Photography Exhibition by Arūnas Kulikauskas “Jonas Mekas & Frozen Film Frames” will be opened on the 4th of January 2023. The official opening is on the 4th of January 17.00 – 20.00. The photographer Arūnas Kulikauskas will be present in the gallery during the official opening & artist talks.

Arūnas Kulikauskas is a photographer, freelance artist & graphic designer born in Kaunas, Lithuania 1959. From 1990 he lived and worked in NY, USA, where Arūnas worked closely with Jonas Mekas at the Anthology Film Archives. Now Arūnas lives in Lithuania.

Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania chronicles the return journey to Jonas Mekas homeland with his brother Adolfas, after several decades in the United States. ​​Reuniting with siblings, neighbours and their mother, the film pulls the viewer through village life in rural Soviet Lithuania, bookended by scenes from New York in the 1950s and a stop in Vienna on their return journey to the US. Combining music, poetry and reflections, with short fragmentary bursts of filming, Mekas’ films are alive with memory.

More information on this event available here.

“A Companion to Mekas Walden” is an in-depth guide to Jonas Mekas’s film masterpiece. It is designed to enrich the viewer’s journey through the cultural ferment of New York City in the 1960s explored by Mekas’s film.

When Mekas’s “Diaries, Notes and Sketches” also known as “Walden”, premiered in New York in 1969, it opened a new chapter in the history of artists’ film. A new generation suddenly discovered that the film medium was not reserved for the commercial entertainment industry.

And at the same time “Walden” was also an invaluable record of a time and place that was the nexus of multiple forms of American art – including music, painting, dance, theater, and poetry. As critic Amy Taubin wrote: “Whenever people ask me what it was like to live in New York in the ’60s, I refer them to Mekas’s Walden…”

As part of the exhibition “…Poetry?” agnès b. collection (until January 22, 2023 at La Fab.) and the centenary Jonas Mekas 100! La Fab is pleased to present an afternoon dedicated to the poetry of Jonas Mekas.

Artists: Jackie Raynal, Jean-Jacques Lebel, Fox Magal

Participants: Austė Zdančiutė, Michaël Batalla, Pip Chodorov

For more information please visit here.

The National Audiovisual Institute (KAVI) in Helsinki celebrates the 100th anniversary of Jonas Mekas with a programme of four feature films, a short film programme, a photo exhibition as well as a panel discussion and introductions. The programme kicks off on the first weekend of December and runs until mid-January in the cinematheque of KAVI, Kino Regina.

The Jonas Mekas programme starts on 2 December with a screening of Mekas’ short films and film diary entries.  3rd December begins with a conversation about Jonas Mekas’ work and legacy. The participants include two international guests: Kristijonas Gukauskas, a London-based Lithuanian art historian and independent curator, and Arunas Kulikauskas who has worked closely with Jonas Mekas for 22 years at the Anthology Film Archives. Photos by A. Kulikauskas are exhibited in the lobby of Kino Regina during the film programme in December and January. He will be also introducing the screening of the feature film Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania (1972) following the panel discussion and the short film programme on 4 December.

The other films in the programme include Walden (1969), Lost Lost Lost (1976) and As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty (2000), all screened from 16 mm film.

For a complete programme at Kino Regina visit link here.

Jonas Mekas (1922 – 2019) – filmmaker, author, and curator – always said that his works were not political. However, often, the exact opposite was the case. His response to the horrors of the 20th century was to turn to the everyday in an artistic way. He sought an aesthetic form for it in his films, diaries and poems and ascribed it with a force of humanization. The eventful history of the past 100 years is reflected in his work.

On the 100th anniversary of Jonas Mekas’ birth, the program curated by Christoph Gnädig, Christian Hiller and Anne König addresses the political dimensions of his oeuvre. Panels with filmmakers, artists and like-minded peers explore Memories, Displacement, Counter-Culture, Cold and New Wars and the Politics of Everyday. In addition to the program in Cinema 1, political video works by Mekas will be installed in Cinema 2. The program will be expanded on the digital platform arsenal 3 with films by Chantal Akerman, Sergei Loznitsa, and Jonas Mekas. There will also be performative readings by Heike Geißler, Eglė Lukšaitė and Goda Palekaitė. Asia Bazdyrieva will from her Ukrainian war diary.

