The collapse of communism in Eastern Europe left a lot of empty plinths as the regime’s figureheads were toppled from power. Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania and a few kilometres south of the official centre of Europe, was at the heart of one of the most violent transitions from Communist rule in 1991. So it was appropriate that its young generation should want to replace the busts of Lenin and Marx with someone whose views were more commensurate with their own. Somewhat bewilderingly, a bust of the singer Frank Zappa was commissioned from a sculptor previously known for his busts of Lenin and installed on top of a steel column in the centre of the city. Lithuanian empathy with western musical margins had precedent in The Grateful Dead sponsoring the country’s basketball team in the Barcelona Olympics in 1992. On beating the Russians to win a bronze medal, the team wore t-shirts given to them by the band.

They may be at the geographical centre of Europe but for young artists working out of what is the biggest of the three Baltic States, this poses the problem of where to head in order to capitalise on current interest from the international art world. This missionary zeal from the west of centre extends to neighbouring Estonia and Latvia’s artistic communities, countries that are frequently lumped together under the Baltic banner, though separated by distinct ethnographic, political and language differences.

The title ‘Remains of Innocence’ sets an emotive context in which this selection of six video works is seen, and hints at a nostalgic view. The selected artists share an interest in how the current life of the city may be documented to pose questions about what the future might hold, through the eyes, thoughts and actions of children and teenagers, eschewing straightforward narratives and simple metaphor. Their audio, monitor and slide presentations combine to describe a very particular place defined through the presentation of physical, intellectual, gendered and imaginative architectures in a state of transformation and transgression, mediated through play as it is developed through various rites of passage. The films take the playground sites of childhood to the imaginary spaces of adolescent hanging about to the acted space of adult film sets. In turn this sets up a relationship between what is true documentary, what is fiction, what is acted and what is not.

This is all set to the backdrop of the legacy of Soviet planning strategies at odds with the new romanticism of Lithuania. The architecture of the playground is an environment at its most virtual when empty, brought to life by those who have the least stake in a culture, but the most to lose or gain from decisions taken by it. Playgrounds symbolise innocence, but few are nostalgic for that. Alma Skersyte’s installation Spectrum includes seven images simultaneously taken from different points within arid public play areas. Each image focuses on a different climbing frame, swing or slide. Painted a different colour of the spectrum, and set against the ubiquitous grey of the surrounding utilitarian apartment blocks, they articulate a relationship between the body for which they were designed to exercise, and the utopian modernist structures of Le Corbusier or the furniture of Eileen Gray, which they formally recall. Within the line of still slide projections, one image – which changes position with each day of the week - shows action off to one side, someone walking their dog, a few leaves blowing across the ground, the area strangely bereft of children, perhaps as it is early in the morning or during the day when they are at school. The sites are charged by the absence of their form being used for the function that they were designed for. A row of green uprights lies between the camera and a running track as a squad of young soldiers jog past, reappearing in the distance as they progress around the circuit. From being used by the children they were designed for, the sequence of films ends in them used for military training instead.

The link between childhood play and adulthood coercion is navigated in an elegiac way in Gintaras Makarevicius film Vaskichi. As children pass into early adolescence, it is inevitable they will make up games based on characters from computer games and films. Makarevicius filmed a group of boys, varying in age from around nine to fourteen, role playing the soldiery that is the staple of Hollywood gangster movies, police dramas, and played for real by NATO occupying forces in Eastern European states. They use homemade wooden toy guns modelled on distinctive designs, taking it in turns to switch between the pump action shotgun, the Kalashnikov, the Magnum, acting essentially the same scenario over and over again. Arguments ensue about the likelihood of one gun meeting the target and how the spread of shot might dissipate over a certain distance. The children are acting and playing up to the camera in one way, but during their arguments forget they are acting as their emotions and competitiveness takes over. The only deviation in the game seems to be in the simple but effective game that is played to decide who gets what weapon. Paper, scissors, match and well – a game in Lithuania known as Vaskichi – gives its name to the title of the film, whose outcome is unpredictable while the shooting game is repeatedly re-staged, the outcome always the same, bodies lying everywhere. Though there is no formal architecture demarcating the borders of a playground, here the boundaries are imagined; old sheds turned into a shooting gallery, while the parameters around what is play acting and what is real is blurred.

There is an element of surveillance in all the works in ‘Remains of Innocence’, the inevitability of the handheld camcorder perhaps. In The Meeting Point, Arunas Gudaitis observes, through monochromatic smog, a group of nine young men standing in a circle, viewed from overhead, from where we might imagine they live in blocks of flats. There is an air of benign indifference seen through the dull phosphorescent yellow street light, which inks out the natural spectrum of colour. They are hanging out, waiting for something to happen. Too old to play unselfconsciously perhaps, they look an impotent group, an inevitable tension built up by doing nothing. Gudaitis notes that Lithuania is subject to the same unremitting marketing strategies that the west has begun to grow inured to, and so from his view the defining characteristics of the men he watches is the insatiable desire to be consumed by such trends, the trainers to the powerful car. They are defined by what they have materially in comparison to their contemporaries, rather than by any overbearing sense of their national or cultural identity.

