Elena Krukonyte

90s Lithuania, or How Not to Overheat is an artistic research that analyses how the recent past (1990-2000s) is being represented in mediated world of today. Combining Marshal McLuhan’s ‘hot’ and ‘cool’ media theory with Umberto Eco’s paleo- and neo-television theory, I research the ‘heating’ up of Lithuanian visual culture of early Independence period (1990-2004). This period marks time after regaining the Independence from soviet union in 1990, till joining the European Union in 2004. From didactic and informative media that consolidated the nation in the early 1990s, it transformed into entertainment media which helped to propagate the ideas of capitalism and individualism in the early 2000s.  

These images from the recent past circulate on social media today. The relationship with the images constantly oscillate – they become objects of nostalgia, they are being hedonistically consumed or critically analysed. In 2017, I created an Instagram account @90s_lithuania. During the 9-years span of curating the page, I have noticed how social media has reached the ‘boiling hot’ temperature - the visual culture of the transformative Lithuanian era, is being decontextualised and fragmented, gaining stereotypical connotations and cliches.  

Therefore, I propose a way to ‘cool-down’ - a metamodern collage. Metamodernism, defined by Dutch philosophers T. Vermeulen and R. van den Akker, is a structure of feeling of the contemporary world which constantly oscillates between naivety and critique, hope and despair, passiveness and activity... and many other existencial modes at the same time.  

In the exhibition, I present 6 projects from my artistic research on Lithuanian visual culture (1990-2004). In metamodern collage, I apply such methods as reference analysis (decollage), revisiting, recreation, pastiche and, finally - connecting fragments (collage).