For more information visit the link here.

Noting the centennial of Lithuanian poet and filmmaker Jonas Mekas, Index will be hosting a three part screening series showing Mekas’ experimental diary film Walden from 1968. Using Walden as a point of departure, the series will spotlight Mekas’ important role as enabler, organizer, connector of people, and devout advocate for art.

This second session doubles as a release for the most recent issue from Ord&Bild and is generally inspired by Mekas’ journalistic output. In 1954, him and his brother founded Film Culture, a magazine offering a space for in depht writing on avant-garde cinema. A few years later he became the first film critic for the Village Voice, where he continued publishing his weekly column Movie Journal for over a decade.

Isabella Tjäder, Curator of Learning at Index, will moderate a discussion between Jonatan Habib Engqvist, editor at Ord&Bild, and Amin Zouiten + Aron Skoog, founders of Filmögon.

More information on this event can be found here.

Ord&Bild (”Word&Image”) has been published since 1892, which makes it the oldest cultural journal in Sweden. The final issue of the printed journal on its 130-year jubilee (no. 5.2022) includes a section specifically dedicated to Jonas Mekas and the essay film Walden. Contributions by: Isabella Tjäder (SE), Lars Movin (DK), and Urbonas Studio (LT/US) as well as still images from Jonas Mekas film Walden and his poetry, translated into Swedish by Liana Ruokyte-Jonsson and Mikael Nydahl. The issue also includes a discussion on wetlands which is reflected in the Jonas Mekas section.

In parallel to the physical journal, we are engaged in a conversation with Index Contemporary Art Foundation over the course of several months. The results of this more experimental collaboration will be published online during the spring of 2023.

The journal will be released in Stockholm and Gothenburg in January 2023 and will be presented during the screening and discussion session “Diaries, Notes and Sketches pt 2 – Critique, contemplation and editorial outlooks” at Index on 20 January, 2023.

For more information on this issue of Ord&Bild visit link here.

Microscope is very pleased to present “A small table with a bottle of wine, garlic, sausage, bread,” a solo exhibition of works by Jonas Mekas, taking place on the 100th anniversary of his birth on December 24, 1922.

Throughout his nearly 80-year-long artistic lifetime, Mekas embraced the diaristic form, arguably more than any other through cameras, sound devices, and written journals, while maintaining a radical dedication to elevating the personal and poetic aspects of daily life, always seeking to capture the essence of the moment. Mekas recorded what was happening in front of him in the present, the here and now. With an emphasis on that which is typically regarded as the small and insignificant, he was unwaveringly committed to sharing “fragments of paradise on Earth.”

More information on this exhibition can be found here.

In celebration of the centenary of his birth, Watershed will be screening “Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania” (1976), which depicts Jonas and his brother Adolfas’s return journey to their homeland after several decades in the United States and Outtakes from the “Outtakes From The Life Of A Happy Man” (2012), a look back on fragments of unused 16mm footage, combined with immediacy and intuition.

More information available here.

Online streaming of the film “J. Mekas” (1980) by Roberta’s Verba. In 1977, accompanied by his wife and daughter, Jonas Mekas returned to Lithuania for the second time since his departure for exile in 1944. Documentary filmmaker Robertas Verba recorded the images of the return to his native country, the memory of which irrigates Mekas’ cinema.

Film numérisé à partir d’une copie 35 mm par le Lithuanian Central State Archives en 2022 pour le Lithuanian Film Centre. Remerciements au Lithuanian Film Centre (Austė Jucytė) et à Austė Zdančiūtė (ambassade de Lituanie en France).

The film link is here.

