Kipras Dubauskas. Pyrogenia. Crowd and Demons (Kipras Dubauskas. Pirogenia. Folla e demoni) from October 16 to January 11, 2025 at MAMbo - Museo d'Arte Moderna di Bologna of Settore Musei Civici del Comune di Bologna, is the first solo exhibition of the Lithuanian artist in an Italian museum institution, a project by NOS Visual Arts Production curated by Elisa Del Prete and Andrea Pastore conceived for the spaces of the Project Room of MAMbo.
The exhibition is part of the program Lithuanian Culture in Italy 2025-2026, organized by the Lithuanian Culture Institute in Rome and the Embassy of the Republic of Lithuania in Italy, supported by the Lithuanian Council for Culture, and was made possible thanks to the collaboration of Meno Parkas Gallery, Fondazione Home Movies - Archivio Nazionale del Film di Famiglia and Canali di Bologna.
«MAMbo's Project Room is the space we dedicate to projects capable of questioning the territory with external and unprecedented perspectives - declares Lorenzo Balbi, director of MAMbo - With Kipras Dubauskas' research, the Bologna of the Waters becomes the protagonist of a current and necessary reflection, especially in light of the recent floods that have made it even more urgent to rethink our relationship with the environment and its natural elements. The exhibition is the result of a choral collaboration with local institutions and associations and testifies to the museum's vocation to support the cultural production of new works that speak to the present and help us imagine new futures».
The exhibition consists of a large installation, an immersive diorama that revolves around Firestarter (2024, 15'), a 16mm film the artist has been working on since 2021 during a research residency in Bologna at the invitation of NOS and MAMbo.
Filmed between Italy and Lithuania, the feature film is the third chapter of a trilogy born during the Covid-19 pandemic, in which the artist explored the nature and aesthetics of rescue in our society. The escape routes of urban architecture, such as the perspectives of Bologna's porticoes and underground canals, are for the artist the setting for a narrative between urban drift and salvific rituals that focuses on the theme of fire. In this contemporary parable, fire, or rather fires, become a metaphor for the ongoing crises that modern society debates, without finding a shared path to a lasting coexistence. After the first two chapters of the "rescue" trilogy dedicated to land and water escape routes, Firestarter explores the element of fire, proposing a modern reinterpretation of the story of Saint Anthony Abbot, a figure, recurring in art history, who brings light, warmth, and prosperity to humankind and guarantees salvation to animals.
«Pyrogenia - says co-curator Elisa Del Prete referring to the title of the exhibition - is the imaginary lineage that today inhabits the time of fire, unearthing good practices of ancient descent, but at the same time developing adaptation to a condition of toxic combustion that has become viral. The British historian Stephen J. Pyne calls it the Pyrocene, a time when the possession of fire, originally salvific, as it is in the story of Saint Anthony, has become a tool for "cooking" the planet. Kipras Dubauskas denounces on the one hand the uncontrolled spread of fires that are the crises in progress, not only environmental, and on the other hand the slumber of a lineage that has lost its bearings to listen to those who raise their voices behind a mask».
The evocative installation set up in the Project Room guides the public into a drifting world. Props, small houses, makeshift furniture, a construction shed, a fire truck set on fire are the architectures of a state of alert. From the dim light emerge sculptures, drawings, collages, and small hidden works by artists with whom Kipras Dubauskas collaborates, as if they were remnants of a past era. Art shows its choral nature when it develops through a contamination of thought, aesthetics, and experience. Trained as a sculptor, Dubauskas continues his artistic journey with street art and graffiti, feeding on the sense of collective making. The crossing of marginal places, urban interstices, undergrounds, and abandoned infrastructures, of what remains hidden, or rather of what society does not like to make visible or does not want to deal with, nourishes his situated practice. Hence also the use of film as a tool on whose surface the image can transform itself compared to what the eye perceives, through jams, overexposures, burns, and out-of-focus.... read the rest of the article»
Dubauskas, as well as the film's director of photography Eitvydas Doškus, winner of numerous cinematography awards, is part of that scene of Lithuanian artists and activists who draw on urban practices of reappropriation of public space and a strand of "home movie" authors on film (think of Jonas Mekas' experiments) who contribute to renewing it.
Firestarter takes shape in a long process of exploration that from the industrial areas of Vilnius repeatedly delves into the bowels of Bologna, but not only. The artist arrives at the filmic mélange by intertwining original footage with stop-motion films and archival materials belonging to a collection of early twentieth-century training films from the London Fire Station in Lambeth. In Bologna, the narrative unfolds between the industrial spaces of DumBO, the long porticoes of via Saragozza, the Pilastro district, and the Navile canal, with an excursion to Macerata Campania (CE) for the traditional feast of Saint Anthony the Abbot: «we found ourselves in the procession for Saint Anthony in Macerata – says co-curator Andrea Pastore – to be welcomed while we brought the profane into the sacred. There is a need for a new glue between people, for a new faith that sees us united, saints and demons, for a vision that leads us to treasure the fire that the Earth provides us as a spark of life and not of death. Kipras' work is mysterious, annoying, and pungent, certainly not explicit and enchanting. His practice is slow and meticulous, sometimes incomprehensible. Yet the modern parables he brings to life in his films, as in his contextualized projects, become precious metaphors of the society in which we live».
