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29 October - 15 January, 2011. Cubitt Gallery will be showing “Energy Lithuania” (2000) by Deimantas Narkevičius within a group exhibition, “The City is a Constantly Blazing Bonfire”. The exhibition focuses on artistic practices that visualise energy flows, infrastructure and consumption as active in producing the spaces and conditions in which people live. The exhibition explores different relationships people have with energy: from a physical and social experience of electricity flowing through the urban environment, to towns built to support power generation, to the atmosphere and air as a threatened and actively inhabited space because of pollution and global warming.

The exhibition pays particular attention to the invisible properties of energy and how the spaces we inhabit are shaped out of the energy that flows through them as much as the concrete structures that appear to give them form. Some of the works address social divisions and inequalities, environmental injustice, private ownership of and access to energy and propose alternative models of public space and sharing energy.

Deimantas Narkevičius, Energy Lithuania, 2000 (video still) super 8 mm film transferred onto DVD, 17 min. Courtesy of the Artist and GB Agency

Through the particular concerns of a number of artists the exhibition proposes the idea of inhabiting an energy space. Part One explores the invisible networks and flows of energy running through the urban environment. Part two finds new ways of thinking about the atmosphere and air as a threatened and hence more consciously inhabited space. “Energy Lithuania”, a film by Deimantas Narkevičius will run throughout the exhibition and connect the two parts.

Energy Lithuania is a portrait of a town - Elektrėnai - built to support an electric power station in 1960, providing the first central electrification of Lithuania. The power station was a modernising life force, drawing people to live and work there from throughout the Soviet Union. The film evokes an interdependent relationship between the human energy of the town’s inhabitants – at work and during leisure time – and the electrical energy that the plant generates.

29 October 2011 – 15 January 2012, CUBITT Gallery and Studios, 8 Angel Mews, London N1 9HH. T +44 (0)20 7278 8226, http://cubittartists.org.uk. Open Wednesday-Sunday 12-6pm