Still Making Art Klaipėda

Still Making Art is a platform for early-career and under-represented artists established by Aaron McLaughlin and Simon Boase in 2013. After ebbing between a collaborative and socially engaged Amsterdam-based practice, the project was solely defined as a curatorial outlet from 2018, aimed to support pre-emerging artists who currently lack professional guidance or institutional endorsement. In Amsterdam the project utilised the scarce resource of space, promoting artists in an open-ended series of group exhibitions, with the common thread that emphasised the value of community, selfrepresentation and a liberation of non-art spaces. The first four volumes took place in pop-up art spaces connected to the curator’s studio between 2019 and 2020, with the intention to steadily build the platform’s reach internationally. Gradually with international acclaim from previous unfunded projects, Still Making Art in its current form consists of yearly group exhibitions that the curator has declared to undertake on an indefinite basis. As one of its first institutionally supported exhibitions, Still Making Art Klaipėda is a development of the original platform model. Usually consisting of mostly early-emerging artists and one or two ‘star players’ for credibility and effective transmission of the projects online, Still Making Art Klaipėda is a levelling of artists at all different stages of their career. Each chosen work in the exhibition is concerned with the notions of duration and accessibility, pertaining to the overall Still Making Art ethos, whether it be the perpetual looped dancing of Matthew Lessner, the inflationary packing sculptures of Egle Ruibyte, the tautological performative counterparts of Robertas Narkus, or the electric argon-fuelled roses of Emilija Povilanskaitė, a thread ties all these artists together, bowing a ceaseless interdependent poiesis.