Google Cloud Speech-to-Text API (Chirp) + Gemini 2.5 Flash Non-Thinking. Treat it as a searchable index of what was broadcast, not a quotation record.
00:00:30evening, today on the show legends today and
00:00:33always we will invite to remember the painter
00:00:36Marija Teresė Rožanskaitė.
00:00:38An extraordinarily interesting painter was born in 1933
00:00:41in Linkuva. When she was just seven, she and her mother were deported
00:00:45to the Altai region. Having escaped from exile, Marija
00:00:49Teresė Rožanskaitė, after Stalin's death, enrolled in the then
00:00:52Lithuanian Institute of Art. The experience of exile
00:00:55later permeated all of her work, in which the painter spoke
00:00:59about the helplessness of man in the grip of a cruel system, about
00:01:03the sick society of the Soviet era, both her
00:01:06paintings and assemblages, and installations
00:01:09permeated with the artist's reflections on time,
00:01:12control, and freedom. For a long time
00:01:15being on the margins of official art, Marija Teresė
00:01:18Rožanskaitė's work is being rediscovered anew. The artist's
00:01:21works are exhibited alongside contemporary art projects
00:01:25today reflecting questions about the human condition
00:01:29globally.
00:01:37I love waters very much,
00:01:40but not the sea, a lake, only streams, here it is like arteries
00:01:44of our earth. Man
00:01:48always tries to stop time,
00:01:52a stream is time and it never
00:01:55stops, I say, I try to live, and
00:01:58others say, you know, there... and that is, so don't go and don't get your
00:02:02nerves ruined, no, I just go, everything for me, I'm interested
00:02:05in being where there is life,
00:02:08pulsating in the full sense of the word.
00:02:31Marija Teresė Rožanskaitė was born
00:02:34on March 18,
00:02:361933, in Linkuva, which
00:02:40is in Pakruojis district, and
00:02:43her parents were, her mother was a teacher, and
00:02:46her father was the chairman of the Riflemen's Union,
00:02:50a farmer, such
00:02:53Lithuanian intellectuals, patriots.
00:02:56Her grandfather was also a rifleman, and it so happened that...
00:03:00somehow her grandfather died, and his
00:03:03wish was to be buried in a rifleman's uniform,
00:03:06and that wish was fulfilled, but perhaps
00:03:10it became such a pretext
00:03:13for the family, maybe I don't know all those
00:03:17vicissitudes, but they were deported to
00:03:20Siberia during that very first deportation
00:03:23on June 14, 1941, and
00:03:26that whole event greatly affected
00:03:30Marija Teresė Rožanskaitė's life and
00:03:33work, and she remembers how
00:03:36those armed people burst in, how they ordered
00:03:40them to prepare quickly, how they really
00:03:44scared them. Her father, meanwhile,
00:03:46was in another place near the barn or somewhere, and he could have
00:03:50actually escaped, but he stayed with
00:03:53his family, although they were quickly separated later. She and
00:03:57her mother were deported to the Reshota
00:04:00camp, and her father went somewhere separately, and
00:04:03later news reached them that he had died, but
00:04:07he was most likely shot.
00:04:38She clearly depicts things, or let's take that
00:04:41work, where exile is depicted, where
00:04:45a wagon is painted in the Mo Museum collection, it is
00:04:491941, so there
00:04:51is that whole terrible wagon with
00:04:55precise details, I have also seen a photograph
00:04:58of a wagon with the inscription
00:05:01Reshota, well 1941, I
00:05:04think that inscription was probably put on at the beginning of independence,
00:05:08but there was such an assemblage with
00:05:12a hole in the middle with some doll limbs
00:05:15and such a pregnant
00:05:18female figure, this is a direct reference to
00:05:21her biography, because the artist's mother was pregnant when
00:05:25they were exiled and there was some miscarriage
00:05:29and those doll parts, so
00:05:32you can say that it is only, how to say,
00:05:36one
00:05:38can look at every work of art only as an artist's
00:05:42some... fantasy or artistic generalization,
00:05:45but in Rožanskaitė's case, that truth
00:05:49seems to be very important, and therefore the number of interpretations
00:05:53could be infinite, but I think it is still
00:05:57important not to deviate from
00:05:59the artist's given path,
00:06:02because well, well, how, then
00:06:06you can fantasize without limits. In Siberia, children also learned
00:06:09all sorts of things there. There
00:06:12were literatures and so on
00:06:15to write and to draw, so she brought to
00:06:18the class for children colored
00:06:20pencils, or I don't remember if it was blue
00:06:23and red or red and green, I remember
00:06:27from my childhood there used to be red and blue pencils,
00:06:30one part of the pencil was blue, the other
00:06:33red, so you could use two colors with one pencil,
00:06:36so when they saw
00:06:39it, someone from the children
00:06:42had complained to their parents, who were
00:06:46officers or something, and said, how can an exile fascist, she
00:06:50cannot draw with colored pencils, and they simply
00:06:53took them away from her, they gave her a black
00:06:57pencil, so that's, well, how to say,
00:07:01such, such, such
00:07:02a life.
