This is one of the first – if not the very first – publicly presented visual art installations by Valdas Ozarinskas that makes no allusions to an architectural function. It is an autonomous work of art: not a model intended to present an architectural project, not a drawing, and not a sketch illustrating a concept. Nevertheless, its form closely anticipates the way Ozarinskas would articulate his ideas about architecture throughout the rest of his career – beginning with formal decisions and extending to abundant meaning-rich references. One of the most intriguing aspects of his work, both then and later, is the interplay between kinetic and video art.

– Virginija Januškevičiūtė

Curiously enough, Ozarinskas used the expression characteristic of cinema and video in his work even before he picked up a video camera. […] [F]or his first personal exhibition, which he held in 1989 in the exhibition hall of the Architects’ Union, Ozarinskas presented the kinetic installation Hats. He used a profusion of railwaymen’s hats suspended in the air and tied together by long threads. As soon as one of them moved, the others would move too, like a pendulum. The graphic works exhibited next to the hats acted like hints to the chaotic, broken trajectories of the movement of the hats. Later, physical kinetic objects in his work were replaced by videos, moving images of another type. Therefore, in 1997, when presenting their first two works of video art at different exhibitions, Čeponytė and Ozarinskas already had some multi-faceted experience with the conceptual mechanism of the moving image.

– Virginija Januškevičiūtė, ‘“Fixations” by Aida Čeponytė and Valdas Ozarinskas: Restored Works of Early Lithuanian Video Art at the Meno Avilys Cinematheque’, Nemunas, 2024, no. 10, p. 13. The text and its translation were commissioned by Meno Avilys as part of Sinemateka.lt, a project dedicated to the digitisation and restoration of Lithuanian audiovisual heritage.