“Slow Schools” is already the second exhibition from the cycle of yearly exhibitions entitled “JCDecaux Award”, initiated by the Contemporary Art Centre together with “JCDecaux” in 2016. The cycle aims to present Lithuanian young artists and encourage production of new artworks, produced by the Contemporary Art Centre. On the 14th of December the international board will announce one artist from this exhibition, who will receive an award of 3000 euros.

Between the 19th of June and the 7th of August young artists were invited to send their proposals for new artworks answering to the guidelines prepared by exhibition curators. More than 40 applications were presented for the open call. On the 3rd of September five artists or artists’ collectives were selected to participate in this exhibition.

The artists were invited to create new pieces reflecting social phenomena, researching, how artworks can comment about old structures of society or become new ones themselves, tell stories about identity, the everyday, the body or become a pretext for creating new stories of the kind.

“Slow Schools” is the exhibition of five artworks about a time, when originality is a resource of a constant remaking and a value is determined by the amount of copies and remakes as well as the speed of their dissemination. These artworks comment recent popular culture and art history, actualise problems identity of an author and individual artwork, but also invite the return of the intimacy of a gaze, where conclusions, manifests and statements lose their importance, giving space to dialogue and hesitations, details and gestures that are not noticed at once, as well as accidentally recorded eventualities. “Slow Schools” present continuous individual learning processes, techniques and habits, that cannot be summarised into one topic or field, but raise the question: what was the old school like and what will become of the new one?

The result is a fluid exhibition in which artworks do not always have a fixed position, constantly changing their place and changing themselves. This way it reveals tensions between different artistic means of expression of the participants, their experiences and attitudes to problems, which may look similar only at the first glance.

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