"Youth Platform": Julija Račiūnaitė's exhibition "From a Private Collection"

The exhibition "From a Private Collection" presents four themes developed in the period 2016-2024 - two personal projects and two projects implemented together with co-authors Inga Navickaitė-Drąsutė and Anta Marija Antanavičiūtė: a series of digital paintings depicting changes of the roadside landscape and surrounding areas in the past decades "The Inevitable Landscape", an artistic research "Kreivuolis. Why Does Architecture Speak Snakish? ", presenting the architectural phenomenon of curvilinear arbours, which is typical for Lithuanian recreational spaces (co-author Anta Marija Antanavičiūtė); "Climb to", a series of texts and photographs telling the stories of Kaunas stairs, fountains, bricks, dormitories, the zoo and museum, and tombstones (co-author Inga Navickaitė-Drąsutė); "Minor Jest", a series of small photographic collections capture artefacts and phenomena, found in Vilnius and Kaunas.

The tendency to collect is a characteristic of various forms of life (humans, birds, insects, rodents, crustaceans), including the author of the exhibition, that sits somewhere on the spectrum between a non-committal hobby, an organized obsession and an obsessive-compulsive disorder. The works and their cycles selected for the exhibition partly follow the tradition of the typology art. In addition, their compilation, like publicly accessible museum collections, is characterised by the curation of existing collections and the formation of new ones, by expeditions and research to add new finds to the collection and to deepen the knowledge of existing ones, and by the classification of finds by refining, expanding or narrowing the definitions of types.

General collecting practice avoids a clear-cut definition. Nevertheless, it could be distinguished that collecting activities include: 1) the collection of objects/phenomena for non-utilitarian purposes 2) the intrinsic relationship between the collected objects/phenomena and 3) the subjective relationship of the owner to them.^[1]

These features can be applied to most of the works executed by the author in the last decade. Most of them have their origins in collections of phenomena that have been stored for a long time in the memory of a smart device, or that have been accumulated in private conversations, and that have eventually moved out of the private and into the public domain, in various forms, techniques and occasions.