Photo – © Jonas Mekas

On August 5 at 6 p.m., the exhibition “Poets Never Sleep” will open at the Jonas Mekas Visual Arts Center (Malūnų St. 8, Vilnius). In the visual narrative created by the exhibition’s curator, artist Audra Vau, key diary films by filmmaker and poet Jonas Mekas come together with video works by installation and video artist Ugnius Gelguda and by Audra Vau herself.

At the heart of the exhibition is the work of Jonas Mekas (1922–2019) and his concept of the film diary. In “Walden (Diaries, Notes and Sketches)” (1969) and the later works “A Walk” (1990) and “Sleepless Nights Stories” (2011), the camera becomes a sensitive recorder of being in the world rather than a narrator of history. In Mekas’s work, fragments of everyday life take on particular importance: the faces of friends, changing light, the seasons, urban spaces, and fleeting glimpses of life.

Jonas Mekas’s son, Sebastian Mekas, who contributed to the development of the exhibition, says that in the later years of his life, his father observed with playful curiosity how other curators and artists interpreted and presented his work and films.

“Several of his most important film diaries are presented in this exhibition alongside works by other artists,” says Sebastian Mekas. “Audra Vau captured Jonas Mekas during his final journey abroad, when he was using his new video camera—a small device, even smaller than an iPhone. Meanwhile, through a palimpsest of stories and their retellings, Ugnius Gelguda brings together one of Mekas’s earliest video works, ‘A Walk,’ and the story of the Tree of Paradise. A diaristic gaze runs through the entire exhibition, connecting different decades, technologies, and artistic practices.”

Ugnius Gelguda’s video work “A Tree of Paradise” (2011), inspired by Mekas’s film “A Walk,” resonates with it as an archaeology of memory. During an hour-long walk through the rain-soaked SoHo district of New York, Mekas recounts the history of the neighbourhood’s development in an intimate and fragmented manner. He recalls the first tree that he and Jurgis Mačiūnas planted in this industrial district and reflects on the streets of SoHo and their inhabitants, changed beyond recognition.

“Back in 1990, as Jonas Mekas walked through a changing New York, he also reminded me of the loft district on Taras Shevchenko Street in Vilnius, which was experiencing the first stages of gentrification,” says Ugnius Gelguda, speaking about his video work. “In 2011, this Vilnius neighbourhood still had its own Tree of Paradise, heralding the new hopes of newcomers amid a once-grey industrial landscape. I was affected by the immediacy of Mekas’s film ‘A Walk’—it felt as though you were walking beside him and experiencing everything together: the transformation of the city and the cooling rain within this enormous organism.”

Audra Vau’s video portrait of Jonas Mekas, “Poets Never Sleep,” is a meditation. The artist created the video work in 2017, when she unexpectedly had the opportunity to film Jonas Mekas in London, where he had come to present his book “Dance with Fred Astaire.”

“This video work grew out of a brief filming session lasting just half an hour. A small space discovered by chance in the hotel became the setting for an intimate encounter with a man who spent his entire life filming the world as an unending miracle,” says Audra Vau.

The title of Audra Vau’s work, which also became the title of the exhibition, was taken from an episode of Jonas Mekas’s “365 Day Project.” Unable to fall asleep on a plane, Mekas says: “Everyone is asleep. I am not sleeping. Poets never sleep.”

The exhibition “Poets Never Sleep” invites visitors to slow down, notice the fragile moments of everyday life, and experience poetry anew as a way of being in the world.

Exhibition curator – Audra Vau
Consultant – Sebastian Mekas
Exhibition installation technicians – Pranas Gudaitis and Laurynas Maksvytis
Exhibition partners – Church Heritage Museum and the Ministry of Culture and Innovation of the Republic of Užupis
Media partner – LRT