Opening of Ana de Almeida and Leo Trotsenko’s exhibition “Lifting the Weight of Importance”

On Friday 16 January at 17.30, the exhibition “Lifting the Weight of Importance” by the Portuguese artist Ana de Almeida and the Ukrainian artist Leo Trotsenko opens at the Exhibition Hall of the Klaipėda Culture Communication Centre (KCCC). Joining past, present and future, the artists invite the visitor to confront experiences that are often hard to bear — historical injustices, unrealised possibilities and enduring material traces. The exhibition runs until 29 March this year.

The artists Ana de Almeida and Leo Trotsenko live and work in Vienna, Austria. They met in 2023, when both took part in the QMA Artist Collective* programme. As soon as they began talking, they were drawn into discussions about each other’s individual artistic practices and about the narratives that connect them.

Both Ana and Leo delve into the past and the present, combining archival documents with contemporary urban and landscape archaeology in their works. Their work spans various periods and shifts in sociopolitical reality, employing an anthropological gaze on human and non-human elements.

The exhibition “Lifting the Weight of Importance” examines how importance arises out of personal perception and care, asking what remains inscribed in collective memory. What is genuinely important, and what do we ourselves merely make important by passing events and phenomena through our own subjective and solipsistic filter of body and mind?

Using the language of art, Ana de Almeida and Leo Trotsenko rethink in this exhibition not only material but also personal, social and historical reality, and in doing so reflect on thought itself and on their own place in time and space.

Ana de Almeida is a doctoral student at the Austrian Academy of Sciences and a junior researcher at the Institute for Art Theory and Cultural Studies of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, while Leo Trotsenko is currently one of the curators of the Viennese cultural initiative “Kriegsbilder”.

We invite you to the exhibition opening, which will take place on 16 January at 17.30 at the KCCC Exhibition Hall.

The curator of the exhibition is Justina Špeirokaitė; the exhibition architect is Bilal Alame.

Opening hours of the KCCC Exhibition Hall (Didžioji Vandens g. 2, Klaipėda): Wednesday–Sunday 11.00–19.00 (closed on public holidays). Photographs and video will be taken during the exhibition opening. Please note that participants may appear in photographs and video recordings of the event published in various media.