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20260806 060000 UTC
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Google Cloud Speech-to-Text API (Chirp) + Gemini 2.5 Flash Non-Thinking
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[00:00:30] evening, today on the show legends today and
[00:00:33] always we will invite to remember the painter
[00:00:36] Marija Teresė Rožanskaitė.
[00:00:38] An extraordinarily interesting painter was born in 1933
[00:00:41] in Linkuva. When she was just seven, she and her mother were deported
[00:00:45] to the Altai region. Having escaped from exile, Marija
[00:00:49] Teresė Rožanskaitė, after Stalin's death, enrolled in the then
[00:00:52] Lithuanian Institute of Art. The experience of exile
[00:00:55] later permeated all of her work, in which the painter spoke
[00:00:59] about the helplessness of man in the grip of a cruel system, about
[00:01:03] the sick society of the Soviet era, both her
[00:01:06] paintings and assemblages, and installations
[00:01:09] permeated with the artist's reflections on time,
[00:01:12] control, and freedom. For a long time
[00:01:15] being on the margins of official art, Marija Teresė
[00:01:18] Rožanskaitė's work is being rediscovered anew. The artist's
[00:01:21] works are exhibited alongside contemporary art projects
[00:01:25] today reflecting questions about the human condition
[00:01:29] globally.
[00:01:37] I love waters very much,
[00:01:40] but not the sea, a lake, only streams, here it is like arteries
[00:01:44] of our earth. Man
[00:01:48] always tries to stop time,
[00:01:52] a stream is time and it never
[00:01:55] stops, I say, I try to live, and
[00:01:58] others say, you know, there... and that is, so don't go and don't get your
[00:02:02] nerves ruined, no, I just go, everything for me, I'm interested
[00:02:05] in being where there is life,
[00:02:08] pulsating in the full sense of the word.
[00:02:31] Marija Teresė Rožanskaitė was born
[00:02:34] on March 18,
[00:02:36] 1933, in Linkuva, which
[00:02:40] is in Pakruojis district, and
[00:02:43] her parents were, her mother was a teacher, and
[00:02:46] her father was the chairman of the Riflemen's Union,
[00:02:50] a farmer, such
[00:02:53] Lithuanian intellectuals, patriots.
[00:02:56] Her grandfather was also a rifleman, and it so happened that...
[00:03:00] somehow her grandfather died, and his
[00:03:03] wish was to be buried in a rifleman's uniform,
[00:03:06] and that wish was fulfilled, but perhaps
[00:03:10] it became such a pretext
[00:03:13] for the family, maybe I don't know all those
[00:03:17] vicissitudes, but they were deported to
[00:03:20] Siberia during that very first deportation
[00:03:23] on June 14, 1941, and
[00:03:26] that whole event greatly affected
[00:03:30] Marija Teresė Rožanskaitė's life and
[00:03:33] work, and she remembers how
[00:03:36] those armed people burst in, how they ordered
[00:03:40] them to prepare quickly, how they really
[00:03:44] scared them. Her father, meanwhile,
[00:03:46] was in another place near the barn or somewhere, and he could have
[00:03:50] actually escaped, but he stayed with
[00:03:53] his family, although they were quickly separated later. She and
[00:03:57] her mother were deported to the Reshota
[00:04:00] camp, and her father went somewhere separately, and
[00:04:03] later news reached them that he had died, but
[00:04:07] he was most likely shot.
