Festival of Art in Public Spaces

Redas Dirżys

Redas Dirżys (born 1967 Olita (Alytus), Lithuania)

The artist works In the field of performance, sculpture and graphic art. He is known for his social interventions in public space. He also is oriented in wide-ranging criticism of art and curator activity.

In 2001 he graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts of Estonia in Tallinn. He started his artistic activity from sculpture and graphics, which evolved in the course of his artistic development, however, his likes for monumentality and print has remained. He often takes up social and political issues in his works. He generates situations in which art is combined with politics and politics start to function as art.

Dirzys challenges the prevailing standards in society, the rules governing the world of art. He's interested in the deconstruction of the mechanisms of power. He has been leading research in the field of art trying to decide how to be part of the system and at the same time remain a rebel. A large part of his artistic expression is focused on criticism of the "illusion of freedom", the official culture and civil society defined as a given value, although his "critical tongue" is not without irony. Creating ephemeral situations such as performance, interventions in public space, are his main interests, much more than a visual over-production of paintings known from mass media. He also conducts workshops of performance with an aim (as the artist claims) to get rid of formal limits, limits of representation and flashes which dominate in the art scene.

The year 2009, when Vilnus is the Capital of European Culture, is a time of strike for the artist. Together with a group of friends artists and activists, he moved the focused art from Vilnus to the town Alytus, from which he originates. Since 2005 he has been organizing an unusual art biennale there. In August 2009 Art Strike Biennale will be held during which the practice of art is forbidden. "Monstrations" - marches with people similar to a flash mob are organized to show the ineffectiveness of political demonstrations which are held under the control of the government. The destruction of biennale is a protest against the official cultural institutions and an attack on the official art dependent on political arrangements.

In Lublin Dirzys will create a plant portrait of Alexander Lukashenko ("Garden. Lukashenko opus #30"). The base of his project is a photo of Lukashenko taken from a newspaper printed 12 years ago. The mechanism of printing will be exactly repeated - raster dots are replaced by a hole in the ground symmetrically marked by a wedge in which the artist will plant a seed. Dirzys says that the most important thing in his work is its most elementary component: point (in a printing form) and pixel (in digital form). He's interested in forming a portrait by applying one point after the other. It's a laborious process of constructing an image both technically (hundreds of points which create a picture) and in the matter of media - the image which is duplicated in mass media.

For many years Dirzys has been transmitting images to various surfaces (concrete walls, pavement, papers of children's school books) with the printing method. The pixels show holes excavated in the ground. Multiplied pixels create portraits of modern dictators: Lukashenko and Pol Pot. The artist plays with the image and archetype of a strong leader, he analyses the way leaders function in culture and the contexts which they are burden by. Moving them to a certain surface always causes a change of context. The choose of a surface in Lublin, creating a vegetable garden based on Lukashenko's face has its reason. While preparing his work for the Open City festival, Dirzys got famiiar with the history of Lublin and discovered an art group "Garden". The vegetable planting is a sort of commemoration of Lublin's activists from "Garden". The image of Lukashenko also refers to the celebration the 440th anniversary of the Lublin Union. During the celebration the presidents of Lithuania and Ukraine will arrive in Lublin so the Belarussian president also has to be present, silently emerging from the park near the Center for Culture.