Work culture

Vilte Fuller is a young generation painter born in Klaipeda, Lithuania now living and working in London. She holds a BA in Painting and Printmaking from The Glasgow School of Art. In her figurative paintings characters, landscapes and motifs are intertwined with nostalgic science fiction imagery and personal experiences from her Eastern European heritage. Currently, her exploration is deeply rooted in her evolving relationship with the concept of work and productivity. 

In her latest exhibition „Corporate Horrors“ at the Brooke Benington gallery, Vilte sheds light on the allure of the corporate lifestyle. The paintings take us back to the workplace of 80s and 90s – the epicentre of life, a promise of a better tomorrow, depending directly on hard work. The artist compares these corporate dreams (or nightmares) with the philosophy of her generation, that „grew up with a narrative that the world is broken and that fixing it will come with real change and sacrifice, it feels like we never got to enjoy the ‘anything is possible’ era“. 

Earlier Vilte’s works contain fragments of her Eastern European heritage, where fairytales don’t always have a happy ending. Feelings of terror and false security are reflected in her paintings, through whose muted tones it is difficult to see a bright tomorrow. Technology and the human form are of the same hue, one day blending into the next. Her paintings lie in the uncanny valley, where Eastern European cultural imagery is entangled with Western cinema, video games, Lithuanian folklore and its horror tales. Her take on it is humorous and curious, as if inviting us to walk together among these nightmarish scenographies, accepting them for what they are.

Produced by The Good Neighbour
Questions: Justė Kostikovaitė
Music by Koloah, from the album “Serenity”
Filmed by Elena Reimerytė
Text by Marija Sinkevičiūtė

Supported by the Lithuanian Council for Culture

Partners: UK Lithuanian Youth Association,
the British-Lithuanian Society

Antropomorphic Trouble

Anthropomorphic Trouble is a collaborative project initiated by Goda Palekaitė and joined by Adrijana Gvozdenović, Curated by Arts Catalyst in partnership with Delfina Foundation and Whitechapel Gallery. 

Adopting the lens of “Earth as a historical figure” as a mode of storytelling and as a narrative device, the project takes the coastal region of Dorset (UK) as a speculative context through which to simultaneously address ecological challenges, deep time and geological formations to unearth the troubled relationship between humans and the Earth.

From Mesopotamian personification of Ki to Incan Pachamama, to Greek Gaia – the narratives related to Earth – have often endowed the planet with human, often female features, behaviours and occurrences, including family tree, romantic relationships, personality, and other humanistic description.

Since the 18th century onwards, ‘historians of the earth’, scientists, philosophers, writers, and political figures have warned about the rapidly changing conditions of the environment. Yet these warnings have been left unheeded and the mechanisms of growing capitalism, global trade, displacement of humans, animals and plants, and military powers have continued to increase the exploitation of the earth.

Johnston Sheard documented and edited a two-day performance over the 20 – 21st November at Whitechapel Gallery, London where over six performances Goda took participants on a journey, exploring geological time, living and dead fossils, the weather on the Adriatic sea, animal horror and the effects of stones on human eyes. Rosemary tea was served and enjoyed, which has the effect of enhancing focus and slowing down aging, bringing everyone present closer to the time of a stone.

The project was produced collaboratively by Arts Catalyst and Schizma (LT), and supported by Lithuanian Council for Culture, Lithuanian Ministry of Culture and Hasselt University. The video production is supported by Lithuanian Council for Culture. 

Goda Palekaitė (Lithuania) is an artist working in the intersection of contemporary art, performance, artistic research, literature, and anthropology. Her practice evolves around projects exploring the politics of historical narratives, the agency of dreams and imagination, and social conditions of creativity. Her recent solo shows were opened at the Centre Tour à Plomb in Brussels (“Architecture of Heaven” 2020), Konstepidemin in Gothenburg (“Liminal Minds” 2019) and RawArt Gallery in Tel Aviv (“Legal Implications of a Dream” 2018). In the last years, her performances and installations have been presented at the Vilnius international theatre festival “Sirenos”, “Swamp pavilion” in The Biennale Architettura 2018 in Venice, Atletika gallery and Contemporary Art Center in Vilnius, The Institute of Things to Come in Turin, among others. In 2019 Palekaitė received The Golden Stage Cross and the Young Artist’s Prize from the Lithuanian Ministry of Culture. Goda is based in Brussels. In 2020 the artist published her first book of fiction “Schismatics” (LAPAS books) and started an artistic Ph.D. position at Hasselt University. palekaite.space 

