Issue 18, January 2008

CAC, Vilnius
9 November – 13 January

Review by Coline Milliard

As I walked in the main gallery of the CAC Vilnius, the huge white space resonated with the sound of balls on cricket bats, with shouting and cheering, an atmosphere more redolent of the Oval than a Baltic arts centre. This cricket training session is Darius Mikšys's contribution to the final of the three Holiday In exhibitions. Playing out the idea that idle time is the most creative, this project was initiated by Triangle in Marseille to examine 'the phenomenon of artistic mobility' through a residency exchange programme, realised in collaboration with Gasworks in London and CAC Vilnius in Lithuania. In contradistinction to standard residency practice, where production is all-important, here two artists from each host country were invited to literally holiday for three months in one of the other locations; London-based Brazilian Flávia Müller Medeiros and Frenchman Quentin Armand travelled to Lithuania, Briton Oliver Bragg and Lithuanian Juozas Laivys chose France, and Frenchman Nicolas Simarik and Lithuanian Mikšys went to the UK.

The three resulting exhibitions, taking place in the three venues, gathered the artists' responses to their travelling experience; here was a Romantic vision of the artist as an exceptional being, worthy of attention even in his leisure time. Bragg, who spent most of his time in Paris, responded to this nineteenth-century postulate by becoming a sort of ironic Victorian explorer, sketching the locals in their natural habitat and mingling the Parisian cliché of the lonely artist in Montmartre with some sharp observations on French nationalism.

Romantic also is the project's conception of travelling as a fluid and easy experience of discovery, resonating with the historical grand tour as Liquid Modernity (2000). But Medeiros's Irka (2007), a passport-size book based on the artist’s email exchange with a Belorussian student from Vilnius whom she invited to London, follows its namesake's endless difficulties in getting a visa and reminds visitors that this liquid modernity remains beyond the reach of all but a very few.

Armand produced an ensemble of objects faithful to the poetics of the absurd developed in his former pieces. In London he presented a telescope with directional signs – Wellington, Mar de Plata – inviting the beholders to envisage locality not as a fixed but as a transitional space, a step towards other localities and potential travels. Simarik’s floor installation Shadow One (2007), adapted to each exhibition location with a different material, is the elongated shadow of a lonely figure, reminiscent of the artist’s solitary peregrinations throughout the British Isles.

Prodding at the link between artworld and leisure industry, Holiday In takes a step further from Maurizio Cattelan's 6th Caribbean Biennial (1999) by attempting to fully endorse the holiday as a pivotal concept. But it was caught in its own contradictions very early on: 'holiday' and 'travel' were often confusingly taken as synonymous, and the 'holidaymakers' had to take part in three exhibitions, an obligation potentially more burdensome than any residency Nonetheless, and beyond the idiosyncrasies of its conceptual framework, Holiday In raises some urgent questions about the relevance of the residency system and the status of artists' production, between 'working' and 'being'.