Shelter of Thoughts

2024

video installation and object

Klaipėda train station, Priestočio g. 1

A blocked tunnel entrance, a shelter turret, a locked door or a window in a building that cannot be accessed – such “unexplained” urban materialities are the intersection points of rational and irrational knowledge, a cultural text of the city that can be read in different ways. This video is inspired by the air-raid shelters in Klaipėda that have survived from the Second World War (two of them right next to the train station) and the urban legends about the labyrinth of tunnels that connect them. The facts of historical memory are intertwined with images of anxiety, born of today’s topical issues: the pollution of the Baltic Sea, the climate crisis, the threat of war. The narrative of the dream logic images is a reflection of the collective imagination not only symbolically, but also technically – ideas, keywords and photographs of the remains of the underground shelters are recreated and mediated by various tools of generative artificial intelligence from an immense amount of visual data.

The video is inserted into the waiting room of the Klaipėda train station, where the seating resembles an auditorium and the fragmented TV screen resembles the images of surveillance cameras. To a casual viewer waiting for a train, it may seem that the image of a parallel reality that flickered on the screen was just a dream while nodding off, or a figment of their own imagination. However, an object in the corner that seems to have materialised from the screen becomes a hint that there is no strict boundary between reality and imagination.

Phenomenon M is an exhibition of site/context-specific contemporary artworks commissioned for Klaipėda. Curator and artist Paulina Pukytė invited twelve Lithuanian artists (one of them was invented) to explore the city of Klaipėda as a text, as a myth, as (dis)information, as representation, as a field of visual “battles”. These artistic investigations are presented to the Klaipėda residents and visitors in the form of conceptual and visual artworks in the public spaces of the city.