Evaldas Jansas. Per ilgai ant pakylos, 2014, autoriaus nuotrauka. Iš parodos “Per ilgai ant pakylos”, LTMKS projektų erdvėje, Malonioji 6

The films and performance art of Evaldas Jansas (born 1969) move along the edges and underground layers of everyday life, by using (self-)destructive and creative outbursts to respond to its meaninglessness. His work, often viewed as transgressive, infuses autobiographical experiences into broader social or creative contexts and analyses the role of the artist as a social agent in society. Jansas’s position was aptly conveyed in his book ‘Ode to Routine’ (2000), published by the Contemporary Art Centre in Vilnius, in which he relates coarse everyday events from his own life and conversations with his colleagues about the films they have seen, thereby showing the inherent intertwining of art and everyday life. In his later films, he uses computer animation to create narratives based on the logic of dreams or the absurd, which are steeped in parody and the grotesque.  

Since 2009, Jansas has increasingly turned to painting, in which he experiments with the tradition of visual culture and combines mythical, pop-culture, art-historical, and pornographic imagery. In 2020, he founded an art space, Evaldas Jansas Museum, in the basement of Paviljonas bar. In the first exhibition in his new museum, the artist presented his most significant works from the 1990s period (‘Inclusion. A Slaughterer’s Knife’, 1993; ‘In One’s Own Juice’, 1998; ‘Greetings’, 1998). Both the space and the exhibition are, according to the artist, an ironic response to the nearby private MO Museum. In his exhibition, Jansas offered a radically different understanding of 1990s Lithuanian art than the one presented in the simultaneously shown MO Museum exhibition, ‘The Origin of Species: 1990s DNA’. Evaldas Jansas Museum hosts exhibitions and performances by him and other Lithuanian artists. 

Evaldas Jansas graduated from painting studies at the Vilnius Academy of Arts. His works have been exhibited at the Contemporary Art Centre, Vartai Gallery, and Jonas Mekas Visual Arts Center in Vilnius, at Rauma Biennale Balticum in Finland (2012). His films have been screened at Vilnius International Film Festival ‘Kino Pavasaris’ in Lithuania and Rencontres Internationales in Berlin and Paris (2007, 2008). 

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