The GlassJazz project/symposium was held in Panevėžys August 23. It is the only place in Lithuania, and perhaps all of Europe, where artistic glass meets jazz music. “Glass is unique, it can be improvised just like jazz. Improvising in the medium you can get indescribable forms. Jazz is like a meditation which stimulates artists to liberate themselves, to dive into creative thought, to experiment and look for unexpected forms,” GlassJazz initiator and glass artist Remigijus Kriukas said. He’s the director of the Glasremis artistic glass studio.
Participants from 16 countries attended the event at the Kupiškis Ethnographic Museum. The exhibit included 30 glass works of art.
The event was kicked off by Israeli artist Louis Sakalovsky’s exhibit of glass works and paintings called Return, named in honor of his parents and all his relatives who lived in Panevėžys and Kupiškis before the Holocaust. His mother and her relatives made aliyah to Israel before the war and all his father’s relatives were murdered in Panevėžys and Kupiškis.
Panevėžys Jewish Community chairman Gennady Kofman thanked Kupiškis mayor Dainius Bardauskas for striving to draw Lithuania’s smaller towns in these kinds of cultural events which include famous Jewish artists. The chairman also thanked the local Kupiškis government for tending and maintaining Jewish cemeteries and mass grave sites so well. There are four such locations in the Kupiškis region and no Jews living there at all.
Israeli ambassador to Lithuania Amir Maimon spoke at the opening of the exhibit and praised organizer Remigijus Kriukas’s idea to invite glass artists from all over Europe to practice their art in Panevėžys for 10 days.
The culmination of the opening ceremony was Remigijus Kriukas’s glass artworks in the dark. This exhibit travelled there from Jerusalem.
In the evening Panevėžys mayor Rytis Račkauskas invited members of the Panevėžys Jewish Community to attend a presentation of work by the master glass artists at the symposium.
Israeli artists also demonstrated their mastery of the medium, and ambassador Maimon tried his had at glass blowing.
