Irina Gheorghe | Scores for the End of the Present

Opening June 18 at 6 pm

In the Scores for the End of the Present, an event that is meant to be experienced in the here and now is disrupted by something absent. It might be that aspects of the situation are inaccessible because they are invisible, kept hidden or have suddenly disappeared. It might also be that what is happening is entirely accesible, but the space and time in which it is taking place is not revealed, thus producing the effect of not knowing where one finds oneself. Either way, a disjunction is intended between one’s perception of an actual ocurrence and something that is not part of it. A space looks familiar, but it gradually becomes unfamiliar. Things appear to be happening in the current moment, but on close inspection they are placed in the temporality of the distant future, remote past, or a not yet materialised hypothetical time. You are, up to a certain point, who you thought you were, until you realise that, in fact, you are addressed as someone or something else. Objects are perfectly recognisable, until they are not. A wooden stick is unambiguous in its (lack of) significance, but in a postapocalyptic scenario it might become the only weapon at hand.

The Scores for the End of the Present are a series of works that aim to engage such divergent temporalities, spaces and presences. Their role is to incorporate incongruous timelines and notate what in his book The Order of Time theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli calls “the end of the present”: a terrestrial “now” that means nothing in wider cosmic terms. Initially conceived to support performance work, the artistic medium most attached to notions of presence and the present, these Scores are in fact visual and conceptual notations that can provide the starting point for other types of artistic practices, expanding from the usual, small page format into other media and sizes: a three dimensional installation, still or moving image, sound.

The works in the exhibition can be seen as part of this heterogenous understanding of a score. Consisting of a series of new 16mm short films and a site-specific floor intervention, realised in direct response to the architecture of the Titanikas space, the installation presents an enlarged notation in the form of an environment. The visitors are guided through the visual language of the tape on the floor, which turns their navigation of the space into a walking performance. The small text instructions scattered through the room suggest alternative scenarios, reframing the visit to the gallery as a moment in an unspecified science fiction narrative. The film series brings a new element in the project, complementing the focus on drawing, installation and photography in its previous iterations, and explores how the moving image can become a score. Rather than a record of something that happened in a particular moment, the actions in the films can be seen as protocols for further action. It is not specified, however, to what context they are part of: whether it is real or fictional, contemporary or historical, terrestrial or extraterrestrial, belonging to the distant past or the distant future. The gradual expansion of a large green paper structure in one of the films, followed by its subsequent downfall, is not only a documentation of a performance fragment, it is also a diagram that might provide the timeline of other phenomena, or a guidance for future performative actions of another nature. In other films, some of the graphic components of the floor installation, or the materials that make it up, present themselves as three dimensional and appear to respond to invisible scores: take the stage, move in a specific direction, create a choreography, destroy the choreography, leave. Having guided human performers through real spaces, the objects of the mind become physical and start to respond to guidance themselves.

The exhibition is part of Irina Gheorghe’s post-doctoral project “Scores for the End of the Present: Notation Systems in Performative and Visual Arts and Their Relationship to Different Temporalities”, carried out at the Vilnius Academy of Arts between 2024 and 2026 and funded by the Research Council of Lithuania (LMTLT), agreement No. S-PD-24-128.

Supervisor: Dr. Lina Michelkevičė