Jonas Mekas – Images Are Real
Jonas Mekas 100! – the international programme of events celebrating the 100th anniversary of the Lithuanian-born filmmaker’s birth – lands in Italy with Images Are Real, an exhibition curated by Francesco Urbano Ragazzi, a curatorial duo that has accompanied Mekas in multiple art projects from Venice to New York to Seoul to Reykjavík. The exhibition takes a retrospective look at Jonas Mekas’s 70-year activity within and beyond the history of avant-garde cinema. Featuring a wide selection of works from the 1950s to the late 2010s, the exhibition presents the practice of the Lithuanian-born artist as a Dantesque journey that, from the infernos of history, leads to happiness through a daily exercise in filmmaking.
The catalogue published by CURA will expand this path by delving into the intertwining of art and reality in Mekas’ work.
The exhibition title is a quote from the film Out-takes From the Life of a Happy Man, in which the artist’s voice off screen reflects to himself that:
«Memory is gone, but my images are here, and images are real!»
Jonas Mekas’s work is an ode to life as it unfolds. In his films the camera becomes a diary in which he daily records the fragments of intensity of his own existence: his encounters with his friends Andy Warhol, Allen Ginsberg and Yoko Ono, or spring in Central Park, the flowers and the trees. Each instant is captured in a non-narrative and non-linear montage that parallels the language of poetry. Leafing through the pages of this 70-year diary, the exhibition aims to map out crucial stages in the life of its author, in a heady mosaic of images that come back to merge and to form new meanings.
Open from November 9, 2022, to February 26, 2023 at Pavilion 9b of Mattatoio di Roma, promoted by Roma Culture and Azienda Speciale Palaexpo in partnership with the Lithuanian Culture Institute and the Embassy of the Republic of Lithuania in Rome.