[00:04:38] She clearly depicts things, or let's take that
[00:04:41] work, where exile is depicted, where
[00:04:45] a wagon is painted in the Mo Museum collection, it is
[00:04:49] 1941, so there
[00:04:51] is that whole terrible wagon with
[00:04:55] precise details, I have also seen a photograph
[00:04:58] of a wagon with the inscription
[00:05:01] Reshota, well 1941, I
[00:05:04] think that inscription was probably put on at the beginning of independence,
[00:05:08] but there was such an assemblage with
[00:05:12] a hole in the middle with some doll limbs
[00:05:15] and such a pregnant
[00:05:18] female figure, this is a direct reference to
[00:05:21] her biography, because the artist's mother was pregnant when
[00:05:25] they were exiled and there was some miscarriage
[00:05:29] and those doll parts, so
[00:05:32] you can say that it is only, how to say,
[00:05:36] one
[00:05:38] can look at every work of art only as an artist's
[00:05:42] some... fantasy or artistic generalization,
[00:05:45] but in Rožanskaitė's case, that truth
[00:05:49] seems to be very important, and therefore the number of interpretations
[00:05:53] could be infinite, but I think it is still
[00:05:57] important not to deviate from
[00:05:59] the artist's given path,
[00:06:02] because well, well, how, then
[00:06:06] you can fantasize without limits. In Siberia, children also learned
[00:06:09] all sorts of things there. There
[00:06:12] were literatures and so on
[00:06:15] to write and to draw, so she brought to
[00:06:18] the class for children colored
[00:06:20] pencils, or I don't remember if it was blue
[00:06:23] and red or red and green, I remember
[00:06:27] from my childhood there used to be red and blue pencils,
[00:06:30] one part of the pencil was blue, the other
[00:06:33] red, so you could use two colors with one pencil,
[00:06:36] so when they saw
[00:06:39] it, someone from the children
[00:06:42] had complained to their parents, who were
[00:06:46] officers or something, and said, how can an exile fascist, she
[00:06:50] cannot draw with colored pencils, and they simply
[00:06:53] took them away from her, they gave her a black
[00:06:57] pencil, so that's, well, how to say,
[00:07:01] such, such, such
[00:07:02] a life.
[00:07:13] "At seven years old she was deported
[00:07:17] separated from her father,
[00:07:21] taken away with her grandmother,
[00:07:24] well we know all those stages all,
[00:07:27] but after
[00:07:30] five, I don't know, in '53,
[00:07:32] it means it was after Stalin's death, there was
[00:07:36] a slight thaw there,
[00:07:39] but even after..." from
[00:07:42] death, it was still not allowed for exiles to return,
[00:07:46] so when such a situation
[00:07:49] arose, when the political instructor left that camp, that
[00:07:53] so-called, not a camp, but that,
[00:07:57] that commune,
[00:07:59] as they called it, a labor camp or whatever,
[00:08:03] that supervisor left for Moscow, and then
[00:08:06] conditions arose when a relative came
[00:08:10] to pick up the children from that exile, so
[00:08:14] they decided to escape,
[00:08:17] because the grandmother
[00:08:20] already understood, her mother was sick at that time,
[00:08:23] meaning very and
[00:08:26] the wagons with hay somehow
[00:08:29] they hid, they
[00:08:33] both dared to travel in winter
[00:08:37] to the city and from the city."
[00:08:40] "Of course they didn't have passports, the situation
[00:08:43] was such, simply secretly, somehow such
[00:08:47] an adventurous escape
[00:08:50] legend was such that
[00:08:53] it meant, well, either
[00:08:56] or, and that was usually
[00:08:59] the case, that people did not reconcile
[00:09:03] and at the first opportunity tried their fate, so
[00:09:07] their fate was very successful,
[00:09:10] they escaped, there were there and..." that escape was interesting,
[00:09:14] because there were cold and wolves around, the situation
[00:09:17] was such that they had to do everything very quickly, so
[00:09:20] in short, in short, the situation was that she
[00:09:24] through that fate, incidentally, an interesting case,
[00:09:28] that she managed to save
[00:09:31] her mother, because, well, those
[00:09:34] so-called relationships in Russia, which were there at
[00:09:38] that time, a little bit isolated,
[00:09:41] they helped, gave strychnine and
[00:09:44] her mother recovered, so for that
[00:09:47] reason, it means that such a fate, such
[00:09:51] coincidences coincided and she managed to escape,
[00:09:54] she spent four years there,
[00:09:58] and she came back, well, in that sense,
[00:10:02] how she came back,
[00:10:03] simply
[00:10:06] a woman came,
[00:10:10] who, to whom...