00:07:13"At seven years old she was deported
00:07:17separated from her father,
00:07:21taken away with her grandmother,
00:07:24well we know all those stages all,
00:07:27but after
00:07:30five, I don't know, in '53,
00:07:32it means it was after Stalin's death, there was
00:07:36a slight thaw there,
00:07:39but even after..." from
00:07:42death, it was still not allowed for exiles to return,
00:07:46so when such a situation
00:07:49arose, when the political instructor left that camp, that
00:07:53so-called, not a camp, but that,
00:07:57that commune,
00:07:59as they called it, a labor camp or whatever,
00:08:03that supervisor left for Moscow, and then
00:08:06conditions arose when a relative came
00:08:10to pick up the children from that exile, so
00:08:14they decided to escape,
00:08:17because the grandmother
00:08:20already understood, her mother was sick at that time,
00:08:23meaning very and
00:08:26the wagons with hay somehow
00:08:29they hid, they
00:08:33both dared to travel in winter
00:08:37to the city and from the city."
00:08:40"Of course they didn't have passports, the situation
00:08:43was such, simply secretly, somehow such
00:08:47an adventurous escape
00:08:50legend was such that
00:08:53it meant, well, either
00:08:56or, and that was usually
00:08:59the case, that people did not reconcile
00:09:03and at the first opportunity tried their fate, so
00:09:07their fate was very successful,
00:09:10they escaped, there were there and..." that escape was interesting,
00:09:14because there were cold and wolves around, the situation
00:09:17was such that they had to do everything very quickly, so
00:09:20in short, in short, the situation was that she
00:09:24through that fate, incidentally, an interesting case,
00:09:28that she managed to save
00:09:31her mother, because, well, those
00:09:34so-called relationships in Russia, which were there at
00:09:38that time, a little bit isolated,
00:09:41they helped, gave strychnine and
00:09:44her mother recovered, so for that
00:09:47reason, it means that such a fate, such
00:09:51coincidences coincided and she managed to escape,
00:09:54she spent four years there,
00:09:58and she came back, well, in that sense,
00:10:02how she came back,
00:10:03simply
00:10:06a woman came,
00:10:10who, to whom...
00:10:13"Grandmother, mother's mother, you see,
00:10:16for a wedding ring, she
00:10:20bought train tickets and
00:10:23so, well, mother with..." grandmother with her mother
00:10:26simply escaped from there, because it was
00:10:29the only way, because they had neither documents nor anything,
00:10:33and from that side, to return by train without
00:10:36documents, impossible,
00:10:40so it's impossible to simply buy a ticket, so that ticket
00:10:43was truly golden, I am very
00:10:47grateful to the people who
00:10:50allowed me to study, who supported me
00:10:54during those difficult times. When we escaped from Siberia with my mother,
00:10:57and here we were also persecuted
00:11:00for six years,
00:11:03I had to run from school to school, some gave us food, others
00:11:06clothed us, and I say I cannot
00:11:10help those people anymore, but I must help others
00:11:14as much as I can, because I believe in what people call
00:11:17a circle, which, you see,
00:11:21goes in a circle, one helps the other, and so on.
