The Tales We Tell
Solo exhibition at Galleria Loisti, Helsinki
With a text by Helen Korpak
Curated by Kamilla Kūna
Designer & architect Juozapas Švelnys
The exhibition is accompanied by a public program including an exhibition opening, Readings and Rewinding events
Materials used: pencil and pastel pencil on mulberry paper and cotton paper, print on rice paper, resin plaster, carousel slide projector, text on transparent film, 35mm slides, clay diffusor, scent
The Tales We Tell exhibition explores memory and how our relationship and understanding of memory frames the ways we see the world. Drawing on personal recollections, fragments and stories, the show takes the form of a series of works in visual art, installation, and writing.
The exhibition looks into how memory manifests in the current moment and human tendency to live within the familiar. An underlying theme of the personal becoming the universal runs through the works, measuring the boundaries between the past and the present, the individual and the collective.
The works dive into the notion of time, a crucial element for building memories. In The Tales We Tell, time is examined in relation to physics, spirituality, symbolism and poetics, with an aim to grasp multiple angles which shape the term and provide different sets of knowledge around it.
Public program:
Readings event invites visitors to flip through the publications that shaped the exhibition, opening up the behind-the-scenes of the project and offering a space to read, talk, and reflect together on themes of time, memory and storytelling. A Nari Tea session joins the Readings, offering warming teas for a chilly autumn. The tea selection focuses on time through the two stages of Pu’er, inviting visitors to sense the contrast between immediacy and what has already taken shape.
Rewinding is a sound performance by Juozapas Švelnys. It blends together collected cassette tapes and electronics into narratives of sound. Ranging from stumbled upon tape records to personal archives, tracks merge and dive into repetition and the possibilities of individual and collective memory arrangements.
The project is funded by the Lithuanian Council for Culture and supported by the Lithuanian Culture Institute.
Images by Valentina Černiauskaitė