[00:10:13] "Grandmother, mother's mother, you see,
[00:10:16] for a wedding ring, she
[00:10:20] bought train tickets and
[00:10:23] so, well, mother with..." grandmother with her mother
[00:10:26] simply escaped from there, because it was
[00:10:29] the only way, because they had neither documents nor anything,
[00:10:33] and from that side, to return by train without
[00:10:36] documents, impossible,
[00:10:40] so it's impossible to simply buy a ticket, so that ticket
[00:10:43] was truly golden, I am very
[00:10:47] grateful to the people who
[00:10:50] allowed me to study, who supported me
[00:10:54] during those difficult times. When we escaped from Siberia with my mother,
[00:10:57] and here we were also persecuted
[00:11:00] for six years,
[00:11:03] I had to run from school to school, some gave us food, others
[00:11:06] clothed us, and I say I cannot
[00:11:10] help those people anymore, but I must help others
[00:11:14] as much as I can, because I believe in what people call
[00:11:17] a circle, which, you see,
[00:11:21] goes in a circle, one helps the other, and so on.
[00:11:25] "Because in life it's very difficult to repay
[00:11:26] the same,
[00:11:29] let everything go in such a circle, well, as much as I can,
[00:11:32] of course, here I am doing very little, sometimes
[00:11:35] I think that I even get such a thought that
[00:11:38] these arts need to be, that
[00:11:41] a lot in my
[00:11:44] spatial works, all the time
[00:11:48] no one needs them, no one buys them from
[00:11:50] me,
[00:11:52] I think that after all I am doing..." a very big crime, it seemed
[00:11:56] to me that I would rather spend that money on people,
[00:12:00] but nothing works out that
[00:12:02] way, you are, there are two
[00:12:06] people, and you just can't, if I don't work, here work or
[00:12:09] not work, then I can't do anything else, it turns out, she
[00:12:13] came back, so she was about 12 years
[00:12:17] old or 13, I don't remember how much according to that story,
[00:12:20] biography, but she still
[00:12:24] needed to... attend school and study, and in Kaunas and
[00:12:27] other cities, both grandmother and
[00:12:30] mother hid, and many prominent
[00:12:34] people helped
[00:12:36] her, and
[00:12:40] in this way she gradually
[00:12:43] finished that secondary
[00:12:46] school, and then she entered
[00:12:49] the Institute of Arts, but it was not easy for exiles,
[00:12:53] their lives might even have been stigmatized,
[00:12:55] so simply the late professor
[00:12:59] and rector of the Institute of Arts,
[00:13:03] Mackevičius, concealed the fact, simply did not report
[00:13:06] to the security services that she was an exile, and thanks to
[00:13:10] such people,
[00:13:12] such talented individuals as
[00:13:15] my mother were saved, and then she
[00:13:18] continued her studies with Gudaitis
[00:13:22] and graduated from the Institute. Marija Teresė Rožanskaitė
[00:13:26] entered the Institute of Arts, and
[00:13:29] there was a good class there,
[00:13:33] her classmate Igoris Piekuras, whom
[00:13:36] she later married, Vincas
[00:13:39] Kisarauskas, Romualdas Kunsa, these
[00:13:42] were truly talented, excellent people,
[00:13:46] and Marija Teresė Rožanskaitė did her diploma work
[00:13:50] with Professor Antanas Gudaitis, and indeed,
[00:13:54] from her remaining works, it is clear that she truly
[00:13:57] mastered that Gudaitian
[00:14:00] color palette and that combination
[00:14:03] of colors, but she probably
[00:14:05] understood after graduating that she wanted something different,
[00:14:09] both she and Piekuras
[00:14:12] searched, walked through some dumps, looked for
[00:14:16] all sorts of discarded things for their assemblages, both
[00:14:19] started using those found objects
[00:14:22] in their work, Rožanskaitė
[00:14:26] was one of the first in Lithuania to create assemblages,
[00:14:29] we know that Kisarauskas, Antanavičius, but