00:11:25"Because in life it's very difficult to repay
00:11:26the same,
00:11:29let everything go in such a circle, well, as much as I can,
00:11:32of course, here I am doing very little, sometimes
00:11:35I think that I even get such a thought that
00:11:38these arts need to be, that
00:11:41a lot in my
00:11:44spatial works, all the time
00:11:48no one needs them, no one buys them from
00:11:50me,
00:11:52I think that after all I am doing..." a very big crime, it seemed
00:11:56to me that I would rather spend that money on people,
00:12:00but nothing works out that
00:12:02way, you are, there are two
00:12:06people, and you just can't, if I don't work, here work or
00:12:09not work, then I can't do anything else, it turns out, she
00:12:13came back, so she was about 12 years
00:12:17old or 13, I don't remember how much according to that story,
00:12:20biography, but she still
00:12:24needed to... attend school and study, and in Kaunas and
00:12:27other cities, both grandmother and
00:12:30mother hid, and many prominent
00:12:34people helped
00:12:36her, and
00:12:40in this way she gradually
00:12:43finished that secondary
00:12:46school, and then she entered
00:12:49the Institute of Arts, but it was not easy for exiles,
00:12:53their lives might even have been stigmatized,
00:12:55so simply the late professor
00:12:59and rector of the Institute of Arts,
00:13:03Mackevičius, concealed the fact, simply did not report
00:13:06to the security services that she was an exile, and thanks to
00:13:10such people,
00:13:12such talented individuals as
00:13:15my mother were saved, and then she
00:13:18continued her studies with Gudaitis
00:13:22and graduated from the Institute. Marija Teresė Rožanskaitė
00:13:26entered the Institute of Arts, and
00:13:29there was a good class there,
00:13:33her classmate Igoris Piekuras, whom
00:13:36she later married, Vincas
00:13:39Kisarauskas, Romualdas Kunsa, these
00:13:42were truly talented, excellent people,
00:13:46and Marija Teresė Rožanskaitė did her diploma work
00:13:50with Professor Antanas Gudaitis, and indeed,
00:13:54from her remaining works, it is clear that she truly
00:13:57mastered that Gudaitian
00:14:00color palette and that combination
00:14:03of colors, but she probably
00:14:05understood after graduating that she wanted something different,
00:14:09both she and Piekuras
00:14:12searched, walked through some dumps, looked for
00:14:16all sorts of discarded things for their assemblages, both
00:14:19started using those found objects
00:14:22in their work, Rožanskaitė
00:14:26was one of the first in Lithuania to create assemblages,
00:14:29we know that Kisarauskas, Antanavičius, but
00:14:32Rožanskaitė constructed them in her own way,
00:14:35because an assemblage is usually
00:14:38such a formation when
00:14:41objects are somehow piled up on
00:14:45canvas or cardboard, on, so to speak,
00:14:48into that frame, but Rožanskaitė's
00:14:52idea was to open something, to go deeper,
00:14:56to open some wound, some
00:14:59container of memory, to see where that
00:15:02second or third bottom is, what is hidden, so her thinking
00:15:06was completely different, that moment
00:15:09of emptiness, cavity, some pain,
00:15:12so you could say hers were like
00:15:15negative assemblages,
00:15:18memory containers, I would say, where all sorts
00:15:22of references to exile fit. like
00:15:25some huge wagon also has its own
00:15:28history and many other
00:15:30things.
00:16:23In those figurative assemblages, for example, there is
00:16:26a whole cycle of Christ's Way of the Cross.
