ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the phenomenon of the historical turn in the work of the Lithuanian artist Deimantas Narkevičius. Taking public monuments in the city of Vilnius as subject, Narkevičius’ short films Once in the XX Century (2004) and 20 July 2015 (2016) recycle, montage, collage, and remix historical forms. The results are discontinuous narratives that urgently demand our renewed attention to the past and challenge our understanding of communism’s legacies in Eastern Europe. Narkevičius uses the rhetorical, technical, and compositional strategies of interruption to revive, reinscribe, and rewrite history in artworks that expose the fraught discourses of post-communist memory today.
