Jonas Mekas: Images Are Real

The exhibition takes a retrospective look at Jonas Mekas‘s 70-year activity within and beyond the history of avant-garde cinema.

Featuring a wide selection of works from the 1950s to the late 2010s, the exhibition presents the practice of the Lithuanian-born artist as a Dantesque journey that, from the infernos of history, leads to happiness through a daily exercise in filmmaking.

The exhibition title is a quote from the film “Out-takes From the Life of a Happy Man“, in which the artist’s voice off screen reflects to himself that: «Memory is gone, but my images are here, and images are real!»

Jonas Mekas’s work is an ode to life as it unfolds. In his films the camera becomes a diary in which he daily records the fragments of intensity of his own existence: his encounters with his friends Andy Warhol, Allen Ginsberg and Yoko Ono, or spring in Central Park, the flowers and the trees. Each instant is captured in a non-narrative and non-linear montage that parallels the language of poetry. Leafing through the pages of this 70-year diary, the exhibition aims to map out crucial stages in the life of its author, in a heady mosaic of images that come back to merge and to form new meanings.