[00:14:32] Rožanskaitė constructed them in her own way,
[00:14:35] because an assemblage is usually
[00:14:38] such a formation when
[00:14:41] objects are somehow piled up on
[00:14:45] canvas or cardboard, on, so to speak,
[00:14:48] into that frame, but Rožanskaitė's
[00:14:52] idea was to open something, to go deeper,
[00:14:56] to open some wound, some
[00:14:59] container of memory, to see where that
[00:15:02] second or third bottom is, what is hidden, so her thinking
[00:15:06] was completely different, that moment
[00:15:09] of emptiness, cavity, some pain,
[00:15:12] so you could say hers were like
[00:15:15] negative assemblages,
[00:15:18] memory containers, I would say, where all sorts
[00:15:22] of references to exile fit. like
[00:15:25] some huge wagon also has its own
[00:15:28] history and many other
[00:15:30] things.
[00:16:23] In those figurative assemblages, for example, there is
[00:16:26] a whole cycle of Christ's Way of the Cross.
[00:16:30] Well, of course, it couldn't be called that
[00:16:34] at that time, so for example, if it was
[00:16:37] a portrait of a person and so on, sometimes there were even
[00:16:41] double titles or simply
[00:16:44] clearly visible crucifixes or
[00:16:48] similar things, they were not, how to say, clearly visible
[00:16:51] to us now, back then they were somehow masked, as if the cross was there,
[00:16:54] as if not, as if some inscriptions and then
[00:16:58] its composition with some numbers, you always have to
[00:17:02] do that, even the artist has recounted
[00:17:04] that one day she came to her studio, which
[00:17:08] at that time was on Pilies street, where there is an optics shop now in that courtyard,
[00:17:12] and she saw that the paintings
[00:17:15] were somehow moved, and she was just painting
[00:17:18] her own and painting and creating an assemblage in the square, where
[00:17:22] the body of a partisan was painted, and then she painted over it, and
[00:17:26] this work is now in the Mo Museum's
[00:17:29] collection, donated to the Pompidou Art Center, here
[00:17:32] when there was the Lithuanian season in France, the
[00:17:35] museum collected such a. campaign of important Lithuanian
[00:17:38] artists and donated it to Pompidou. The paintings of
[00:17:42] those times were not accepted
[00:17:45] by society, because well,
[00:17:48] they were political, after all, at that time they were not
[00:17:52] accepted for exhibitions, no, because not only was it
[00:17:56] not safe to show them to society, but
[00:18:00] generally it seemed very
[00:18:03] resistant, and these works were
[00:18:06] purely personal. "Because
[00:18:09] to tell some story in a book,
[00:18:13] you can hide those inscriptions, everything somewhere, but here these
[00:18:16] of hers, let's say, artistic inscriptions
[00:18:19] were placed in the
[00:18:22] studio and we only saw
[00:18:25] that process, no one else, so that was very, but
[00:18:29] she did it because she
[00:18:32] needed to, of course, that she had to somehow
[00:18:35] hide. write one way, call it
[00:18:39] something else, but on the other hand, the works themselves
[00:18:42] didn't lie, I am very impressed that, oh,
[00:18:46] it's still not like something
[00:18:49] is distorted, you still
[00:18:52] clearly feel it, there is even one assemblage where
[00:18:55] in Cyrillic, in Russian is written
[00:18:58] Prava Chilaveka Zaftra, human rights
[00:19:01] tomorrow, well, this is completely such obvious criticism,
[00:19:05] but somehow, well, during that period she probably didn't show
[00:19:08] it, she showed maybe more abstract
[00:19:11] assemblages, which
[00:19:14] could be presented as decorative
[00:19:17] compositions, and if it's decorative, then it will
[00:19:20] be understood, there can be nothing political and serious here,
[00:19:23] so she exhibited such very interesting
[00:19:26] abstract compositions in her solo
[00:19:29] exhibition.
