On June 27th Meno Parkas Gallery (Rotušės sq. 27, Kaunas) has opened the exhibition The bugaboo by Domas Mykolas Malinauskas.

We live in a time when part of our imagination has already been handed over to technology – it responds to our desires with images and sounds. Everyday life feels as if it’s been traded for quick choices and strange, increasingly inhuman beings. We press time as if there were still something left to squeeze from it.

I grew up in a culture where imagination played a vital role in shaping my world and that of those around me. Today, I can observe it from a distance or try to explore it anew. It feels like a hunt for symbols – like a pheasant released into a field and immediately pursued. The objects in the exhibition are an attempt to breathe life into these symbols, to turn them into enchanting creatures whose survival I increasingly doubt.

These works were born out of anxiety over an uncertain present – out of not knowing, of aging, of the backdrop of the sixth mass extinction. They seek to reveal how contemporary fears shape our thinking, and how imagination becomes a way to cope with those fears. This is a sculpture exhibition about the signs I encounter daily in my environment: from a run-over frog to trophies or a tongue used as a weapon. The objects are fragments of reality that acquire symbolic meaning. But that’s only the surface. The real “bogeyman” hides in the shadows. The objects here are like transformed Monopoly figurines. Through them, I try to find where anxiety meets free imagination – and where a fairytale is born.

Today, in a time of biodiversity crisis, many are trying to find ways to navigate fear and anxiety. Perhaps the ability to imagine different realities, worldviews, and life forms is what might save us. As Ursula K. Le Guin wrote, paraphrasing Tolkien: “Fantasy is escapist, and that is its glory. If a soldier is imprisoned, would we not consider it his duty to escape?”.