Following the premiere in Venice, award-winning KD Davison’s poetic documentary “Fragments of Paradise” will be screened in Turin in remembrance of Jonas Mekas. The organiser Unione culturale is the cultural club where Jonas Mekas, Jerome Hill and Taylor Mead presented two extended New American Cinema Expositions in 1967 and 1968. This happening will be evoked during the event.

More information on this event can be found here.

Celebrating the 100th anniversary of the birth of Jonas Mekas the Museum of Contemporary Art Zagreb will be screening the magnum opus of this filmmaker “As I Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty”. This is a film-video diary in which Jonas Mekas observes his life in the rhythm of life in New York, subtly pays attention to less visible fragments of everyday life, experiences and emotions. He lets the viewer into his “observation room” and in this way helps us (to) find simplicity in what we see, (to) find the indescribable power of poetry and the need for that power, to feel again the pleasure that a person feels through friendship, seeing the first snow or again next spring.
The first part of the film will be shown on January 25, and the second part of the film on January 26, 2023.

For more information visit link here.

Jonas Mekas 100! – the international programme of events celebrating the 100th anniversary of the Lithuanian-born filmmaker’s birth – comes to Italy with “Images Are Real”, an exhibition and series of events curated by the duo Francesco Urbano Ragazzi, who have accompanied Mekas on a number art projects from Venice to New York, Seoul and Reykjavík.

The exhibition takes a retrospective look at the sixty-year career of Jonas Mekas (Biržai 1922 – New York 2019) within and beyond the history of avant-garde cinema. Presenting a broad selection of works ranging from the 1960s to the late 2010s, the project sets out to explore the Lithuanian filmmaker’s work as a form of resistance to human brutality, a quest for happiness through which to cope with the uncertainty of the present.

The title of the exhibition is a quote from the film “Out-takes From the Life of a Happy Man”, in which the artist’s off-screen voice reflects: “Memory is gone, but the images are here, and the images are real!”.

Curated by Francesco Urbano Ragazzi.

More information on this event can be found here.

Noting the centennial of Lithuanian poet and filmmaker Jonas Mekas, Index will be hosting a three part screening series showing Mekas’ experimental diary film Walden from 1968. Using Walden as a point of departure, the series will spotlight Mekas’ important role as enabler, organizer, connector of people, and devout advocate for art.

This third and final session focuses on Mekas’ dual role as poet and filmmaker. It invites contemporary artists to talk about polyphonic practices; allowing methods and particularities from one medium to bleed into another – linguistics into film, movement into sculpture and sound into image.

Isabella Tjäder, Curator of Learning at Index, will moderate a discussion between artists Agnė Jokšė, Anastasia Sosunova, Andria Nyberg Forshage, Eglė Budvytytė, and Salad Hilowle.

For more information on the sessions please visit link here.

Gwangju Museum of Art is pleased to present “To All My Dear Friends”, an exhibition to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Jonas Mekas’ birth. The exhibition focuses on Jonas Mekas’ important films that have been created throughout his life as Mekas was a master of American avant-garde cinema and established a new horizon in the history of experimental film through the format of ‘diary film.’ The exhibition begins with the idea that the stories that many of his films present are indeed his letters with wishful greetings he wanted to deliver to his friends.

The exhibition also illuminates his friendship with Nam June Paik, whom he worked with for some time as an immigrant and exile in New York. Nam June Paik’s Sistine Chapel where images of Fluxus artists at the same time working with Jonas Mekas are projected is on display.

More information on this exhibition can be found here.

Join Mishkin Gallery and art historian Inesa Brašiškė for a closing event for “Warhol, People and Things: 1972–2022”, an exhibition featuring work from the Baruch College art collection currently on view at Casa São Roque in Porto, Portugal.

Brašiškė will discuss the vibrant collaborations between Andy Warhol and Jonas Mekas, share documentation related to Warhol’s screen tests of Mekas, and consider Mekas’s “Scenes of the Life Of Andy Warhol” (1982) which is currently on view in Portugal as part of the exhibition.

For more information and registration can be found here.

