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After Lithuania was liberated from its occupation by the Soviet Union at the end of the 1990s, many avant-garde artistic movements began to spring up. Among other socio-political and socio-cultural factors, these avant-garde breakthroughs were influenced by the knowledge that there was a Fluxus movement in New York and that one of its leaders was Lithuanian Jurgis Mačiūnas (George Maciunas). The information that was able to penetrate the Iron Curtain came only in fragments and was often based more on legends than on concrete facts, but that is one of the reasons why the mysterious Jurgis Mačiūnas and Fluxus, with a powerful charge of cultural anarchy and the avant-garde, stirred the imagination of young Lithuanian artists and went hand in hand with positive anarchy and a thirst for winds of change.

Most individual avant-garde breakthroughs or collective avant-garde movements and festivals flourished around 1987-1995. (Lithuania regained its independence in 1990). Of course, each was more or less close to the spirit of Fluxus and often to some of its forms, despite the fact that adequate and more accurate information about the American and European Fluxus movements reached Lithuania a little later.

In this exhibition we remember moments from the AN-88 and AN-89 happenings seminars, the thoughts expressed by Jonas Mekas about Fluxus and Jurgis Mačiūnas. We will also touch on the origins of Fluxus, which is vividly revealed in Jonas Mekas’ film Zefiro Torna or Images from the Life of Jurgis Mačiūnas (1992).

JMVMC, 2021.