January 2022 - The Good Neighbour

The video interview with Vika Prokopavičiūtė in December 2021 feels like a remote studio visit against the backdrop of coming home, coming from Vienna to Vilnius. It seems that Vika’s paintings, displayed at the art gallery Vartai and the artist herself battle one another for control of the explanation about the motivations behind the painting method. The video explores the relationships between the paintings and the layers, forms and shadows that these paintings inhabit. Paintings look as if they are folding, stretching, and dreaming with one another, offering a glimpse into the psychedelic, yet a very controlled system of the art-making of Vika Prokopavičiūtė.

Produced by The Good Neighbour. Questions: Justė Kostikovaitė. Camera & editing: Vytautas Tinteris. Supported by the Lithuanian Council for Culture

Vika Prokopaviciute is a painter who lives and works in Vienna. Born in 1983 in Lithuania, she grew up in Russia, where she studied design and architecture and later worked as a graphic designer. 2012 she moved to Austria to study painting at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. Her abstract works develop from one to the next and form a repertoire, a system. The next painting begins where the preceding one ends. An acting-as-algorithm set of rules adjusts itself during the painting process and leads to a highly associative, poetic, yet mechanical and abstract image. The method becomes a motif. She has recently exhibited at Vartai Gallery, Vilnius; Haus, Vienna; NEVVEN, Göteborg; xhibit, Vienna; nGbK, Berlin; Mauve, Vienna; Skulpturinstitut, Vienna; Heiligenkreuzerhof, Vienna; Kunstverein Eisenstadt, Eisenstadt.

One day in three years when the light and the temperature are just right (2021) is a drowsy observation on constructed environments and bodies positioned there. The perception of slow-paced time merges with everlasting paradise space turning into a diminished unit of existence.

The video film is continuing the artist’s ongoing research exploring loneliness and its scale — from very personal, contained in one body to the one which pervades all the universe. In this work, by observing captivity, Gedvilė focuses on the deep desire for an emotional connection we seek in animals where …protracted stress and disappointment with our lives and relationships coincides with fantasy projections onto wild animals we see on screens according Margaret Grebowitz.

One day in three years when the light and the temperature are just right also resembles the desktop-wallpaper-videos, where the view is un-constructed, the camera is still, and the very presence of oxygen is questionable. The frames in the film connect different moments from the lives of animal persons in the zoos. The melancholy penetrates through the images of beautiful paradise-like, yet somehow odd environments, where animals turn away from the viewer, frozen in the moments of forced slowness, in the unreality of the place as such. 9 minutes of uncanny meditation, then the body observed mirrors the body of the observer/viewer merging space and time into all-inclusive boredom.

In her artistic practice, Gedvilė Tamošiūnaitė (b. Lithuania, based in Berlin) focuses on ways of transferring contemporary human emotions and feelings into visual digital culture and non-verbal codes. Taking the former as an emotional collective entity — non-organic, bloodless, and painless — she aims to detect gaps that expose it to reality and allow for influence. Urban materiality, textures, mundane compositions, merging of nature with technology – these things fascinate her and outline the aesthetic she continues to explore. Her prior artistic experience led to an expanded creative field situating her commercial and personal work between photography, video art, and art direction.

Month: January 2022

Phoenix in folds

One day in three years when the light and the temperature are just right