Travelling Imagination | Alytus

Have you ever travelled through the forest full of creatures: living fluffy toys falling for their journeys where human objects make an impact and inspire to explore new adventures? Where imagination takes its power and suddenly affects your thoughts that your childhood toy might also become alive and tell their stories all around. Stories about you but not about others. Toys can reflect your life and everything you experienced: faith, fear, joyfulness, sadness – the true you. Toys can dive into a voyage across the world, and the world for them is a very tiny one: for instance, a forest flooded with snow, where they got thrown from the garbage truck. But still they survive and still they remain reflections of human beings.

Other parts of your expedition might be driven by mythological creatures – the Lithuanian witches of folklore. They bring you unexpected secrets. They weave, they hide, they follow or spy, they bind you into their hair, rings or ropes. They make the escape impossible because you are bound tight into their yarn. They never let you go. Just implies to run, survive but it always ends the same – looped back into the yarn filled with the stories of those who had been alive before you.

A voyage through all those diverse emotions, imaginations and feelings will be conveyed through the exhibition Traveling Imagination. No matter whether you are vulnerable or not at all. Witches will still grab you into their defenceless desire. It is you who are facing your weaknesses or powers. Either you withdraw into the thread of the rainbow, metal rings, horse hair or flame of fire, or you leave the exhibition for these later to be considered your fate: for instance, while reading the books that these illustrations are presented in. Words and images are equally significant and substantial. If they come together on the stage of your subconscious, the imagination conquers you entirely. And only then you might be plunged into the voyage through your creativity. These are the main propositions of the exhibited illustrations from the books. But we are not exhibiting the written texts because during the exhibition, we ask you to use just the visuals, to empower your freedom to fantasise without the given story behind.

The little house built specifically for this travelling illustration invites the audience to venture even further. Go inside, look at the colours and lights, the window shutter where you will see Stasys Eidrigevičius – the artist who created these magnificent illustrations that he calls the book pictures. Also… there is a mask staring at you from the other side as though it were your reflection.

Have you ever seen a rabbit with the ear lost in the cut of the canvas? Have you ever seen a frog sitting in a suitcase, holding a rainbow that tries to slip away? Have you ever seen such a torturous tightness between the birds, or a cat holding a snake with its tail, and a stick creating the continuous, voluntary or compulsory cohesion. Have you ever explored the rainbow assembled from unbodied bodies? These are all images that will appear and fulfil the progression of your imagination, only if you really untie the true or real you – the one hidden and forced to be hidden inside of you.

This exhibition asks its audience to explore the inner and outer space. It is up to you how you would get into the exploration not just of the physical space, following our suggested exhibition architecture, but also the mental journey, which might surprise you with little glimpses or the moments that reflect your childhood or even your adulthood instead.

Exhibition curator: Lina Albrikienė
Exhibition architect: Darius Baliukevičius
The project is financed by: Lithuanian Council for Culture and Panevėžys City Municipality
Organizer: Stasys Museum