[00:19:31] Mother could create, but
[00:20:01] still that creation was
[00:20:05] m'... m such, where when you know
[00:20:08] that you can never show it, you are incredibly
[00:20:12] free, free as much as you
[00:20:15] have, well, those technical
[00:20:18] possibilities, so that's it,
[00:20:22] that's when there were
[00:20:25] probably,
[00:20:28] when there were
[00:20:31] some
[00:20:33] informational
[00:20:35] news, some
[00:20:37] came through magazines, through through through
[00:20:41] the radio, through various informational sources
[00:20:45] of acquaintances, so more or less
[00:20:49] they knew what was happening in the world, what was happening in the art world,
[00:20:52] abroad, and that desire, well,
[00:20:56] also
[00:20:58] to be, to be a bit
[00:21:00] more innovative,
[00:21:03] so I remember that smell in the studio,
[00:21:07] oil paints and something else, something else,
[00:21:11] which I still cannot find, cannot recognize,
[00:21:14] so there, there, there was such a spirit and
[00:21:18] and some such... I don't know, there was
[00:21:21] such a mysticism, so that creative work was very, very
[00:21:25] interesting for that period,
[00:21:28] the 60s, 70s, that is, those
[00:21:31] searches, searches for form, searches for
[00:21:35] materials, searches for
[00:21:38] spaces, I was still painting under
[00:21:41] Gudaitis' influence, since I was already a student,
[00:21:44] I did my diploma, somewhere after that, that
[00:21:47] material just came. She
[00:21:51] wanted to, that flat surface no longer
[00:21:54] satisfied me, I wanted to take and do
[00:21:58] something like that,
[00:22:01] simply looking at those also from that rural
[00:22:04] architecture, somehow looking from
[00:22:08] the shadow of the roof, some space, doors
[00:22:11] open, shadows of the barn fall,
[00:22:14] the well opens, also, how to do this, somehow.
[00:22:17] Culture, nothing, I started with cardboard, I had nothing else, what
[00:22:21] other material, what can you do, well,
[00:22:25] I started cutting, so the very first
[00:22:28] work is assembled with yarn,
[00:22:31] it's funny
[00:22:35] to look at it now,
[00:22:38] well, it somehow appeared, I remember my former
[00:22:42] teacher also told me,
[00:22:45] Professor Katinas
[00:22:49] said: "Why are you doing that, he said. You can paint
[00:22:52] the same thing." "No, he said, I can't, my work has to change, I can't, it
[00:22:56] has to be illuminated one way, another way, something else can be
[00:23:00] done with it, I can't, painting doesn't satisfy me."