00:16:30Well, of course, it couldn't be called that
00:16:34at that time, so for example, if it was
00:16:37a portrait of a person and so on, sometimes there were even
00:16:41double titles or simply
00:16:44clearly visible crucifixes or
00:16:48similar things, they were not, how to say, clearly visible
00:16:51to us now, back then they were somehow masked, as if the cross was there,
00:16:54as if not, as if some inscriptions and then
00:16:58its composition with some numbers, you always have to
00:17:02do that, even the artist has recounted
00:17:04that one day she came to her studio, which
00:17:08at that time was on Pilies street, where there is an optics shop now in that courtyard,
00:17:12and she saw that the paintings
00:17:15were somehow moved, and she was just painting
00:17:18her own and painting and creating an assemblage in the square, where
00:17:22the body of a partisan was painted, and then she painted over it, and
00:17:26this work is now in the Mo Museum's
00:17:29collection, donated to the Pompidou Art Center, here
00:17:32when there was the Lithuanian season in France, the
00:17:35museum collected such a. campaign of important Lithuanian
00:17:38artists and donated it to Pompidou. The paintings of
00:17:42those times were not accepted
00:17:45by society, because well,
00:17:48they were political, after all, at that time they were not
00:17:52accepted for exhibitions, no, because not only was it
00:17:56not safe to show them to society, but
00:18:00generally it seemed very
00:18:03resistant, and these works were
00:18:06purely personal. "Because
00:18:09to tell some story in a book,
00:18:13you can hide those inscriptions, everything somewhere, but here these
00:18:16of hers, let's say, artistic inscriptions
00:18:19were placed in the
00:18:22studio and we only saw
00:18:25that process, no one else, so that was very, but
00:18:29she did it because she
00:18:32needed to, of course, that she had to somehow
00:18:35hide. write one way, call it
00:18:39something else, but on the other hand, the works themselves
00:18:42didn't lie, I am very impressed that, oh,
00:18:46it's still not like something
00:18:49is distorted, you still
00:18:52clearly feel it, there is even one assemblage where
00:18:55in Cyrillic, in Russian is written
00:18:58Prava Chilaveka Zaftra, human rights
00:19:01tomorrow, well, this is completely such obvious criticism,
00:19:05but somehow, well, during that period she probably didn't show
00:19:08it, she showed maybe more abstract
00:19:11assemblages, which
00:19:14could be presented as decorative
00:19:17compositions, and if it's decorative, then it will
00:19:20be understood, there can be nothing political and serious here,
00:19:23so she exhibited such very interesting
00:19:26abstract compositions in her solo
00:19:29exhibition.
00:19:31Mother could create, but
00:20:01still that creation was
00:20:05m'... m such, where when you know
00:20:08that you can never show it, you are incredibly
00:20:12free, free as much as you
00:20:15have, well, those technical
00:20:18possibilities, so that's it,
00:20:22that's when there were
00:20:25probably,
00:20:28when there were
00:20:31some
00:20:33informational
00:20:35news, some
00:20:37came through magazines, through through through
00:20:41the radio, through various informational sources
00:20:45of acquaintances, so more or less
00:20:49they knew what was happening in the world, what was happening in the art world,
00:20:52abroad, and that desire, well,
00:20:56also
00:20:58to be, to be a bit
00:21:00more innovative,
00:21:03so I remember that smell in the studio,
00:21:07oil paints and something else, something else,
00:21:11which I still cannot find, cannot recognize,
00:21:14so there, there, there was such a spirit and
00:21:18and some such... I don't know, there was
00:21:21such a mysticism, so that creative work was very, very
00:21:25interesting for that period,
00:21:28the 60s, 70s, that is, those
00:21:31searches, searches for form, searches for
00:21:35materials, searches for
00:21:38spaces, I was still painting under
00:21:41Gudaitis' influence, since I was already a student,
00:21:44I did my diploma, somewhere after that, that
00:21:47material just came. She
00:21:51wanted to, that flat surface no longer
00:21:54satisfied me, I wanted to take and do
00:21:58something like that,
00:22:01simply looking at those also from that rural
00:22:04architecture, somehow looking from
00:22:08the shadow of the roof, some space, doors
00:22:11open, shadows of the barn fall,
00:22:14the well opens, also, how to do this, somehow.
00:22:17Culture, nothing, I started with cardboard, I had nothing else, what
00:22:21other material, what can you do, well,
00:22:25I started cutting, so the very first
00:22:28work is assembled with yarn,
00:22:31it's funny
00:22:35to look at it now,
00:22:38well, it somehow appeared, I remember my former
00:22:42teacher also told me,
00:22:45Professor Katinas
00:22:49said: "Why are you doing that, he said. You can paint
00:22:52the same thing." "No, he said, I can't, my work has to change, I can't, it
00:22:56has to be illuminated one way, another way, something else can be
00:23:00done with it, I can't, painting doesn't satisfy me."
