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The initial concept of the bilateral exhibition focuses on “archaic future” and “dynamic rooting” – on a return of the ancestral in synergy with the contemporary and the future, which promotes a re-enchantment of our world and our imagination. Contemporary textile art of Japan and Lithuania is a particularly potent field for the reflection of the becoming, which is in a certain way a restart, return, reconfiguration, reframe and remaking of the past, heritage and traditions. The exhibition wants to reveal the conceptual metaphors encoded by contemporary textile works, immersed in archaic, mythical, historical depths while highlighting the textures of the future.

The present is overcrowded, full of uncertainty, and something is always getting stuck. And if so, should it not be “restarted,” like software? Click “Restart,” close programs that are running with errors, and update everything. Restart everything, without discovering anything new, just activating the original states and forms. At the same time, stopping the rush of everyday life, going back in time to the beginning, looking back to where it all started. Such premonitions are revealed in works that seek direct contact with reality and create new networks of meaning.

Textiles and weaving occupy a significant place in creative and spiritual traditional of Japanese and Lithuanian cultures. On the other hand, Kaunas and Kyoto are also prominent centres of contemporary art. The exhibition takes a broad look at the textile practices, revitalizing them by the exploration of inter and trans-textiles, which embrace all surfaces and deep substances that are lying beneath them. The show aims to include various forms of interrelations, which could be defined as “transcendence of the textile” that makes it possible to mix various media, art and artistic research, and ask relevant questions related to human and nonhuman life, fragile existence and pressing environmental concerns. It offers an update on creative practices using textile as their medium and it refers to the various ways in which the complexity of the materials manifest itself in contemporary world.

Textiles reveal themselves in these works as an all-encompassing “operating system” that controls all of life’s programs. At the same time, they remind us that weaving is one of the oldest technologies, characterized by ritual repetition and repetitive movement. It is the primary medium of “writing,” which existed before writing, closest to the earth, the body, objects, interwoven in the life of the living. It encourages us to touch the original matter and to go back to the origins, when there were no definitions of media and art, rethinking all the connections and approaches.

The works of Japanese and Lithuanian artists seem to “restart” the programs of our consciousness and imagination, stirring up the whole reality. The artists use textiles as a specific medium of experience that allows us to get closer to reality, to touch the surfaces of multiple realities, and to experience the depths beneath them, recalling the experiences we have had and bringing us closer to the other’s experience or creating the possibility of other experiences. Several themes run through the exhibition, which encompass our relationship with nature, inseparable from the experience of the native place and the primary natural materials. The human relationship with spiritual practices and the higher reality that opens beyond the veils of everyday life. The bodily relationships and the feelings of the body hidden under the clothes, which also bring us back to the mystery of ritual dances.

All this involves questions of human identity, memory, interconnectedness, continuity, and change, marked by different cultural traditions and cultural expressions. But the premonitions that emerge from the present bring them together, presenting the possibility of a closer engagement with the world, and perhaps even of renewal.

The exhibition can be read through a prism of reconnection and refresh. Experienced and young textile and visual artists from Japan and Lithuania are invited to initiate a dialogue by addressing the issues of memory and its reappropriation alongside the themes of the new emerging futures. Paraphrasing Paul Valéry, we are entering in the future backwards. Therefore, the exhibition aims to present the existing connection between the future and the past, the contemporary and the primitivism in the sense of a return to fundamental principles.

The Japanese and Lithuanian contemporary textile exhibition “Restart” is the fruit of long-term cooperation with Japan. The friendship between the creators of the two countries started in the last decade, marked by several exhibitions in Kaunas, presenting Japanese culture, art, and famous figures of the art field. The organizers of the exhibition are already planning future collaborations with Japanese creators in order to present Japanese works to even wider audiences by connecting textile artists from the Baltic countries (Lithuania and Estonia) with Japanese artists in Tartu (Estonia).