‘Same Day’ Rejects Quotidian Structures

‘First you put on your shirt, then your trousers; you drag yourself into bed at night and in the morning drag yourself out again; and always you put one foot in front of the other. There is little hope that will ever change. Millions have always done it like that and millions more will do so after us.’ This is how Georg Büchner observes the imposition of a cultural clockwork onto the natural phenomenon of the solar day in his play Danton’s Death (1835). This ceremony of reality – ritualistic, mimetic, performative – is echoed by the 15th Baltic Triennial, ‘Same Day’, currently on view at the Contemporary Art Centre (CAC), Vilnius.

Installed across the newly renovated CAC, ‘Same Day’, curated by Tom Engels and Maya Tounta, transports the viewer between varied sensory states. We move through the dark heat of a room featuring multiple analogue projections: Kevin Jerome Everson’s Recovery (2020), a 16mm black and white video of an American airman conducting his training in a ‘spin-and-puke chair’, plays near Rey Akdogan’s Carousel #2 (2010/19), #8 (2015) and #9 (2016) – three slide projections portraying layered plastics. Everson’s nausea-inducing shots engender a creeping sense of vertigo, whilst Akdogan’s ostensibly beautiful images reveal themselves, upon closer inspection, to consist of commercial and industrial waste.

From this visceral experience, we pass via a corridor into the largest room of the triennial, which contains 47 artworks in a range of media. With almost all the works in this room being on a relatable human scale, the space feels intimate yet uncanny – like a dream. Take, for example, Bradley Kronz’s installation Square Sleep (2021), which features a slightly shrunken reproduction of his childhood bed. Its unexpected size, sitting somewhere between plausibly usable and ornamental, speaks to the ways in which retrospection miniaturizes and sentimentalizes childhood. Placed adjacent is Ian Law’s untitled (2024): a wallet seemingly abandoned on the gallery floor, which contains eight geometric shape poems. The experience of the work is tactile and seductive: we crouch on the floor to flip the wallet open, pull out a sheet of paper and unfold it. The temptation to pocket either the wallet or a poem evokes the self-conscious pleasure we might feel when touching something illicit. Tapping into nostalgia, sleep and petty criminality, these works allow us momentary respite from the tedium of everyday life.

Elsewhere in the gallery, Simon Lässig’s installation Untitled (2022) – a table, a stool and 38 pages of photocopied research materials with large sections of text redacted in marker pen – draws the viewer into the artist’s field of enquiry through the palimpsest of his annotations. Across the exhibition space, Ewa Partum’s Drawing TV (1976) plays on a monitor. Like Lässig, Partum utilizes the felt-tip pen as a performative tool of obfuscation, placing a firm strike across the face of an anchor for the Polish People’s Republic news programme, whose nightly broadcast reiterated state ideology during the Cold War era. Both works centre around the recurrence of a quotidian movement – the slight gesture of writing – which attempts to edit and re-sequence the facts of a given reality.

Purposefully devoid of explanatory wall texts or exhibition didactics, the triennial leaves the visitor to draw their own conclusions about the show, where context and narrative are determined solely by the close formal and material relations between artworks. Taken from Emerson’s eponymous 1984 poem, the exhibition title serves as a broad outline to which different practices are gently tacked. The curatorial premise of the 15th Baltic Triennial suggests that artworks should speak for themselves, in their own language and at their own pace.

The 15th Baltic Triennial ‘Same Day’ is on view at Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius, until 12 January 2025 

_{Main image: Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, En Rachâchant, 1982, ‘Same Day’, 2024, installation view. Courtesy: Contemporary Art Centre (CAC) Vilnius; photograph: Kristien Daem}