Deimantas Narkevicius
Revisiting Solaris
12 May-17 June 2007
daadgalerie
Zimmerstr. 90-91
10117 Berlin
Opening hours: daily from 11am 6pm, closed Sundays Opening: 11 May 2007, 7 9 pm
Along with Donatas Banionis, Deimantas Narkevicius sought and found the actor who played Kelvin, the main character in Tarkovskys famous 1972 filming of Solaris based on the novel by Stanislaw Lem. Banionis now lives near Vilnius in Lithuania, the home town of Narkevicius. In numerous conversations between the two, the idea arose to re-film the quintessence of this legendary science-fiction film in a modern form and, most importantly, with Deimantas Narkevicius stylistic language. The result is a kind of film collage. Narkevicius shows, between black and white landscape photography shot in the 19th century in the area around Anapa on the Krim, documentary sequences of a former Russian television station that seem, on their part, surreal in their pure architecture. (The building has, in the meantime, been demolished.) The old figure of the silent actor, Donatas Banionis, is at the centre of the sparse action, where Deimantas Narkevicius himself appears as a character. Revisiting Solaris thus seems to present a film visit to surreal places on a different planet that is nevertheless thoroughly realistic.
Deimantas Narkevicius was born in Lithuania in 1964 and works in Vilnius. Since the 1990s his films and videos have received international recognition. In 2003 he represented Lithuania at the Venice Biennale. He participated in the exhibition Utopia Station in the Haus der Kunst in Munich in 2004. In 2006, his work could be seen at a solo exhibition in the Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst in Leipzig and in conjunction with the DAAD at the Akademie der Künste in Berlin.
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