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Photo reportage from the exhibition ‘Mouthless’ by Eglė Kulbokaitė and Dorota Gawęda at WallRiss and Fri Art

For their first monographic exhibition in a Swiss institution, Eglė Kulbokaitė (*1987 Kaunas / Basel) and Dorota Gawęda (*1986, Lublin / Basel) are occupying both Fri Art and the independent WallRiss art space in Fribourg at the same time.

If you listen, you can hear the murmur. Two places, two art spaces, a small old town, hidden histories, stories told by the landscape itself, stories buried in winter hibernation. In dialogue, two space-times that can however never be experienced together, a process of reconstitution is launched, starting with the construction of a place where the action has already taken place (WallRiss) and moving on to its fictionalised recreation (Fri Art). The interplay between WallRiss and Fri Art suspends geographic coordinates, taking the exhibition onto a speculative plane. 

Mouthless, then, serves as a station, a hub that makes the rhizomatic tangible. The relationship between form and content is deliberately a-hierarchical. Nothing comes first. There’s no vantage point between matter and information, event and fiction, narration and theory, the body and its environment, the landscape and whoever perceives it. Order is dissolved, the frontier always already contaminated.
Mouthless aims at dismissing the concept of point of view, of the division of the world into subjects and objects. The exhibition therefore stages a critical fabulation of our idea of nature, our way of understanding and framing it, our ways of conceptualising it as distinct objects, the body, on one hand, and the landscape on the other.

Rather than observing from one’s respective distance, we’re advised to listen to that which calls out dispersion: of autonomous bodies, of natures and of the exhibition. In the in-between, objects, contributors and images become receptacles of multiple fictions, ghost vehicles of counter-stories. Eastern European legends stand side by side with archives of local witch trials, eco-feminist texts merge into performance of transformed bodies, mutant landscapes call for your attention.
What happened, fiction.

In the first room, a piece of stained glass accommodates an imagery produced by artificial intelligence solicited to recognise a scene. Not far away, a muffled noise reaches us. It makes its way between stuffed animals that children of the former communist block shared with each other beyond the borders of their respective homes. The sound of a tapping at a window, the same window which, at the WallRiss art space, blocks access to the site and divides the scene into two distinct sides: the observer and the observed. In the distance, the cluster of animals forms a planet. From it emanates the continuous murmur of another story to which we do not pay any attention.

Dorota Gawęda (*1986, Lublin / Basel) and Eglė Kulbokaitė (*1987 Kaunas / Basel) began their collaboration in 2013, with their extended serial project Young Girl Reading Group (YGRG). Under this project, they organized more than 150 reading groups and performances at a sustained pace. Over the past six years, they have produced performances and solo exhibitions in numerous places, among the most recent, Sunk into it, part of it at Futura, Prague (2019); I get those gossebumps everytime you come around at Lucas Hirsch Gallery, Düsseldorf (2018); YGRG 154X: reading with the single hand V at Cell Project Space, London (2018), and participated in group shows such as 13th Baltic Triennial, Vilnius/Riga/Tallinn (2018); the 6th Athens Biennale (2018), or the 6th Moscow Biennale for Young Art at MMOMA (2018).

Exhibitions runs till 29th of March 2020.
More information: http://www.fri-art.ch/en/exhibitions/mouthless

Exhibition view, Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė, Mouthless, Fri Art, 2020. Photo Guillaume Baeriswyl, Courtesy of Fri Art Kunsthalle

Exhibition view, Exhibition view, Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė, Mouthless, Fri Art, 2020. Photo Guillaume Baeriswyl, Courtesy of Fri Art Kunsthalle

Techno-monsters, 2020, 30 x 30 x 30 cm. 1970s Soviet foam toys, sound 35’30’’, Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė, Mouthless, Fri Art. Photo Guillaume Baeriswyl, Courtesy of Fri Art Kunsthalle

Techno-monsters, 2020, 30 x 30 x 30 cm. 1970s Soviet foam toys, sound 35’30’’, Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė, Mouthless, Fri Art. Photo Guillaume Baeriswyl, Courtesy of Fri Art Kunsthalle

Exhibition view, Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė, Mouthless, Fri Art, 2020. Photo Guillaume Baeriswyl, Courtesy of Fri Art Kunsthalle

Exhibition view, Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė, Mouthless, Fri Art, 2020. Photo Guillaume Baeriswyl, Courtesy of Fri Art Kunsthalle

Exhibition view, Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė, Mouthless, Fri Art, 2020. Photo Guillaume Baeriswyl, Courtesy of Fri Art Kunsthalle

Spectator (I-V), 2020, 80 x 36 x 12 cm. Steel, print on leather, Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė, Mouthless, Fri Art. Photo Guillaume Baeriswyl, Courtesy of Fri Art Kunsthalle

Exhibition view, Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė, Mouthless, Fri Art, 2020. Photo Guillaume Baeriswyl, Courtesy of Fri Art Kunsthalle

Exhibition view, Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė, Mouthless, Fri Art, 2020. Photo Guillaume Baeriswyl, Courtesy of Fri Art Kunsthalle

Exhibition view, Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė, Mouthless, Fri Art, 2020. Photo Guillaume Baeriswyl, Courtesy of Fri Art Kunsthalle

Exhibition view, Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė, Mouthless, Fri Art, 2020. Photo Guillaume Baeriswyl, Courtesy of Fri Art Kunsthalle

Exhibition view, Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė, Mouthless, Fri Art, 2020. Photo Guillaume Baeriswyl, Courtesy of Fri Art Kunsthalle

Enclosure (III), 2020, 50 x 9,6 x 1,5 cm. Text on LED scroll, Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė, WallRiss. Photo Guillaume Baeriswyl, Courtesy of Fri Art Kunsthalle

Exhibition view, Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė, Mouthless, Fri Art, 2020. Photo Guillaume Baeriswyl, Courtesy of Fri Art Kunsthalle

Exhibition view, Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė, Mouthless, Fri Art, 2020. Photo Guillaume Baeriswyl, Courtesy of Fri Art Kunsthalle

Untitled, 2020, 242 x 107 cm. Enforced glass, steel fixtures, Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė, WallRiss. Photo Guillaume Baeriswyl, Courtesy of Fri Art Kunsthalle

Exhibition view, Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė, Mouthless, Fri Art, 2020. Photo Guillaume Baeriswyl, Courtesy of Fri Art Kunsthalle

Hexanol (IV-V), 2020, 230 x 50 x 50 cm. Steel, aluminium, hay, Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė, WallRiss. Photo Guillaume Baeriswyl, Courtesy of Fri Art Kunsthalle

Hexanol (IV-V), 2020, 230 x 50 x 50 cm. Steel, aluminium, hay, Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė, WallRiss. Photo Guillaume Baeriswyl, Courtesy of Fri Art Kunsthalle

Exhibition view, Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė, Mouthless, Fri Art, 2020. Photo Guillaume Baeriswyl, Courtesy of Fri Art Kunsthalle

Exhibition view, Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė, Mouthless, Fri Art, 2020. Photo Guillaume Baeriswyl, Courtesy of Fri Art Kunsthalle

Portrait of Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė

Portrait of Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė

Portrait of Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė