Deva Bartninkaitė | Videotape

On Monday, 1 June, at 6 p.m., we invite you to the opening of Deva Bartninkaitė’s exhibition “Videotape” at the Jonas Mekas Visual Arts Centre (Malūnų g. 8). What might the synergy of VHS (Video Home System) and textile weaving technologies look like? Weaving is one of the oldest technologies created by humankind, still in functional use to this day. VHS, on the other hand, flashed through the long history of technological evolution like a comet – barely flickering into brilliance, captivating our imagination, and soon vanishing from active use, leaving most of us with nothing but a sentimental memory. The word “videotape” was chosen for the title of Deva Bartninkaitė’s master’s creative project not by chance, and it aims to become the key that unlocks the door to the synergy of these technologies. The videotape becomes not only the theme of the creative project, but also the object of study: the videotape as materia per se. As VHS technology fades from everyday use, this term is heard less and less in linguistic discourse and drifts into the graveyard of words that have lost their semantic function. In her theoretical research, the artist posits that it is still possible to breathe new relevance into the term by expanding it into the concepts of image and tape, which encompass far more possible meanings. By reflecting on and expanding the concept of the videotape, we move away from a description confined solely to a specific technology. This linguistic moment of recycling a word’s meaning is not merely aesthetic play, but one of the core methodologies of the creative practice. Recycling here occurs through the use of both the material (the magnetic tape inside VHS cassettes) and the image itself, or at least an intuitive understanding of it. The creative project demonstrates how, by working on a textile loom with magnetic tape from defunct VHS cassettes, it is possible to recycle the image – i.e. the content and meaning – while retaining the same matter. The videotape becomes the raw material and matter of creative recycling, losing its original function as a medium of image and sound. Weaving technology reveals new possibilities both for encoding information in patterns and for achieving various variations of a visual surface that also correlate with the visual aesthetics of the VHS analogue format. Deva Bartninkaitė’s creative practice is consistently developed in the technology of weaving looms using VHS magnetic tape. The information contained on the tapes becomes inaccessible, yet is transformed into a new artistic medium. The exhibition is a presentation of the artistic project carried out during master’s studies at the Department of Textile Art and Design of the Vilnius Academy of Arts. Artistic project supervisors: Assoc. Prof. Laura Pavilonytė-Ežerskienė and Assoc. Prof. Danutė Jonkaitytė Research thesis supervisor: Assoc. Prof. Dr. Jurijus Dobriakovas Graphic design: Lukas Stanionis The exhibition is part of the VAA graduation exhibition. The exhibition runs until 27 June.

Adresas: Jono Meko vizualiųjų menų centras