Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė: Sunk into it, part of it at Futura, Prague

September 25, 2019
Author Echo Gone Wrong

Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė
Sunk into it, part of it / it would be like hearing the grass grow, and we should die of that roar which is the other side of silence

opening: 25. 9. 2019 – 18:00
exhibition lasts until: 17. 11. 2019
curator: Caroline Krzyszton

In their large scale solo presentation at FUTURA, Gawęda and Kulbokaitė, founding members of Young Girl Reading Group, explore artistic production through collaboration, decay and search for aberrant, media that lend themselves to creating speculative environments. Sunk into it. Part of it (…) will comprise of video, light, putrefying installation, sculpture and scent all contributing to a fragmented narrative for audience to navigate through.

An olfactive trigger for this narrative is RYXPER1126AE – fragrance conceived after their YGRG159 : SULK (2018) performance at the 6th Athens Biennial. Gawęda and Kulbokaitė created RYXPER1126AE in collaboration with International Flavors and Fragrances Inc. in New York. Working together with a chemist and smell designer the artists made a fragrance sample based on the synthetic molecular replica of the smell collected with the use of headspace technology during the aforementioned performance. The smell bears a poetic sign or memory of belonging to a collective experience, sentiment to a shared moment, but can be also understood as its molecular imprint or documentation. At FUTURA the scent is held and released by a series of new sculptural pieces holding a performative possibility within. Here the duo employ olfaction as an interface, which creates a volatile passage between the virtual dimension and the physical body. The artists see smell as a performative play on the molecular level that highlights the breaking boundaries between us, the other and nature, flowing through and across humans and machines, life-forms and non-life-forms. Thinking through Foucauldian biopolitics and pharmacopornographic regime (P. B. Preciado), the artists suggest that we can no longer understand bodies as finite unities but instead fluid, porous cartographies or else distributed networks of corporate agency (M. Mendes).

The singular topology of the FUTURA exhibition space which will play host to this fragmented narrative underlying that the boundaries between public and private, internal and external, self and environment are increasingly permeable.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a text by Ella Plevin.

Futura

Open hours: Wednesday – Sunday 11am – 6pm
t.: (+420) 608 955 150
w.: futuraprague.com
e.: info[at]futuraproject.cz
Holečkova 49 150 00 Prague 5, Czech Republic