Draudziami Jausmai

In recent years visual artists working in film and video have increasingly focussed on storytelling and narrative as a means of examining history. This approach opens up different trajectories and points of access to film history and cinematic aesthetics, related much more closely to narrative feature filmmaking than to avantgarde and experimental cinema. Artists like Deimantas Narkevičius bring this aesthetic, which is very much connected to the ‚classical’ cinema experience – storytelling, linearity, causality – to the realm of the gallery space, the exhibition. In his new work, Draudžiami Jausmai (Restricted Sensation), he tells the story of a young Lithuanian, who, in the 1970s, loses his job at a theater because of accusations of homosexuality. Narkevičius recounts the events in a straightforward narrative, using first-hand accounts of Lithuanian gay men who lived under the threat of §122 of the Soviet Penal Code as the basis for his script.