Adrijana Gvozdenović (Montenegro) is an artist interested in artists’ motivation and ways of resisting (self)institutionalised structures. In the last three years, she has been developing methods of collecting and annotating symptomatic artistic practices that recognise their anxiety as a prerequisite state for criticality. One of those is a card-reading publication “7 anxieties and the world” that she performed during the 2019, among some: at FairShare: self-publishing as an artistic practice (CIAP Hasselt), during the “victories over the suns” in Brussels and for “The Hub – Between the iliac crest & the pubic bone” (GMK Zagreb). The research in these forms of “otherwise exhibiting” was supported by a.pass (a platform for artistic research, based in Brussels) and the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp and it has been published this year in an online publication ArchivingArtisticAnxieties.me.

Johnston Sheard is a London based Scottish artist. His work focuses on experimental film with scored song-cycles, and intricate sculptural constructions. He combines a baroque architectural sense with anti-digital aesthetics, creating sentimental narratives reflecting on a theological universe. Johnston Sheard is one of he founders on The Deep Splash, his artistic vision in 2015-6 helped to transmute the interview format into interpretive films, serving as works themselves. Sheard studied in Central Saint Martins and University of Westminster. Recently he had a show at Kunstraum, London and Outset Contemporary Art Fund, London and was part of the group exhibition ‘The Future Is Certain; It’s the Past Which Is Unpredictable” in Calvert 22 Foundation, London and Blaffer Art Museum, Houston.

 

Phoenix in folds

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.

ON INSULA

ON INSULA – a conversation between contemporary dancer Dovydas Strimaitis and artist & choreographer Maarja Tõnisson in Marseille.

Insula aims to dive into organic relations of space within and between bodies, where they meet complex identities, natures, movements, clothes and sounds. Transfiguring strangers are constantly defaced or obscured in dance. The space becomes a field of attention and the audience takes an active part in landscape dramaturgy. The bodies that we inhabit, made of seventy percent water, unstable materials and containers, are in constant shift. The fictional and natural merge into affective scenes to challenge the sense of physicality, belonging, the other and intimacy.

Interview setting: September 2020 Dovydas Strimaitis and Maarja Tõnisson meet in Marseille IRL after a few zoom sessions and start working together, testing the borders of their bodies and their work, they start forming their own island, their insula (s). In this conversation you will hear reflections about how does it feel to work together in an unfamiliar setting of pandemic-ridden city of Marseille, which in 2020 commemorates 300 years since the deadly bubonic plague.

Video edit: E/A/Smith

Music: Maarja Nuut & Ruum, a duo will present the work “World Inverted”(LP)
 Curated by Justė Kostikovaitė, Merilin Talumaa, Maija Rudovska

Interview was conducted by Ryan Galer and Ilze Aulmane

 Dovydas Strimaitis is a Lithuanian contemporary dancer, living and working in Marseille. He has been part of Jitti Chompee’s “18 monkeys dance theater” in Thailand, participated in the creation process in Gothenburg Opera’s Dance Company with choreographer Marina Mascarell, and performed in the restaging of Jan Martens’s “Pretty Perfect”. Since 2019, Dovydas has been dancing in Le Ballet National de Marseille, under the direction of La Horde, where he works with choreographers Alessandro Sciarroni, Lucinda Childs, Lasseindra Ninja and Tânia Carvalho.

 Maarja Tõnisson is an artist and choreographer based in Tallinn, Estonia. In her work, she mainly explores physicality and materiality through choreography. She has created four solo works: bodySHIFTbody (produced by STL, nominated for the Estonian dance award, 2015); bodyBUILDINGbody (commissioned by Tallinn Architecture Biennale, 2015); bodyIMAGEbody (group exhibition “(In)visible dreams and streams”, curated by Maija Rudovska, CAC, 2016)) and bodyWORKbody (at group exhibition “Museum Choreography” curated by Hanna Liis Kont, Tartu Art Museum, 2017). She is also part of a performance collective Olmeulmad.