The exhibition “Under the Shadow of the Tree” curated by the duo Francesco Urbano Ragazzi at the Pavilion de l’Esprit Nouveau places the building – a residential prototype built in 1925 by Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret, reconstructed in a faithful copy in Bologna in 1977 by Giuliano and Glauco Gresleri with José Oubrerie – in dialogue with works by Mekas, which brings out from the big screen his film diaries. As if it were a sounding board, the entire pavilion is filled with the sounds of the audio diaries with which the artist has recorded life in New York. The tree that stands out in the center of Le Corbusier’s architecture, crossing its ceiling, is instead the element around which revolves a reflection in images on the role of nature in the work of this author, a fundamental figure in the history of avant-garde cinema American.

More information on exhibition can be found here.

Online streaming of the film “J. Mekas” (1980) by Roberta’s Verba. In 1977, accompanied by his wife and daughter, Jonas Mekas returned to Lithuania for the second time since his departure for exile in 1944. Documentary filmmaker Robertas Verba recorded the images of the return to his native country, the memory of which irrigates Mekas’ cinema.

Film numérisé à partir d’une copie 35 mm par le Lithuanian Central State Archives en 2022 pour le Lithuanian Film Centre. Remerciements au Lithuanian Film Centre (Austė Jucytė) et à Austė Zdančiūtė (ambassade de Lituanie en France).

The film link is here.

Monira Foundation proudly presents Jonas Mekas, Open Archives, a year long exhibit at Mana Contemporary Chicago featuring artifacts, items and memorabilia from Mekas personal archives.

Since March of 2020 Open Archives has send out a weekly digital release offering a glimpse into the personal archives of Jonas Mekas. Every item shared was selected by Sebastian Mekas, Director of the Jonas Mekas Studio, with the goal of keeping the studio practice alive and showing its long term relevance through its diaristic and meticulously cataloged collections of artwork, artifacts, and other materials.

An Open Archives presumes a veritable archive. That of Jonas Mekas comprises more than eight decades of collected material of the famed filmmaker, poet and impresario of the avant garde.

The hundred or so items, presented publicly for the first time – photographs, manifestos and scribbles, poems and faxes, as well as clippings, tchotchkes and working tools – broadly expand the understanding of this cultural figure as well as the many decades of shifting Zeitgeist through which he moved.

For more information visit link here.

Jonas Mekas 100! – the international programme of events celebrating the 100th anniversary of the Lithuanian-born filmmaker’s birth – comes to Italy with “Images Are Real”, an exhibition and series of events curated by the duo Francesco Urbano Ragazzi, who have accompanied Mekas on a number art projects from Venice to New York, Seoul and Reykjavík.

The exhibition takes a retrospective look at the sixty-year career of Jonas Mekas (Biržai 1922 – New York 2019) within and beyond the history of avant-garde cinema. Presenting a broad selection of works ranging from the 1960s to the late 2010s, the project sets out to explore the Lithuanian filmmaker’s work as a form of resistance to human brutality, a quest for happiness through which to cope with the uncertainty of the present.

The title of the exhibition is a quote from the film “Out-takes From the Life of a Happy Man”, in which the artist’s off-screen voice reflects: “Memory is gone, but the images are here, and the images are real!”.

Curated by Francesco Urbano Ragazzi.

More information on this event can be found here.

Gwangju Museum of Art is pleased to present “To All My Dear Friends”, an exhibition to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Jonas Mekas’ birth. The exhibition focuses on Jonas Mekas’ important films that have been created throughout his life as Mekas was a master of American avant-garde cinema and established a new horizon in the history of experimental film through the format of ‘diary film.’ The exhibition begins with the idea that the stories that many of his films present are indeed his letters with wishful greetings he wanted to deliver to his friends.

The exhibition also illuminates his friendship with Nam June Paik, whom he worked with for some time as an immigrant and exile in New York. Nam June Paik’s Sistine Chapel where images of Fluxus artists at the same time working with Jonas Mekas are projected is on display.

More information on this exhibition can be found here.