To explore more widely the spectrum of arts, this year’s LFF proposes various side programs during all the two days of the festival. On Friday 24th at 16:30h, the castle chapel will host the opening of the multi-channel video installation “LUCIDITY” for both days. Through this installation, the Lithuanian artist Arnis Aleinikovas will lead us on a journey at the borderline of dream and reality, darkness and light. In the evening, from 22:30h, in Romanska dvorana, the local legend Niko Novak will perform, giving us his usual intimate and poetic atmosphere, that perfectly matches the spirit of the beautiful Rajhenburg Castle. For the festival closing we are pleased to host the Dj set of the Lithuanian artist SINUO. His conceptual electronic music navigates between the genres of ambient and techno music, complemented by the thoughts of various philosophers and psychologists, sounds from NASA universe, and personal sounds. The event will be hosted by Rooms Kozmus, in Brestanica, from 23:00h until late.
FRIDAY, 24 NOVEMBER
All the day, Graffiti custom t-shirt station
16:30 Multi-channel video installation LUCIDITY opening (Arnis Aleinikovas, 2023)
22:30 Concert: Niko Novak @Romanska dvorana
SATURDAY, 25 NOVEMBER
All the day, Graffiti custom t-shirt station
23:00 DJ SET by electronic music creator SINUO (LT) @Rooms Kozmus
Multi-channel video installation LUCIDITY opening (Arnis Aleinikovas), 2023,
Magic Carpets, Kaunas Biennial, Wroclawski Instytut Kultur
Arnis Aleinikovas is a Lithuanian interdisciplinary artist, mainly working in performing arts, contemporary theater, new media and electronic music. He graduated from “Theatre and Film Acting” (B.A.) in Vytautas Magnus University in Lithuania and “Directing of Devised and Object Theatre” (M.A.) in Academy of Performing Arts in Prague. His works so far have been seen at art festivals in Germany, the USA, Portugal, Poland, Finland, Georgia and Lithuania. In 2020 he was awarded with the “Art creator status” in Lithuania.
LUCIDITY (as an interdisciplinary performance) was created in 2022 in Wroclaw together with Kaunas Biennial and Wrocław Institute of Culture are a part of the platform Magic Carpets co-financed by the European Union. Originally, it was presented as an interdisciplinary, movement-based performance at the borderline of dream and reality, darkness and light. It allowed visitors to experience a rave party as a spectator and also transformed the spaces of a community centre and art gallery into spaces for nightlife and rave subculture. Now, LUCIDITY is presented as a multi-channel video installation, where video projections represent non-ideal 3D scans of the participants’ bodies, authentic texts and documentation of the workshops on the topics of darkness, identity, ecstatic and somatic movement, playfully addressing the relationship between humans and new technologies.
The dry scraping of a bruised cello announces the track, and pulls you straight in from whatever happy place you were, to a sudden and all-pervading landscape of paranoia, darkness and dreadful premonitions. A moment later Niko Novak’s voice (think Leonard Cohen at his darkest) begins to tell us in a calm, measured, doomsday baritone of all that is coming down on us. Of waking up from a mouth-dry sleep where he is running through dreams, to feel that he is as lost as ever. To observe wryly that killing the drinking might kill this laden atmosphere. There is – of course – a sense however that it is all too late.
Niko Novak is a Slovenian “lone bluesman with a signature baritone” (ment.si). He is a voice foretelling of doom. In his brighter moments he sings songs with titles like “Clean Sheets, Full Fridge”. But mostly song titles are things like “Pavlov’s Dog”, “Gloomy Sundy Revisited” and “Vultures”. Niko has spent time in Berlin and was a leading light in the Slovenian musical landscape with his punk band Nicky B. Hardy from ’94 until 2001. Now he remains behind to help us not forget that the darkness is only a step behind us.
If you’re fed up (especially in this leading-up-to-xmas-time of writing) with the prettily pointless, the garishly glittering, the baubles and modern-day soulless, sweat-factory bric-a-brac, Niko Novak has come to release you from any semblance of cloying, sickly-sweet hopefulness. No, Niko Novak has come to you from the darkness, the one that resides in yourself. (Text: Noel Maurice, photo: Simao Bessa)
During all the festival, there will be the possibility to get a unique t-shirt design, made inspired by Luksuz Film Festival 21′ edition provided by the Ukrainian independent artist Vanya (@vanyavicious). His experience as a war refugee fully changed his art vision, bringing him, at the young age of 18, to experiment through various forms of art, from photography to tattooing. “From the experience of lettering on the walls with child-looks-like style in heart through ages” as Vanya describes his art, he will create personalized LFF’21 t-shirts, that you can get at the Castle´s infopoint during all the festival days.