 

Unknown Mushrooms

“As I’ve mentioned not once in my previous interviews, besides my main activity and business (a gallerist at Galerie Uberall), I’m a dedicated mushroom picker and, like the majority of gallerists, have a great passion for collecting. Currently I own quite a large collection of mushrooms consisting of specimens picked in Lithuanian forests in 2016.

While building this mushroom collection, I couldn’t but notice a new mushroom species that I keep coming across… (I’m not sure how it should be called…) But it’s a highly resilient or, perhaps we should say, invasive mushroom species, which multiplies at the speed of geometric progression and is found in forests, near expanding settlements. I’ve never picked this species, but in this year, 2018, I decided to give it a try.

As I don’t know how this species is called, I’m going to call it ‘Unnamed’ or ‘Unknown’.

Mushrooms of these unknown species are presently found in almost all forests all around the world. It’s difficult not to notice them… It’s even more difficult in the woods of Mickūnai environs, where I go quite often… or what’s left of them…

Perhaps these woods have such a large population of these mushrooms because there’s enough humidity and darkness…? Or perhaps these mushrooms grow in exactly the opposite climatic conditions…? I have no clue…

It is thought that these mushrooms reproduce via spores. It is also thought that spores are carried by animals in their stomachs. They also say: “mushrooms ‘travel’ underground, together with tree roots and species…”

Sometimes it seems to me that like all the others, ‘Unknown Mushrooms’ are reproduced not only by rodents or hoofed animals, but also by ‘Animals Wearing Boots’…

Some people say: “It’s better to pull out mushrooms”,
and others say: “It’s better to cut them”.

Myself, as an experienced collector, I follow the classical tradition/rule of picking mushrooms – I cut them slightly above the root.

It’s important to distinguish known mushrooms from unknown.”

– Andrej Polukord

Andrej Polukord (b. 1990) is an artist based in Vienna and Vilnius. He is a graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and co-recipient of the 2016 Kunsthalle Prize Vienna. His painting, installation, performance, and video art create unpredictable environments and absurd situations that produce double meaning and ambiguity.

Andrej Polukord’s work was presented in GAK, Bremen, –20 degrees biennale, Flachau, Austria, Zachęta Project Room, Warsaw, Survival KIT, Riga and elsewhere. Polukord is also a co-founder of Galerie Uberall, a mobile art gallery that is one of the first private mobile galleries, founded in 2014. Since then it has traveled and exhibited internationally including Vienna Contemporary 2015, documenta (14), Athens, Hoftallungen | mumok, Vienna, Austria and more.

Today Is the Color Day Meets at Day

‘Today Is the Color Day Meets at Day’ glides through the exhibition under the same title by two artists Laura Kaminskaitė and Antanas Gerlikas, curated by Audrius Pocius at P/////AKT, Amsterdam in September-October 2018. Ieva Kotryna Skirmantaitė glues transitions and movements in the exhibition space with moments from the opening and a voice-over reading a text written by Laura Kaminskaitė.

‘Art is more than meets the eye’, the folk saying goes, and I believe there might be some truth to that. Despite its fragility, related to its thingness, it acts as if it were space within a space, bigger on the inside, as if it is a portable black hole. It devours every-thing around it without consuming anything, transforming objects into time, creating cracks in the sameness of our days, letting us feel the futility of our everyday in the background of which we may encounter the richness of reality itself.

This ‘richness’ is a relative term, obviously, generally indicating something that is out of reach, a longing for things that are yet to come. Maybe, this is why there is another saying – ‘a man who has everything, has nothing at all’. To be rich, then, means to be able to appreciate a lack.

Perhaps, it is within this lack where the meeting between an artwork and the observer’s eye occurs. It is a distant gaze, although a loving one – a gift that is being gifted both ways, forming a relation. A bond, where the ones bonded cannot touch, but nevertheless constitute each other. Similar to how one imperceivably recognizes oneself through the reflection in another’s eye or like a memory of a glass, which refuses to be touched by lips.