The exhibition Kipras Dubauskas. Pirogenia. Folla e demoni (Kipras Dubauskas. Pyrogenia. Crowd and Demons) is the result of a precious and fruitful collaboration with various local realities that has been articulated during the research and production phases of the film. In this sense, it also becomes an unprecedented story of Bologna thanks to the perspectives the artist has collected, in his four years of frequenting the city, weaving a network of relationships during walks and explorations, both on the surface and underground.
The exhibition represents the epilogue of a project born from a virtuous collaboration between NOS and the independent Lithuanian production company Spongė Lab, which has had the support of the Lithuanian Council for Culture and the Meno Parkas Gallery of Kaunas, was also made possible thanks to MAMbo and Fondazione del Monte di Bologna e Ravenna as well as a dense network of partners such as DumBO, Fondazione Home Movies - Archivio Nazionale del Film di Famiglia and Accademia di Belle Arti di Bologna.
The collaboration with Canali di Bologna - already a precious ally in the making of the film - continues on this occasion with the organization of a special tour in Reno Canal scheduled for Thursday, October 16, 2025. The tour starts at 7:00 PM with a guided visit to the exhibition together with the artist and the curators and continues in the underground, accompanied by Milena Naldi for Canali di Bologna, to offer the public a unique opportunity for an exploration between the surface and the subsoil of the city. To access the underground of the Reno Canal, it is mandatory to wear rubber boots or high and waterproof trekking shoes and to have a flashlight to use if necessary. To participate in the tour, open to a maximum of 30 visitors, it is mandatory to book your place by writing an email to edumuseicivicibologna@comune.bologna.it by 12:00 PM on Wednesday, October 15.
Kipras Dubauskas (Vilnius, 1988) lives and works in Vilnius, Lithuania. He studied Installation at the Royal Academy of Ghent and Sculpture at the Vilnius Academy of Arts. Recent solo exhibitions include Meno Parkas Gallery, Kaunas (2024), the Contemporary Art Center, Vilnius (2020), and POST Gallery, Kaunas (2019). His work has been presented in group exhibitions such as Performing the Fringe at Pori Art Museum, Finland (2021); Waiting for Another Coming in Vilnius and Warsaw (2018); Some Pieces from a Cracked Sidewalk (through an intent gaze), Gdańsk (2017); and the 12th Baltic Triennial (2015).In 2022, as part of Emergency Break – Main Project at ART CITY Bologna, NOS premiered a cinematic installation featuring the first two films in Dubauskas's ongoing trilogy on "rescue"—36 Chambers (2019, 3') and Daynighting (2020, 9')—and initiated the development of Firestarter (2024, 15').
Between 2006 and 2010, Dubauskas was among the founders of the independent initiative Artkor Project Space. Since 2018 he has been a member of Spongé, a laboratory for the development and production of analogue film at the multidisciplinary center SODAS 2123 in Vilnius. In 2012, together with artist Simon Marie Sarah, he founded in Rotterdam the Bureau of Psychogeography, a fictional organization devoted to tracing paths at the edges of the city through its undeveloped terrains. Most recently, Dubauskas has embarked on a new long-term endeavor: the "Blackberry Island" project, a peaceful occupation of an uninhabited island in the Neris River on the outskirts of Vilnius. Conceived as a comprehensive study of island biodiversity, it aims to establish a semi-public sculpture park and a wild plant garden.
kiprasdubauskas.tumblr.com|spongelab.eu
NOS Visual Arts Production is the curatorial board of the Nosadella.due Cultural Association, an unprecedented entity that atypically integrates into the current art system, combining the concreteness of the producer with the sensitivity of the curator to create new artistic works in extra-ordinary contexts, exhibitions, books, and projects. NOS was founded in 2018 from the experience of the two curators Elisa Del Prete and Silvia Litardi, joined in 2020 by Andrea Pastore, to bring out and take care of the many aspects that make the creation of a work of art possible, from the research and design phase in dialogue with the artist, to the human, cultural and operational relationships involved in the production of projects in specific contexts, up to its promotion and documentation.
www.nosproduction.com
Title: Kipras Dubauskas. Pyrogenia. Crowd and Demons
Opening: October 16, 2025
Ending: January 11, 2026
Organization: MAMbo - Museo d'Arte Moderna di Bologna
Curator: Elisa Del Prete e Andrea Pastore
Place: Bologna, MAMbo, Project Room
Address: Via Don Minzoni, 14 - 40121 Bologna
More info on this website: https://www.museibologna.it/mambo/
Facebook: MAMboMuseoArteModernaBologna
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