DOROTA GAWĘDA (PL, 1986) & EGLĖ KULBOKAITĖ (LT, 1987)
Residency period: July – October 2020
During their three-month residency at La Becque artist duo Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė focused on the completion of their 44-minute video piece Mouthless Part I as well as a new production of extended performative videos, Mouthless Part II. In view of the current ecological debate, Mouthless opens up an important process of investigation into the concept of Nature as one which has traditionally been defined outside the subject and aims to reconsider the art-historicised trope of landscape as a technologically framed image. Gawęda and Kulbokaitė’s current research spans a number of topics and emergencies they see as intertwined into the ecology of landscape including: histories of European deforestation; rituals connected with mourning, death and thresholds; eco-feminist theory; accounts of witch trials; recent bog fires in Eastern Poland; folkloric undead beings originating in Slavic and Baltic cultures connected to the soil, swamp and terrestrial waters, or the historic redefinition of the relationship of the individual with the land. Mouthless Part I was launched as part of a solo exhibition at Julia Stoschek Collection in Düsseldorf and is currently on display at the Swiss Institute in New York. Mouthless Part II was presented at OnCurating in Zurich and shortlisted for the Swiss Performance Award. The next presentation of Mouthless Part II is scheduled for 2021 at Istituto Svizzero in Milan.
Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė are an artist duo founded in 2013, based in Basel. Both are graduates of the Royal College of Art, London (2012). They work in a variety of media spanning performance, video, installation, sculpture and scent. They are the founders of YOUNG GIRL READING GROUP – YGRG (2013- ), organized around feminist and queer thought, both historical and contemporary. The project became the basis of the duo’s continuous collaboration and still frames the conceptual core of their artistic practice.
Images 1-6: extracts from Mouthless Part I
Images 7-12: extracts from Mouthless Part II