In contrast Kristina Inciuraite’s film Spinsters is confined to a children’s foster home where teenage girls with behavioural problems are forced to live and whose engagement with the outside world is heavily mediated. Here, questions about the containment of a community of young people whose anxieties were unable to be met are withheld. Inciuraite has made a number of films in which girls are representatives for the youngest generation of her country, ciphers for the anxieties of a nation as she perceives them, observed in this instance through apparently low standards of social care. Living opposite the foster home, she took the opportunity of recording the activities surrounding an end of school year performance, accompanied by strains of Lithuanian pop music. The film opens with the statement by one of the girls that they “do everything by ourselves, we choosing things we like, if we don’t we won’t be able to perform it”. The film in fact shows very little action, with the camera planted firmly behind the back of one of the performance’s audience, who is covered in a scarf. The anonymity of the participants is protected throughout and what it is exactly that they are performing is unclear, however the implication is of a complex network of lives and voices veiled behind institutional and gender-determined borders.

Laura Stasiulyte has investigated teenage anxieties about sexuality and the rites of passage that are universal concerns. From the life of young ladies takes the problem pages of a teen magazine, euphemistically titled Panele, or Young Lady, from which Stasiulyte collated a number of key compelling questions, each ascribed a name and the age of the questioner. She then asked teenage girls of a similar age to those that posed the initial questions to hand-write the questions, which she subsequently photographed and projects on 35mm slides in the gallery space. The questions are inevitably an entertaining, if excruciating, read, and implicate the symbolism of play as just that, a veil for more serious issues to be discussed: “What is an orgasm? Is it a feeling”, asks Diana, 14. “Is it normal to make love three times a week. I can’t help it I want it so much”, says Dena, 13. Through them, erudite observations and judgements about the culture in which they arise are made, along with telling connections between the ignorance of a teenage community left to their own devices to work out the inevitable conflicting emotions of desire shared by teenagers everywhere.

The history of film making in Lithuania is focussed on documentary rather than art films, not least as artists working through the Soviet era to 1991 did not have proper access to the video art from the US and Western Europe. Instead artists, such as Kristina Inciuraite, the curator of ‘Remains of Innocence’, looked to contemporary philosophers Foucault, Baudrillard and Virilio to put into context their practices in light of the changing political, social and economic landscape in which artists are working. G-Lab is a collaboration between two artists, Arturas Bumsteinas and Laura Garbstiene. Their film Invasion is the closest to an art film, though in fact is raw documentation of the making of a war movie. It documents a few moments between takes on a film set, showing an audience watching the actors play themselves, supposedly out of character, but still in costume. Evocative piano music by Antanas Jasenka drives the imagery along, the beat dragging and the pace of image a step behind real time. The action is slowed down and heightens the fictional account of war that is the subject of the film that is being documented. There is an ambiguity about whether a group of men are actors playing off duty soldiers, or whether they are off duty actors dressed in character. An older soldier removes his hat, becomes the character beneath the actor. Film sets are quite unlike any other context, a self-contained world, balanced around ego, team- work, deadline and finance. The intensity of co-operation necessary to pull off the production, no matter on what scale, is far over and above what most people would consider doing out of that context, a playground for adults. It is a tender unfolding of what is, in the end, just a few moments from the life on set, a sequence of activity immediately after the action shot itself. It is the mopping up, an aftermath that resounds with abundant metaphors about the state of Lithuania, post independence. As strong spot- lights burn out the digital capacities of the video recorder, the whole scenario seems like a subjective dream sequence, a coda to the objective works in ‘Remains of Innocence’ as a whole.

It would be disingenuous to try and fix the significant influences on artists working in Lithuania today to a clear set of ideas, but they agree to share resistance to a nostalgic view of a recent past. Lithuania’s independence came relatively recently; these influences on young artists have been extraordinary. Previous generations, and artists a few decades or so older than the artists in this exhibition, created what Lithuanian critic Elona Lubyte called ‘quiet modernism', “a metaphor which refers not to artists or works, but to the nature of the process. After all, the cultures of small nations develop under the influences of their larger neighbours. Efforts to survive in a contradictory environment lead them to reject the categorical stances typical of great empires. During the Soviet period this led to the development of a language of poetic metaphors, the unsaid, and suggestions” (this quoatation is from the exhibition catalogue Quiet Modernism in Lithuania 1962 – 1982 by Elona Lubyte). Or else they produced Soviet propaganda, socialist realism, their history confined to memory, apparently hardly present in art historical terms at all. It seems that if there is one uniting factor among contemporary younger artists under the age of thirty-five, it is their joint sense of being distinct from their peers, and their willingness to progress is perhaps best expressed through their adoption of the most modern tools to make their work. Through using digital and video to create a style of their own, they hold a contemporary mirror to the socio-political contexts in which they find themselves working today. For young artists to turn the camera on the society that surrounds them is to turn the camera on themselves. These artists are resolutely independent of collective practices and resist the tendency to be gathered under one umbrella. The memories of Soviet occupation and communist ideologies are still recent enough history for the current generation of artists to respond to; just as Zappa has replaced Lenin as the capital’s new figurehead, the political is certain to be shared with a concomitant spirit of play that resists any homogenous straightforward view.

Bruce Haines is Exhibitions Organiser at Camden Arts in London.

© Bruce Haines