On Friday, 11 September, at 6pm, Editorial (Latako 3, Vilnius) will open the exhibition Familiar Stranger, curated by Milda Januševičiūtė. The exhibition is part of the Vilnius Gallery Weekend programme.
Familiar Stranger brings together works by Zuza Banasińska, Loora Kaubi, Sarah Neumann and Milda Januševičiūtė, to look at memory as an unstable process through which personal and collective identities are continually reconstructed. The exhibition lingers between family histories, inherited images, bodily memory and digital archives, asking what happens when the past reaches out through fragments: a story repeated by relatives, an image whose details no longer agree, a gesture inherited without explanation, or a file stored somewhere in the clouds. Memory here is less an archive of what happened, and more an ongoing negotiation between what is remembered, forgotten, altered and passed on.
The exhibition is interested in the shift between embodied and externalised memory. What was once held in stories, objects and bodies increasingly also exists on corporate servers, accessible through passwords, subscriptions and infrastructures that we rarely see. Forgetting may be a basic condition of being human; data storage has made it into a service.
Rather than treating memory as reliable evidence, Familiar Stranger considers how remembering is shaped by repetition, omission, technology, and the moment from which it looks back. The familiar can return slightly changed; someone else’s memory can quietly enter our own; an inherited story can feel simultaneously intimate and strangely foreign. The exhibition does not propose the recovery of an original, intact past. Instead, it asks how to live with what remains, what has already been rewritten, and what we choose, or allow other systems, to remember for us.
The exhibition can be seen at Editorial (Latako 3, Vilnius) until 24 October.
Familiar Stranger
Artists: Zuza Banasińska, Milda Januševičiūtė, Loora Kaubi, Sarah Neumann
Curator: Milda Januševičiūtė
Architect: Ona Juciūtė
Designer: Monika Janulevičiūtė
Language Editor: Joseph Everatt
The exhibition is funded by the Lithuanian Council for Culture
The exhibition will be accompanied by a programme of events: follow us for updates at www.editorial.lt.