In their work, Dorota Gawęda (1986, Lublin, PL) ed Eglė Kulbokaitė (1987, Kaunas, LT) address feminist-inspired theory and (science)fiction, technology-driven emancipation and the discursiveness of space. They work within a variety of media, spanning performance, installation, fragrance, sculpture and video. With YOUNG GIRL READING GROUP (YGRG), an ongoing serial project (2013–), they examine the relationships between reading, affect, distraction, togetherness and disunity, bodily and virtual presence, live action and documentation, interested in how the collective experience of being together can be inscribed in space and how language can become material and embodied. For YGRG, the body of flesh, the location of the reading and the technology used, personify language, perform text and present that very contradiction —of processing material to immaterial, immaterial to material complexities of perceived bodies and environments. The body is re-textualized through technology and the reading is made public and embodied, positing the interdependence of the text, the body, the environment and the technology. The porosity of the queer reading produces a horizontal, useless, amoral and sensual space that lives only in and for experience. In their performances, the ongoing concern is to reconsider the way in which reading has developed as a solitary, internalized practice within the modern society, thus having a formative influence on desire and the sexual experiences of individuals. Their current research focuses on the commodification of the ‘scopic’, the over-privileged position of vision over other senses, especially smell but also touch and sound.
Biography
Gallery exhibitions
