Ghosts
2022 Found crystal vases on gallery floor
Site-specific intervention in National Gallery of Art in Vilnius
2023 Found crystal vases, pedestals
Site-specific intervention in Museum of Contemporary Art of Estonia
The series Ghosts was first exhibited in 2022 on the floor around the National Gallery of Art in Vilnius (former Museum of the Soviet Revolution). The crystals were displayed as degraded and vulnerable – not as artworks, but as abstruse strangers from another cultural paradigm, wanting to be there, but instead only “ghosting”. In the Museum of Contemporary art of Estonia the crystal bowls were placed on pedestals on the roof of the building, like wannabe busts of past heroes, elevated and imposing, yet also fragile and clearly empty (unless rain happens to lend them some substance). They were outside and inside at the same time, or rather neither outside nor inside, entrapped in a house-like cage, made by another artist for another exhibition.
In the 20th century, crystalware decorated the interiors of many middle-class homes. Once valued for purity, today it is mostly associated with our recent past, i.e. the “bad” and “impure” Soviet era – even though in the Soviet times, the same kind of crystal was cherished as a representation of the good life in the previous past – the inter-war independence period. The word “crystal” also evokes associations with vulnerability in the face of aggression, like the historical term Kristallnacht denoting a sudden outburst of violence against Jewish people (the "other"). There is also “the crystal ball” – a devise that allegedly shows you the future.
Ghosts, as Avery Gordon writes in Ghostly Matters, are not simply from the past, but from the repressed and unresolved past that is making itself known through them”. In literary studies ghost often refers to “disqualified”, marginalized, fugitive knowledge from below and outside the institutions of official knowledge production. But ghosts are also there to help you imagine what was lost that never even existed, and to “imagine the future beyond the limits of what is already understandable”, “to see differently both the things of our world and the histories that have made them possible”.
Ghosts
2022 Found crystal vases on gallery floor
Site-specific intervention in National Gallery of Art in Vilnius
2023 Found crystal vases, pedestals
Site-specific intervention in Museum of Contemporary Art of Estonia