Kliudžiau

Kliudžiau is the first solo project by Gedvilė Tamošiūnaitė in Improper Walls project space, Vienna. The exhibition features new productions by the artist as well as works created in collaboration with photographer Pavle Nikolic, illustrator Rūta Vėbraitė and fashion designer and artist Karolina Janulevičiūtė. The exhibition title Kliudžiau, originally a title of a story by 19-century Lithuanian writer Jonas Biliūnas, functions as a phonetic trope, an onomatopoeia, its pronunciation reminiscent of cutting, hitting, a physical material encounter. Kliudžiau presents new photographic series by Tamošiūnaitė that continue her research into the present overlaps of physical and digital realms. The exhibition explores different areas and states of these transitions, and the forms they take in individual's social and emotional being. Among them is the topic of adolescence as a period of physical and emotional change where the notion of playfulness and naive games may turn into acts of aggression or unsolicited violence. This aspect is elaborated through visual and conceptual clues to gaming and play, and the relations between violence and the sense of guilt, amplified by the presence of digital simulation and stimuli that have become coming-of-age issues during the past decades. The reoccurring leitmotif of these photographs, set in ice-like blocks of transparent epoxy resin, is a knife designed in a sci-fi style that the artist acquired during her research in preparation for the exhibition. The knife's iridescent blade gives a seducing aesthetic quality to the object of aggression and cruelty. Through slightly distorting 'lenses' of epoxy resin, the shots of the object deceitfully appear not as photographs but rather as digitally rendered images, bringing back the physical knife to its places of origins, mainly to computer games like "Mortal Combat" or other fantasy-cum-fighting video games. Other agents in the photography series – a boy, an Irish wolfhound, a webbed cluster of moth larvae – allude to various states of morphing, either as temporary states of change, or set conditions of hybridity. Text by: Ignas Petronis

High in viscosity obsidian lava flows produce a natural glass, obsidian, typically black in color. Deriving from the depths since the times of the Old World, obsidian glass was used by ancient peoples to manufacture cutting and piercing tools, weapons, jewelry, surgical scalpels, and ritual items. However, it is thought that it was in the ancient civilizations of Mesoamerica, namely the pre-Hispanic lands of the Aztecs, that obsidian glass was polished for the first time, revealing its highly reflective surface. In awe, Aztec priests believed that such black mirrors were manifestations of their deity Tezcatlipoca ("The God of Fatality") and served as portals between worlds, revealing inevitable destinies, answers about the afterlife, and deeper mysteries of the universe. Gedvile Tamošiunaite’s dark screen photography offers a contemporary scrying experience. Silkscreen prints are printed directly onto mirrored and tinted glass, mounted on steel tripods or suspended within heavy metal frames; paper prints lie veiled beneath tinted dark glass, enclosed within black passepartouts. Reflective surfaces shift with light and the viewer's position, transforming attempts at reproduction into self-portraits. Lost gazes, low-res textures, broken pixel surfaces and the audience’s reflections, whisper about the vastly fragmented intimacies out in the open - “a healthy terror of being alive”.1 Gedvile’s work, thus, functions as a diary of the present-day condition of post-media, and through her works, primal dark matter finds its way to speak to us again. On her practise Gedvile writes: Publicly accessible cameras streaming continuously: the Sermeq Kujalleq glacier calving into Disko Bay, Greenland; the Yangtze River, where baiji dolphins will never surface again; shipping ports; metro platforms; endangered ecosystems; your local shopping mall. Webcam encounters: bodies trying to "compose" themselves to fit into your screen, intimacy intertwined with distance, disrupted by pixels. A private gesture, a desire, and a planetary emergency are equally compressed, streamed, and negligible. The project departs from midnight online observations - hours spent inhabiting the continuous time of surveillance streams, dwelling in duration that the infrastructure treats as disposable. I translate screenshots, the remnants of attention, through silkscreen onto glass and paper. The process is slow and manual, the opposite of the fleeting image it originates from. Text by: Eglė Ambrasaitė