So, what is ‘more’ within a meeting with an eye? What is this excess dwelling inside a lack? Artworks, so it seems, just like us, are their own doppelgangers: double, dual – a movement between the first and the third person in a sentence, perpetually seducing us to entangle them in language, while at the same time constantly evading an explicit definition. An object craving for a gaze, though evaporating as soon as we think we start recognizing it as familiar.

That is why exhibitions are peripatetic – more suitable for movement than observation. Move through the space, or better let the space move you and the path will bend accordingly to the steps you take. On your way, you will find a Station in Conversation lurking, waiting for the right moment, ready to catch the possibilities that are yet to be envisioned. Or a Researcher’s Outfit, inviting the curiosity of others to whisper alien questions in passing, leading you to a space of dreams and uncertainty, offering to cease control and give yourself up to the passage of time. This time becomes a space in Prototype of Dunes.

On the other side there are three Nameless surfaces which came from the past and by which you possibly once passed, reflecting your present gaze back at you in the form of a memory or a wish. You will also find a piece, which is Not Yet Titled, but suspended in a state of eternal becoming; a thing patiently waiting for its word, anticipating a sense of belonging. Walk some more to find a shoelace dangling from the ceiling – an object of the everyday, standing before you Today. And if sometimes time ceases to pass in this space, can there still be any News? Through the multitude of these ‘todays’, time reveals itself as a vehicle, a mode of travel, a rhythmical Exhition. Eventually, you will notice that you are not alone in your travels, with Friends’ Names delicately watching over, revealing nothing but the difference they profess. These appearances, as vivid as they may be, once touched will quickly melt away as if they were a kind of Sugar Entertainment – sweet to the eye, saturated for the tongue.

An exhibition is a kind of promise that cannot be delivered. It is untouchable, yet fragile, a meeting point enabling a difference to be noticed, yet disenchanting any illusion of its realness. It is a lack, that needs to be addressed with love. Soothingly, there is no magic here.

– Audrius Pocius

 

Ieva Kotryna Skirmantaitė (b. 1994) is a video artist interested in alternative documentary forms in theory and in practice. By capturing and connecting real events, other people’s practices, discussions, sounds and bits from everyday life, she has found a way to create an imaginary path and to reveal invisible excitements and anxieties. She explores how different technical qualities of the digital image act as separate memory systems and represent different contemporary political and economical values.

Antanas Gerlikas (b. 1978) has recently taken part in group exhibitions in Vilnius, Riga, Tartu, Bucharest, Rome, Athens, Moscow and Reykjavik. His solo exhibitions so far have been held at Plungė House for Culture (1999), Tulips & Roses gallery (with Liudvikas Buklys, 2008), CAC Vitrine (2011) and CAC Kitchen (2014), Art in General in New York (2013) and Objectif Exhibitions in Antverp (2013).

Laura Kaminskaitė (b.1984), lives and works in Vilnius, Lithuania) has exhibited her works in solo exhibitions, including Something something, Vermilion Sands, Copenhagen (2016); Exhition, BWA Warszawa, Warsaw (2013); Walking in a Title, The Gardens, Vilnius (2012); Exhibition, Objectif Exhibitions, Antwerp (2012); and in group exhibitions, including A Rock That Keeps Tigers Away, Kunstverein Munchen, Munich (2017); XII Baltic Triennial, Dailes theatre, Riga (2016); A Million Lines, Bunkier Sztuki Contemporary Art Centre, Krakow (2015); Helsinki group, Hiap Augusta gallery, Helsinki (2015); A Cab, Kunsthalle Athena, Athens (2014); The Moderna Exhibition 2014 – Society Acts, Moderna Museet Malmö, Malmö (2014); The excluded third, included , Galerie Emanuel Layr, Vienna (2014); Vilnius Pavilion, National Contemporary Art Centre (NCCA), Moscow (2013); Thinging , Frutta, Roma (2012); Sparrows, CAC, Vilnius (2012).

 

 

Life Is Short But Love Is Long

“Life Is Short But Love Is Long” documents and extends a performance installation by Johnston Sheard, presented in Outset Contemporary Art Fund, London in 2018. Eight musicians, including Sheard, confined in a glass-walled room for three hours, improvise on the same chord motif. This work is part of Sheard’s ongoing project “How Can You Love Me Knowing That I Could Never Love You” – a series of vignettes in sculpture, installation, séance and a feature length musical essay film dedicated to historical lovers mortally separated by tragic circumstances. The artist creates a bittersweet graveyard comprised of shrines, with sculptures as series of totems, formed from shells and organic matter, a group of denizens halfway between life and inanimacy each representing hermaphroditic creatures.

