LUX at Hackney Picturehouse: Time Together/ Laikas Kartu with Darius Mikys

Premiere of Mark Aerial Waller’s new feature film Time Together/ Laikas Kartu (2013) plus a special presentation by artist Darius Mikys

Time Together, a film in 14 episodes, is set against the luscious backdrop of summertime Lithuania, where a lost woman (Smilt Bagdin) is befriended by a stranger (Monika Biiunait) and lead through a series of ritual exercises towards the formation of a cult or political cell. The story is deeply mysterious, yet the strangely compelling scenarios, each with a cliffhanger, leave the mind racing. What-if’s on a cosmological scale. Mark Aerial Waller’s unique films almost come from another dimension, from a position shared with the science fiction and mystery writing of Adolfo Bioy Casares or Philip K Dick.

In Lithuanian with English subtitles

Commissioned by the Centre for Contemporary Art Vilnius as part of Midaugas Triennial, The 11th Baltic Triennial of International Art

Supported by the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Lithuania

Mark Aerial Waller
Mark Aerial Waller is an artist working in video, sculpture, drawing and event based practices, based in London. He produces interdisciplinary, cinematic time travelogues that refute any predictable balance between our romance for the ancient past and our fetish for a streamlined future. Waller defies conventional screening formats, integrating sculptural objects and live performances for an experience of cinema defined in spatial and situational terms. He is also the founder of The Wayward Canon, a platform for event-based interventions in cinematic practices.

Darius Mikys
For a long time, Darius Mikys stopped using the word ‘art’ in relation to his work. Refusing to ally himself with any genre or medium, he describes what he does as ‘just projects’, and speaks about his ‘active practice of exhibition-making’. His whole modus operandi is based on social networks, bringing people together to create performances and shared experiences. A self-proclaimed concept designer, whom others have called a ‘practitioner of persuasion art’, many of his conceptual schemes have taken place far beyond the confines of the gallery. These have included learning new skills such as playing the accordion or cricket (which led him to establish Lithuania’s first cricket club), organising a workshop on avoiding eye contact, and procrastinating his own lecture On Procrastination. For his first solo exhibition, when he represented Lithuania at the 2011 Venice Biennale, Mikys invited 200 Lithuanian artists who had received government grants to submit a work to his project. The concept, he said, was ‘to create a metaphorical mirror for the state and society.’

LUX at Hackney Picturehouse: Time Together/ Laikas Kartu with Darius Mikys

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