[00:23:47] everyone spoke in metaphors. In
[00:23:50] most cases, everyone spoke, and
[00:23:53] we know from cinema, from theater, and from
[00:23:56] literature, everything was largely
[00:24:00] in those metaphors,
[00:24:02] and those who could read
[00:24:05] would read, those
[00:24:09] who wanted to know would also find out, maybe some
[00:24:12] would keep silent, maybe some would
[00:24:16] sense it, and undoubtedly, it
[00:24:20] was dangerous, it was, it means, complicated, and
[00:24:23] there was no other way, there was no other
[00:24:27] way, I just think that when you want to speak
[00:24:30] and you are not allowed to speak with words,
[00:24:33] you speak in other forms, those assemblages that are now in Radvilų
[00:24:37] Palace, I don't care about those, you see,
[00:24:40] many of my friends are conceptualists, I
[00:24:44] think I myself am a conceptualist, you see,
[00:24:47] well, we think differently. A bit
[00:24:50] and that box, when I first saw it, I don't remember when, 40 years
[00:24:54] ago, his studio, that box stands there, I
[00:24:58] that object and that it has three dimensions, that
[00:25:01] you have to look at it that way, so I like it when I immediately give
[00:25:05] it as a gift, it's yours, go hang it up,
[00:25:07] I'll hang it up, so those, of course,
[00:25:10] I can't help but say that
[00:25:14] his art, where
[00:25:17] that painting of his, well, it's... super,
[00:25:20] they had
[00:25:23] well, a sensitivity, a sensitivity to color, and then his
[00:25:27] form, they perfectly master form, because here,
[00:25:30] as I said about improvisation, here improvisation,
[00:25:33] here it's not like do what you want, there's a very strict
[00:25:37] form, from A to the last,
[00:25:40] well, inside we improvise, of course, we
[00:25:44] know it, you need to know the way, with form, Marija
[00:25:48] Teresė works excellently. All, if you look at his
[00:25:51] painting and you'll see all those diagonals, everything is
[00:25:55] in place.
[00:26:31] But any idea has to take some form, and
[00:26:35] if it has a good form, it is effective, and if it
[00:26:38] does not have that form, then some other form
[00:26:42] must be found, yes, but it still
[00:26:45] has to be effective and it has to affect the viewer,
[00:26:49] I was simply moved by the fact that a person
[00:26:53] in our age, having created that
[00:26:56] civilization himself, fell into the grip
[00:26:58] of that civilization, so to speak.
[00:27:01] Now, man can no longer escape without that
[00:27:04] technology, otherwise, well, he is
[00:27:08] forced to live surrounded by
[00:27:10] it.
[00:27:13] On Park Street, there is a psychiatric hospital, and there is a ward there
[00:27:17] where, well, simply homeless
[00:27:19] people are brought, and people suffering from Alzheimer's disease,
[00:27:23] abandoned, their relatives disowned them, I
[00:27:26] had to interact with them, and there was one woman,
[00:27:29] who was very
[00:27:33] sweet, but she couldn't talk and
[00:27:36] never wanted to let me go,
[00:27:40] she became like my saint, I painted her, I painted
[00:27:43] her everywhere and everywhere, everywhere
[00:27:44] I could,
[00:27:47] to simply embrace those people, to take on some suffering,
[00:27:50] misfortunes, and
[00:27:53] X-rays appeared in her life
[00:27:57] at that stage when she herself
[00:28:01] was... being examined with X-rays,
[00:28:04] because cancer was suspected, and we, so to speak, in the family,
[00:28:07] I still remember, there was such a very
[00:28:10] difficult situation,
[00:28:14] we thought that my mother had lung cancer, but
[00:28:17] it turned out that those tests
[00:28:19] were, well, imperfect, maybe the
[00:28:23] technology was primitive at that time, because her relative
[00:28:26] was a radiologist and said, "Mom, don't pay attention,
[00:28:29] it could be a shadow theater and so on," so
[00:28:33] through her personal encounter with
[00:28:36] the X-ray machine, she realized that it
[00:28:39] was like penetrating
[00:28:43] a person, into their inner being, into that matter,
[00:28:46] but on the other hand, it is such a, well, how to
[00:28:50] say, such an encounter with the otherworldly,
[00:28:53] with the sign of fate, because
[00:28:56] X-rays, so to speak, are
[00:28:59] usually associated with
[00:29:02] scientific research, but also with medicine, and medicine is always
[00:29:06] such a,
[00:29:09] it means, like some
[00:29:12] bed, where you are born and die,
[00:29:16] so X-rays are also a kind of litmus
[00:29:20] paper, whether you will live, whether you will be sick or something else,
[00:29:23] so for my mother, that such, it means,
[00:29:26] well, it was important, like those draperies, so
[00:29:30] were X-rays. It's such a thing about
[00:29:33] being, about fate, about meaning
[00:29:37] and so on.