Now on view at the Contemporary Art Centre in Vilnius, Title One: The tasks of the Community by Rossella Biscotti. It’s the first presentation in Lithunania of the Italian artist, who in 2009 won the second prize of Prix de Rome. It exhibits two works that relate not merely by subject matter – as both portray two now defunct power plants that once operated using very similar Soviet technology – but also share the methodology characteristic to Biscotti’s practice.

In her work, using rigorous research and fictitious elements, she does not reconstruct historical facts but rather investigates them and our perception of what has happened.

Title One: The tasks of the Community is also part of Biscotti's forthcoming project that she is developing for the Manifesta 9 exhibition in Genk (Belgium) this Summer. It borrows its title from the Euratom Treaty that established the European Atomic Energy Community (Euratom) in 1957, with the purpose of assisting the development of nuclear power.

Biscotti's new work inquires into the issues of nuclear energy, representative of related political and economic forces, and has as its point of departure the recent closure of the Ignalina Nuclear Power Plant in Lithuania. The artist first visited Ignalina NPP in 2008, while in residence at the Contemporary Art Centre in Vilnius, and has since been returning for research visits; in 2011 she attended two public auctions at the Ignalina NPP where she bought lead and copper cables previously used in the plant's premises.

The first installation of this work in Vilnius features two metal artifacts — recycled lead and industrial copper cables. The floor-based sculpture is composed of modular rectangular elements, made from recycled lead, that forms a ‘parquet’.

As with the ‘lead parquet’, which also implies the aspect of danger when lead (or recycled material) is transformed into a ‘domestic’ item, the idea of re-usage extends further through the industrial copper cables from the Ignalina NPP. The cables will be recycled into new electrical wires that will be used to power the Manifesta 9 building.

Together with the first edition of the Title One... project, this exhibition also presents an earlier work by Biscotti; The Sun Shines in Kiev (2006), consisting of a film, three slide-projections and a poster. The film The Sun Shines in Kiev recreates fragments from the biography of the Ukrainian filmmaker Vladimir Shevchenko, starting from the moment he decided to film the nuclear power plant catastrophe in Chernobyl in 1986.

Title One: The tasks of the Community
on view until 18 March 2012
More information at www.cac.lt