The Sapiegi Palace opens its doors to visitors and invites you to the first exhibitions Culture

The exhibition “Užovėja” aims to help reveal the palace itself and the stories related to its history. The title of the exhibition “Canopy” is inspired by the Latin inscription on the facade that welcomes visitors to the palace, which proclaims that “the majestic palace rising from the ruins will protect the war-weary in peaceful peace.”

Built as a resting place for war-weary heroes, the building has changed owners and uses many times over the course of more than three hundred years, but until today, most of its existence has been associated with warfare and healing. It was a tool of war and a trophy, at various times it housed barracks and a military hospital, and in the interwar period it housed an eye clinic. In the Soviet era, the palace served the war again, only this time as a school where military personnel learned to use anti-aircraft radars.

Photo by Emilia Filipenkovaitė/Work from the exhibition “Užovėja”

As restorers discover more and more traces of different periods, the inconsistency of historical narratives, breaks, contradictions and abundance of different views on the past are revealed in the walls of these palaces. What at one time seemed unimportant, unwanted, or destructible, has been re-valued at other times. Many nuances of the past will always remain a mystery. Especially since each story also testifies to forgotten or purposefully erased individuals and collective voices from history. The palace’s first exhibition seeks to highlight the coexistence of these different narratives and voices, the various ways of reflecting on the past and the present.

Photo by Emilia Filipenkovaitė/Work from the exhibition “Užovėja”

The exhibition also looks back to the Baroque as a period that left an indelible mark on Western culture. Baroque in Vilnius – as in many places in Europe – arose after the disasters of war, fires and diseases that ravaged the city. This is an era that discovered fragility, impermanence, the change of light and darkness in its own way. She was able to give special importance to the power of man to change the world with his own hands, and humbled himself to accept the natural forces beyond man’s control, which change the face of the city and communities. Baroque’s exalted drama of ruthless change and heavenly promise continues to resonate with the fires and hopes of later periods.

This exhibition will run until the end of the year and will be constantly changing during its run.

The second exhibition “Porcelianas rūms” presents the works of one of the most famous Lithuanian sculptors, Mindaugas Navaks. The vectors of baroque and modern Western and Chinese cultures collide in it. In Navak’s painting, hard porcelain, which once shined magnificently in the art of nobles and imperial palaces in the form of vases, tableware, and interior details, is today mostly seen in toilets and bathrooms in the West. Toilets, urinals and wash basins made of it have become attributes and symbols of personal and collective hygiene. Despite the hardness, durability and resistance of porcelain, this material is usually associated with delicacy and luxury, the distinguished past of China and, by extension, Europe.

Photo by Emilija Filipenkovaitė/Artwork by Mindaugas Navakas

The large-scale works of the sculptor indicate not only the changing range of meanings and associations of materiality, but also changes in the global vertical of power and values, in which the material that once embodied nobility and prestige turned into the basis of sanitary ware.

According to Paulius Andriuškevičius, M.Navakas is bluffing and, contrary to the old masters, who painstakingly painted every detail of the product, he creates his works, as is usual for his harsh practice, with bare hands, but rough ones, based on a more brutal industrial process.

The cheap construction materials that dominate the exhibition, including Ukrainian porcelain, as well as pedestals made of textiles and plastic, refer to the mechanized creation of modern high culture by the cheapest possible means. On the other hand, the marble pedestals featured in the exhibition remind us of the foundations of the great European culture, on which the baroque Sapiegi Palace was once built.

“The porcelain returning to the Sapiegi Palace after several centuries is no longer what the owners of this palace would remember. Neither is the new culture he represents. In the works of Navak, you can see fish, the symbol of the Christian world, Egyptian sarcophagi, alien cocoons and vases resembling baroque desserts. Navak’s characteristic monumentality goes hand in hand with humor.

Photo by Norberto Tukaj/Sapiegi Palace

Maybe that’s why the “Porcelain for the Palace” created by him can be taken as an ironic gift, a joke about a glorious but illusory past. Navak states: “Sculpture is the art medium that requires the least amount of imagination to grasp. It is here and now more than drawing, painting or poetry.” What the audience sees here and now is the fantasy of an innovative Lithuanian artist, surprising again with his unique ability to weave a conversation between form, material and culture”, says P. Andriuškevičius