March 9, 2022 – May 6, 2022
For their third exhibition at the gallery, Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė present a series of paintings and sculptures. The exhibition will be accompanied by an online screening of the video work Mouthless Part I, 2020.
Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė are naturally collaborative. Their work initially manifested as Young-Girl Reading Group, a serial performative project and a fragmented collection of texts engaged with feminisms and its weavings into queer and minority positions and the more-than-human. The texts were read out loud and the performances were distributed online or recorded using mobile phones.
Their early interest in amalgamating the organic with technology continues in this series of new works on canvas, in which they collaborate with artificial intelligence, breeding images using Generative Adversarial Networks. These images are used to make paintings that reference depictions of nature in the Western painting tradition, which are applied to the canvas through the layering of gesso. The paintings respond to the sentimentality of artificially bucolic pictures and are a reflection on the historical representation and framing of the landscape as well as the algorithmic systems that increasingly structure our understanding of the world surrounding us. The chromed steel sculptures also presented, shaped as farm implements, are broken and incomplete. These shiny metal objects have been rendered impractical, yet act as ghostly reminders of labour next to the saturated verdant paintings. Ideas of nature and technology are further explored by the use of LED fans to reveal animations produced by the same Generative Adversarial Networks technology. Shapes metamorphose into strange creatures; techno monsters produced by algorithms recall creatures from earlier mythologies.
Through their alchemical blending of materials and references Dotota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė present works that both seduce and unsettle. They gesture toward the past, to folklore and myth, and to traditional depictions of the pastoral and of monsters, but also toward an unknown future that includes the presence of nonhuman intelligence. In doing so they produce a sense of radical destabilization. As one performer calls forth in one of their recent video works
The Earth is wretched
Our ground
Idzie bobo, złapie kogo?
All levelled
All vanished, all settled,
Contaminated, eroded,
Drained, exploded.
Dorota Gawęda (PL) and Eglė Kulbokaitė (LT) are based in Basel, Switzerland. They have a forthcoming solo opening at Kunstraum Neideroesterreich, Vienna in April 2022. Recent solo exhibitions include Instituto Svizzero, Palermo; Germany; Swiss National Library, Bern; Swimming Pool Project, Sofia; Kunsthalle Fribourg and Cell Project Space, London. They were the recipients of the Swiss Performance Prize 2021 and the Collide Residency Award, CERN, Geneva and Hangar Barcelona 2022/23.