2021 Archives - The Good Neighbour

Antropomorphic Trouble

Posted on July 9, 2022July 9, 2022 by Monika Lipšic

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

Posted on January 24, 2022January 24, 2022 by Monika Lipšic

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

Posted on January 7, 2022January 7, 2022 by Monika Lipšic

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.

The Mind is a Home

Posted on December 31, 2021January 3, 2022 by Monika Lipšic

The Good Neighbour asked Gintė Regina to produce a video about herself, a self-referential artist’s studio visit where she examines her work and the inspirations behind it. Gintė invited Monika Baranauskaite to ask her some questions, in a direct inversion of their roles in Gintė’s film Monika in September (2018), in which Monika is the subject and Gintė — the voice behind the camera. In Gintė’s answers we find clues as to what draws the viewers into her lyrical, autobiographically flavoured films. Is it the painfully recognisable yet playful authenticity, or certain non-dogmatic insertions that challenge the suspension of disbelief within Gintė Regina’s films, reminding us of the artist at work and allowing us to keep a certain distance from the protagonists?

The video, titled “The Mind is A Home”, reflects Gintė’s process by playing with layers of staging and reality. It is a document of her filmography so far, an exploration of the themes in her work, and a self-reflexive positioning of the artist inside her practice, culminating in a dance scene and blurring the boundaries between art and life. For Gintė, by being an artist “in the broadest sense of the word”, you “create a world for your mind to inhabit — a place that’s always there and that you never have to leave”. This, for a maker whose life and practice are marked by a sense of constant movement, is a most precious possession.

Gintė Regina is a Lithuanian filmmaker working in-between artist film and narrative fiction. Her short films have been screened in leading cinemas and arts venues around the UK, including British Film Institute (Future Film Presents SCENE) and Whitechapel Gallery (Selected VII) in London. She has had two solo exhibitions, in 2018 at GAO, London, where Monika in September had its premiere, and in 2020 at CCA Derry~Londonderry, Northern Ireland. Her work was first shown in Lithuania in 2021, at Galerija 101 in Kaunas and as part of Videograms festival in Vilnius. Ginte is currently based between London and Vilnius.

Monika Baranauskaitė is a writer for stage and a voice actor. Her most recent projects as writer include the performance “Žiūredama viena į Kitą” (“Gazing at One Another”), shown in November 2021 at CAC in Vilnius, and “Eco Farm”, a comedic play that will premiere in 2022.