00:23:47everyone spoke in metaphors. In
00:23:50most cases, everyone spoke, and
00:23:53we know from cinema, from theater, and from
00:23:56literature, everything was largely
00:24:00in those metaphors,
00:24:02and those who could read
00:24:05would read, those
00:24:09who wanted to know would also find out, maybe some
00:24:12would keep silent, maybe some would
00:24:16sense it, and undoubtedly, it
00:24:20was dangerous, it was, it means, complicated, and
00:24:23there was no other way, there was no other
00:24:27way, I just think that when you want to speak
00:24:30and you are not allowed to speak with words,
00:24:33you speak in other forms, those assemblages that are now in Radvilų
00:24:37Palace, I don't care about those, you see,
00:24:40many of my friends are conceptualists, I
00:24:44think I myself am a conceptualist, you see,
00:24:47well, we think differently. A bit
00:24:50and that box, when I first saw it, I don't remember when, 40 years
00:24:54ago, his studio, that box stands there, I
00:24:58that object and that it has three dimensions, that
00:25:01you have to look at it that way, so I like it when I immediately give
00:25:05it as a gift, it's yours, go hang it up,
00:25:07I'll hang it up, so those, of course,
00:25:10I can't help but say that
00:25:14his art, where
00:25:17that painting of his, well, it's... super,
00:25:20they had
00:25:23well, a sensitivity, a sensitivity to color, and then his
00:25:27form, they perfectly master form, because here,
00:25:30as I said about improvisation, here improvisation,
00:25:33here it's not like do what you want, there's a very strict
00:25:37form, from A to the last,
00:25:40well, inside we improvise, of course, we
00:25:44know it, you need to know the way, with form, Marija
00:25:48Teresė works excellently. All, if you look at his
00:25:51painting and you'll see all those diagonals, everything is
00:25:55in place.
00:26:31But any idea has to take some form, and
00:26:35if it has a good form, it is effective, and if it
00:26:38does not have that form, then some other form
00:26:42must be found, yes, but it still
00:26:45has to be effective and it has to affect the viewer,
00:26:49I was simply moved by the fact that a person
00:26:53in our age, having created that
00:26:56civilization himself, fell into the grip
00:26:58of that civilization, so to speak.
00:27:01Now, man can no longer escape without that
00:27:04technology, otherwise, well, he is
00:27:08forced to live surrounded by
00:27:10it.
00:27:13On Park Street, there is a psychiatric hospital, and there is a ward there
00:27:17where, well, simply homeless
00:27:19people are brought, and people suffering from Alzheimer's disease,
00:27:23abandoned, their relatives disowned them, I
00:27:26had to interact with them, and there was one woman,
00:27:29who was very
00:27:33sweet, but she couldn't talk and
00:27:36never wanted to let me go,
00:27:40she became like my saint, I painted her, I painted
00:27:43her everywhere and everywhere, everywhere
00:27:44I could,
00:27:47to simply embrace those people, to take on some suffering,
00:27:50misfortunes, and
00:27:53X-rays appeared in her life
00:27:57at that stage when she herself
00:28:01was... being examined with X-rays,
00:28:04because cancer was suspected, and we, so to speak, in the family,
00:28:07I still remember, there was such a very
00:28:10difficult situation,
00:28:14we thought that my mother had lung cancer, but
00:28:17it turned out that those tests
00:28:19were, well, imperfect, maybe the
00:28:23technology was primitive at that time, because her relative
00:28:26was a radiologist and said, "Mom, don't pay attention,
00:28:29it could be a shadow theater and so on," so
00:28:33through her personal encounter with
00:28:36the X-ray machine, she realized that it
00:28:39was like penetrating
00:28:43a person, into their inner being, into that matter,
00:28:46but on the other hand, it is such a, well, how to
00:28:50say, such an encounter with the otherworldly,
00:28:53with the sign of fate, because
00:28:56X-rays, so to speak, are
00:28:59usually associated with
00:29:02scientific research, but also with medicine, and medicine is always
00:29:06such a,
00:29:09it means, like some
00:29:12bed, where you are born and die,
00:29:16so X-rays are also a kind of litmus
00:29:20paper, whether you will live, whether you will be sick or something else,
00:29:23so for my mother, that such, it means,
00:29:26well, it was important, like those draperies, so
00:29:30were X-rays. It's such a thing about
00:29:33being, about fate, about meaning
00:29:37and so on.