Johnston Sheard is a London based Scottish artist. His work focuses on experimental film with scored song-cycles, and intricate sculptural constructions. He combines a baroque architectural sense with anti-digital aesthetics, creating sentimental narratives reflecting on a theological universe. Johnston Sheard is one of he founders on The Deep Splash, his artistic vision in 2015-6 helped to transmute the interview format into interpretive films, serving as works themselves.

Sheard studied in Central Saint Martins and University of Westminster. Recently he had a show at Kunstraum, London and Outset Contemporary Art Fund, London and was part of the group exhibition ‘The Future Is Certain; It’s the Past Which Is Unpredictable” in Calvert 22 Foundation, London and Blaffer Art Museum, Houston.

ADDRESS

‘Address‘ is filmed in Mulokas’ studio. In this video the artist recalls a prophecy he once experienced in the presence of a Madagascar shaman, who revealed that the self that belongs to him will become itself, only in the state of possession by movement. The artist questions this state of mind in relationship to performance: “performance is a serious business, sometimes it can take hours and hours in the studio” he says before embodying a new nature. This work is about the state of possession by movement, about relationships with objects, materials that become performers, about the labour of performance art and the expressive forms it takes.

“I am the living matter on stage that is searching for a physical match in revitalised matter. Through exercising live actions I look for ways to reveal the full physical consequence of the material. I found that interactions with the same material in a repetitive manner can cause varying associations that constantly redefine the nature of an object. On stage, I intuitively shift from one investigation to another, accumulating in my body the different qualities that are revealed by each encounter with an object. By using my imagination, I let the body carry the adopted qualities of all the materials. Thus a living subject (a performer) on stage becomes a self-produced matter that runs on its own established (more or less) sustainable physical structures.

Being in a position of an artist requires a certain attitude towards playing. Inside culture this attitude persists. Once I arrive to a level of identity I move to the second part of my process: I create a video. The video demands the role to present itself.“

– Andrius Mulokas.

After studying visual arts and architecture, Andrius Mulokas’s artistic interest shifted to space in relation to the moving body. He studied dance in Finland (North Karelia College), later he moved to Amsterdam where he studied on the BA Choreography programme (SNDO) at the Amsterdam School of the Arts (AHK). Born in 1983 in Kaunas, Lithuania, he is currently based in Amsterdam and Tel Aviv and works in the artistic scene there and abroad.

Home Entertainment

Morenotyet is a series of exhibition documentaries made in collaboration with the Lithuanian artist Gediminas G. Akstinas. Morenotyet aims to capture the continuity of exhibitions, their reciprocal relationship with all other things around them. The 4th episode of the series is dedicated to Home Entertainment 4 metres, a work by the British artist Chris Evans. The piece was temporarily installed in Yorkshire Sculpture Park as a part of the exhibition At Home, curated from the Arts Council Collection and marking the collection’s 70th anniversary. The episode celebrates travelling, weather changes and scaling.

Gerda Paliušytė (b.1987) is a Lithuanian video artist and curator currently based in Amsterdam. Her practice is focused on the shifts and delays of representation, the ways that it is shaped by predominant – yet mutable – power structures, time and social needs.

Slips in public space

Slips in public space combines the artist discussing her work with documentation excerpts from the works Some Were Carried, Some – Dragged Behind (2015); Choreography for the Running Male (2012); and Skateboard Prayer, or Head Below the Heart (2016).

Eglė Budvytytė is a visual artist based in Brussels and Amsterdam. She creates performance situations to explore the relationships between body, architecture, environment and audience. By choreographing performers to enact gestures that can often seem contradictory to their surroundings, uncannily out of context and sometimes filled with a sense of emergency, she looks at the body’s ability to challenge conventions of conduct and the narratives of normativity implicit in public spaces.

