Karaoke (2001) is part of the Breaking the Course of the European Boomerang, and exhibition curated by Krisztián Gábor Török Una Mathiesen Gjerde at the Pragovka Gallery in Prague in 2025.
At the intersection of performance and video art, Nomeda & Gediminas Urbonas’ work Karaoke (2001) invites its audience to reflect upon the rapid changements that took place in former communist republics as the cold war came to its end, and capitalism came out as the only way forward. On the final workday before the Lithuanian Savings Bank – the country’s last state owned-bank – was privatized in 2001, the artist duo staged a series of actions that rubbed up against the happy-go-lucky narrative of a post- communist Lithuania. Bank employees, alongside actors, performed ABBA’s Money, Money, Money inside the bank’s lobby: the camera pans across a chorus of women in demure skirts and pantyhose while the give alternately dispassionate and spirited deliveries of the song – «I work all night, I work all day, to pay the bills I have to pay / Ain’t it sad / And still there never seem to be single penny left for me / That’s too bad» – edited together into five seemingly continuous takes. The ease with which Lithuania embraced both the allure and mundanity of the private market is repeated here ad nauseam, and a building embodying the ideals of Marxist economics becomes a soundstage for the cheesiest subordination to the free market. Karaoke was filmed on a Saturday, the following Monday the former premises of LTB as a new branch of the Swedish bank Swebank.
Photo: Marcel Rozhoň
