contemporary Art Centre; accompanied by a new forward by the author, its fragments also appear on ¼ Satori. Here on this page you can download the translation in full.

On March 29, 2012 kim? Contemporary Art Centre opened an exhibition called 90s, curated by Virginija Januškevičiūtė with The Baltic Notebooks of Anthony Blunt, with works by Aurelija Maknytė, Darius Mikšys, Valdas Ozarinskas and the participants of the 1985 workshop of sculpture of concerete (Ksenija Jaroševaitė, Kęstutis Musteikis, Mindaugas Navakas, Naglis Nasvytis, Vladas Urbanavičius, Mindaugas Šnipas, documentary photography: Gintautas Trimakas and Raimondas Urbakavičius).

The project has at least three publications as its more obvious departure points. The essay by Arūnas Sverdiolas is one of them.

The second text is a review of the exhibition called Specters of the Nineties (curated by Lisette Smith in collaboration with Matthieu Laurette for Marres Centre for Contemporary Culture in Maastricht, The Netherlands) written by Lars Bang Larsson and published in the January-February 2012 issue of Frieze. Here, the author expands on yet another writer’s notion of 1990s as ‘a decade that has yet to end’.

The third is a catalogue and the exhibition of the same title - 90ie - organised by the Latvian Centre of Contemporary Art in 2010, an extensive overview of the Latvian contemporary art of the 1990s. The 90s at kim? is not another version of either exhibitions; but it may be considered a new take on the subject, true to the spirit of Arūnas Sverdiolas’s essay where he complains that due to the anachronistic, allogical, fog-like substance of our immediate cultural environment we are always forced to do everything from the start.

Fog is also quoted as the evironment the Lithuanian architect Valdas Ozarinskas feels most comfortable with. (Ozarinskas designed the display of the exhibition at kim? as well as, much earlier, Villa Jogaila, presented therin.)

Fog is also the subject of the collection of quotes gathered by Giambattista Bodoni, or Yambo, in Umberto Eco’s 2004 novel The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana. Yambo discovers this collection as well as other things he has had in common with world after he loses his personal/episodic memory due to a stroke. To a large extent I consider Sverdiolas’s essay a study of cultural amnesia, and I’d like to dedicate this translation to the fellow Yambos.

VJ, 2012