Kiss Ai and wear Ai like a modular construction

Created in 2014 by Dorota Gawęda (b. Poland) and Eglė Kulbokaitė (b. Lithuania), Agatha Valkyrie Ice is an ongoing, multi-platform, multi-user, participatory, self-performance project that aims at developing a fictional postgender character within an existing confined framework of social media platforms. Agatha is a companion species, here to think with and with which to invent a body and sexuality of one’s own. Agatha is immersed in a constant process of becoming; a loop of re-posting, re-staging and re-appropriating expressed in textual form, on social media as well as IRL.

The video presents documentation of an extended enquiry into non-spaces, following the exhibitions: EPISODE X/CHAPTER 3: BEDROOM, art monte-carlo, Monaco, 2016; Agatha 1.2.0.1 and Agatha 1.2.0.2 (conceived of in two chapters in separate location in Berlin, 2015). The projects imagined Agatha’s character in several distinct spaces: a veranda, a hotel room, within an established art institution, within an art fair and bedroom setting, and were simultaneously a presentation of scents developed with the support of International Flavours and Fragrances, New York (IFF Inc.).

Live creature after Dewey

Live Creature after Dewey is a reading by Teets of American pragmatist philosopher John Dewey’s seminal text on aesthetics, Art as Experience, from the rooftop of a Venetian Greek dovecote located in Tinos, Greece.

Jennifer Teets is a curator, writer, and researcher based in Paris. Her research and writing combines inquiry, study of sciences, philosophy, with ficto-critique, and performs as an interrogative springboard for her curatorial practice.

She recently presented (with Margarida Mendes) The World in Which We Occur at the XII Baltic Triennial in Vilnius – an event series taking place over the telephone and formulated around questions addressed by speakers across the world. The World in Which We Occur embarks on modern day issues rooted in the history of materiality and flux as well as pertinent politically enmeshed scientific affairs shaping our world today.

On Life

In this film Jonas Mekas discusses: the intensity of experiences; his dreams; his past life as a bumblebee; the non-linear narrative of time; the first time he made love to an American woman; why his Lithuanian accent is still so strong after 65 years in America; the Lithuanian state’s refusal to recognize the State of Palestine (after Lithuania having been in a parallel situation); voyeurism; Casanova; and his relationship with the ukulele playing falsetto singer Tiny Tim. Jonas also plays unheard early recordings of Tiny Tim made in 1962 whilst acting as his musical agent. This film was made in collaboration with Jonas Mekas and by his request has been left unedited.

Jonas Mekas (b. 1922) is a Lithuanian-American filmmaker, poet, artist, curator and former music agent. He is often referred to as the “Godfather of American avant-garde Cinema”.

Mekas escaped Lithuania with his brother Adolfas in 1944 having experienced both Russian and German occupation. Whilst crossing Europe they were captured by the Nazis and imprisoned in a Labour camp for eight months. They subsequently escaped and hid in a farm near the Danish border until the War ended. After living in various displaced person camps he studied Philosophy at the university of Mainz. In 1949 Jonas and his brother emigrated to the USA where they settled in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, New York.

Visualizing the Song

For her performance at David Roberts Art Foundation in 2014 Lapelytė was interested by the history of castrates in Europe, where the Catholic Church would not permit women to sing in choirs. In lieu of this, boys were castrated to prevent their voices breaking at puberty, creating a specific genre of high-pitched voice that was highly appreciated by opera composers. Lina explores the possibilities of reversing this dynamic by instead using females with low pitched voices.

Lina Lapelytė (b. Vilnius, 1984) lives and works in London and Vilnius. She is an artist, composer, musician and performer exploring the phenomena of song. She graduated from the Royal College of Art in 2013 and has been exhibiting and performing internationally, including:

David Roberts Art Foundation (London); ICA (London); CAC (Vilnius); CCA (Glasgow); Ikon (Birmingham); BBC Proms (London); Tate Modern (London); Skopje Biennial; Royal Festival Hall (London); Spor (Aarhus); Echoraum (Wien); Holland Festival (Amsterdam) and recently presented a Park Nights project at the Serpentine Gallery (London). Together with Vaiva Grainytė ir Rugilė Barzdžiukaitė they created an opera Sun and Sea to represent Lithuanian Pavilion in Venice Biennial 2019 and it was nominated the Golden Lion award.

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