For the ninth time Siauliai City (Lithuania) hosted the International Modern Art Festival VIRUS. It is a major annual event of modern art in Northern Lithuania aiming to introduce new trends of modern art. The festival has been arranged and held by Siauliai City Art Gallery, VO Club of Artists, Culture Anthropology Center at Siauliai University.

Aira Nagineviciute, Processus

The International Modern Art Festival VIRUS is a project of modern visual art, theater, pavement-art, modern dance, fashion and electronic music. Here dominates youthful and pilot creative spirits. Beside the theater, modern dance, visual art, art theory, music, digital technology and entertainment industry educational events, such as conferences, seminars, discussions, various presentations, took place in the city as well.

Diverting tone of the Festival was pilot fashion shows. The artists and designers recognize clothing as a unique piece of art instead practical and commerce item. Art people from Siauliai, Lithuania, foreign countries took part at the Festival. They had a possibility to come together, discuss, exchange knowledge and experience.

Particians and theoreticians, artists and philosophers, musicians, DJs and video artists, dancers and poets met at the events.

Keystone of the IX Festival in 2004, was the days of Western Countries literature, literary conference and transfer of the events into Siauliai County. The IX Modern Art Festival reacted to various creation innovations and was open for vanguard classics and nascent art movements.

VIRUS9 was devided into different pieces in order to reflect it’s versatile, fresh and multiviral program. Here is a small overview of main events.

VIRUS Art presented fine arts exhibition “The Best of the Best of All of Us” by leading Lithuania artists.

VIRUS Cinema cached our eyes with surreal animation, transsexual Andy Warhol’s movie and some other films with a label “Not for kids!”.

VIRUS Text covered international literature event “Europe literature Days in Lithuania”. Lithuania well known writers – Sigitas Parulskis, Juozas Erlickas, Herkus Kuncius, Mykolas sluckis, etc – met western literature personas – Dumenic Andry, Cornelius Hell, Rose-Marie Pagnard, Alois Hosching. Fresh and sunshining discusions boiled constantly during these meetings in Siauliai City Philharmonic House.

VIRUS Media focused on multimedia and presented Kaunas city multimedia art and music festival Centras 4, multimedia project “readERRor” and involved some other audiovisual projects in Siauliai Art Gallery which all lead us to events.