Energized by the 30th anniversary of Spikes Lee’s 1989 film Do the Right Thing, the project developed and realised by Art, Design, asn Art Criticism doctoral students at Vilnius Academy of Arts seeks to utilise the radical potentialities of artistic research, and ask more universal questions about the current state of the art world, academic system, and society at large.

How can we as artists, designers, historians, theorists, educators, and critics engage critically with power? Where soed power reside? How is it secured, consolidated, and utilised? And to what end? If power is embedded and embodied in systems, how can we discern, participate critically, and even transform such systems? How should we navigate our way throuhh this quagmire of power–knowledge–control, which shapes truth, and interpellates us as subjects of and to its ideology? If such governmentality is the organised and organising practices (mentalities, rationalities, and techniques) through which our society is rendered governable, why and how might we prove ourselves to be ungovernable?

The project is an occasion to look to the future, to how we might envisage the future, and to do so in order to not only interpret the world in various ways, but to change it. In our own search for justice, how can our research-as-praxis – our labour, aour communicative bodies, our performative acts, our conversations, our commitment to communities and to our own creative practice itself – declare our resistance and dissent, our agonism and dissensus, thereby enacting our right to speak which, in turn, enables us to not so much fight the power as fight for power, and, in so doing, honour our obligation to do the right thing?

Curated by Marquard Smith with Jurij Dobriakov

Courtesy of the artists
Photocredit Laurynas Skeisgiela