Dorota Gaweda & Egle Kulbokaite
Artist Duo
Performance, sculpture, painting, fragrance and video
Basel
Dorota Gawęda (PL/CH) and Eglė Kulbokaitė (LT/CH) both graduated from the Royal College of Art in London (2012). They work across performance, video, painting, sculpture and installation - where language breaks down and one genre morphs into many.
They have exhibited internationally including Centre Pompidou, Paris (2023); Kunsthalle Mainz (2023); EPFL Pavilions, Lausanne (2023); Shedhalle, Zürich (2022); Kunstraum Niederoesterreich, Vienna (2022); CCS, Paris (2022); Kunstverein Hamburg (2021); Istituto Svizzero, Palermo/Milan (2021); Swiss Institute, New York (2020); Julia Stoschek Collection, Düsseldorf (2020); Kunsthalle Fribourg (2020); Lafayette Anticipations, Paris (2019); Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2018); Athens Biennale (2018); Kunsthalle Basel (2017); ICA, London (2017) among others. They founded the YOUNG GIRL READING GROUP (2013–2021). They are the recipients of the Allegro Artist Prize 2022; CERN Collide Residency 2022 and laureates of the Swiss Performance Art Award 2022.
Dead Ringer series
Found aluminium part (CERN), maple wood, soap finish
solo show at Sentiment, Zürich, 2023
Photo: Philipp Rupp
Courtesy: Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė, Sentiment
Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė’s Dead Ringer series combine found aluminium objects collected by the artists during their Collide Residency at CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, and soap coated wood stakes. Each object of the Dead Ringer series eerily mirrors one another, yet incompletely; the sculptures are inspired by the stories of the vampyric Upiór beings with two souls, found in Slavic mythology.
Q&A
How does your upbringing influence your artwork?
In our practice, shared memories often resurface as fragments, tropes and traces in the final form of the artworks. In Yield, 2021, or Techno-monsters, 2020, for instance, domestic objects that we recall from growing up in the Eastern Bloc resurface in new materials and recontextualised. Yield is a much-enlarged two-faced hand-held cosmetic mirror, while Techno-monsters gather together in a Mike Kelley-like cluster a number of foam toys produced in the 1970s under the Soviet Union. The sound that escapes the sculpture is a sound of constant knocking, a mysterious and uncanny attempt at escape or entry. In these works we want to think how memories are influenced and delineated by geographical, political and social lines, always shifting, always returning.
Slavic and Baltic mythology and folklore also weaves through our work as stories loosely tethered together. In our recent sculpture series Dead Ringer, 2023, currently on view as part of our solo exhibition Upiór at Sentiment, Zurich present themselves as vampyric dual animated beings, facing the onlooker threatening with their presence. The sculptures use heavy aluminium machine-parts, found at CERN - the European Organisation for Nuclear Research combined with bespoke lathed soap coated stakes.
What does your creative space feel like?
Our practice is inherently collaborative and moves across different genres. We work in multiples across performance, painting, sculpture, fragrance, and video installation, thus our creative spaces are always shifting. It can be a train taking us on a research trip or residency, a film set or our studio in Basel. Our work has always been inspired by extensive reading and the imaginative spaces of books or film. Works as Enclosure (The lower bound of the landscape), 2023, embody some of those moments as a spatial restaging of a scene from P.P. Pasolini’s The Decameron, in which a liar receives salvation and sainthood through persuasiveness of false storytelling. The work reimagines the scene through a series of deceptions as an enclosure of machine hallucinated images superimposed onto the real space acquires and loses saturation viewed at different angles. This work draws from the imagery of the -lalia (2021-) performance that was staged in the exact same location as Pasolini staged his scene but altered by a GAN algorithm.
How digital technologies influence your creative processes?
We often employ and simultaneously question limits and effects of technology. In 2023, we completed two research and production residencies: CERN Collide Residency and Enter - The Hyper Scientific at EPFL - The Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne. At EPFL, together with the Imaging Department, we created a two-channel video piece Mouthless Part III that includes morphing GAN landscapes simulating of extreme weather events and the merging of the protagonist into each other and the surrounding wheat fields. The narrative of Mouthless Part III builds across two screens as a conversation between two characters - an archetypal peasant and a landscape demon Poludnica, encountered in the delirium of heat. Here, AI driven technology becomes a tool to think of potential futures and pasts underrepresented. With Mouthless Part III, we want to seek alternative ways of understanding the relationships we could develop to the natural world and of our place within. Concerned with reflecting in equal measures on the historical representation and framing of the natural within the Western painting tradition and current algorithmic systems which increasingly build the understanding of our surroundings, we seek to challenge the illusory promise of subjectivity as whole and distinctly other from the environment and customary separation between technology and nature, in order to break normative patterns of behaviour.
How collaborative work enhances your individual practices/ideas?
Collaboration permeates our practice from day to day or residency facilitated discussion between us to various collaborations with scientists, musicians, writers and other artists. Our collaborative practice grew out of our shared interest in text and embodied language, indebted to our previous long-term project Young Girl Reading Group (2013-2021) under which we organised a number of reading group events, performances and created a temporary nomadic community which for a time was reactivated once a week.
Future is...
and needs acting together, of opening up and telling multiple and complicated stories.
