On Monday, June 1  at 6 pm, we invite you to the opening of Deva Bartninkaitė’s exhibition “Image Tape” at the Jonas Mekas Visual Arts Center (Malūnų St. 8).

What might a synergy between VHS (Video Home System) and textile weaving technologies look like? Weaving is one of the oldest technologies created by humankind and remains functionally relevant to this day. Meanwhile, VHS, in the long history of technological evolution, flashed past us like a comet — briefly shining brightly, captivating audiences, igniting imagination, and then quickly disappearing from active use, remaining for many only as a sentimental memory. The Lithuanian word vaizdajuostė (“videotape”) was chosen intentionally as the title of Deva Bartninkaitė’s MA graduation project, serving as a key to unlock the synergy between these technologies.

The videotape becomes not only the subject of the creative project but also an object of research: videotape as matter per se. As VHS technology disappears from everyday life, the term itself is heard less frequently in linguistic discourse and drifts toward the landfill of words that have lost their functional meaning. In her theoretical research, the artist proposes that the term can still be revitalized by separating it into the concepts of “image” and “tape,” thereby opening up a much broader range of possible meanings. By reconsidering and expanding the concept of videotape, the work moves beyond a description confined solely within the framework of a specific technology. This linguistic reprocessing of meaning is not merely an aesthetic play on words but one of the core methodologies of the artist’s creative practice.

Reusing here emerges both through the use of material (the magnetic tape found inside VHS cassettes) and through the image itself — or at least its intuitive understanding. The project demonstrates how weaving with magnetic tape from discarded VHS videocassettes can remake the image itself, that is, its content and meaning, while preserving the same material substance. The videotape becomes a raw material for creation, losing its original function as a carrier of image and sound. Weaving technology reveals new possibilities both for encoding information through patterns and for achieving various visual surface variations that correlate with the visual aesthetics of the VHS analog format.

Deva Bartninkaitė’s artistic practice is consistently developed through weaving technologies employing VHS magnetic tape. Although the information stored on the tapes is no longer accessible, it is transformed into another artistic medium.

The exhibition presents an artistic project developed during the MA studies at the Textile Art and Design Department of the Vilnius Academy of Arts.

Supervisors of the artistic project: Assoc. Prof. Laura Pavilonytė-Ežerskienė and Assoc. Prof. Danutė Jonkaitytė

Supervisor of the theoretical research paper: Assoc. Prof. Jurijus Dobriakovas, PhD

Graphic design: Lukas Stanionis

The exhibition is part of the Vilnius Academy of Arts graduation show. The exhibition will run until June 27.