Deimantas Narkevičius – Stains and Scratches, 2017

Deimantas Narkevičius’s entire video oeuvre is a subjective exploration of history. He often uses the aesthetics and techniques of documentary filmmaking — interviews, archive footage and voice-overs — to examine the relationship between personal memories and political events. His work nevertheless reflects the impossibility of taking an objective view of events and the complexity of memory. Although his films always evoke his native Lithuania, they have a wider resonance as poetic and political studies of ordinary lives lived in a time of great upheaval.

The video installation Stains and Scratches uses stereoscopic illusions to evoke a memorable episode in Lithuanian alternative culture. A vinyl LP of the rock opera Jesus Christ Super Star was smuggled onto the underground scene in Vilnius. The score was transcribed by ear by a group of students, who then performed the banned musical at the Vilnius Art Institute on 25 December 1971. Deimantas Narkevičius reconstructed the concert on the basis of the only material record of the event — a silent Super 8mm film that had deteriorated over time. The blackand-white film, digitised and converted into a 3D projection, opens a tiny window onto an era of contradictory actions and illusions, in which the political, artistic and private aspirations of young people come up against the silence and inertia of the media. As it explores the material nature of the support — the “stains and scratches” on it — Deimantas Narkevičius’s work invites us to see and hear a piece of history.