Eglė Kulbokaitė and Dorota Gawęda (Young Girl Reading Group)
Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė. Video, 44.45. Mouthless (I part), 2020
Eglė Kulbokaitė (born 1987 in Lithuania) and Dorota Gawęda (born 1986 in Poland) are a duo of artists and writers currently based in Basel, Switzerland. This duo creates works of performance art, video, photography, olfactory, installation art, and sculpture.
In their work, the artists emphasize collaboration in searching for new and unexpected means of making (and disseminating) art and creating speculative scenarios. The performances and sculptural practices of Kulbokaitė and Gawęda reflect the need to reveal the limitations of language – the gaps and cracks in its perception. The artists are currently exploring the multifaceted understanding of nature as an ecological system that we have historically tended to describe as alien and isolated from humankind.
The activities of Kulbokaitė and Gawęda’s Young Girl Reading Group (YGRG), launched in 2013, combine the formats of performance, performative installation, exhibition, reading group, and social network community. To date, over 160 reading groups and performances have been held at various institutions and programs. The project started with the format of a wandering event that took place every week on Sundays in a variety of physical and virtual locations. The YGRG explores the act of reading as an intimate experience, believing in the potential of less well-known ideas to become public through the acts of verbalizing and publicizing them. The YGRG draws on historical and contemporary feminist thought; and, inspired by theory and fiction, it forms an intimate, discursive space through the collective reading experience. Launched as a physical book club for queer theory enthusiasts, the YGRG has become a community of artists looking for novel ways to approach text, to read and share knowledge. The duo is currently working on an online archive of the Young Girl Reading Group, which was presented in April 2020 in collaboration with contemporary exhibition platform ARIEL, Feminisms in the Aesthetics (Copenhagen).
Both artists completed their master’s studies at the Royal College of Arts in London. Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė presented solo exhibitions at the Julia Stochek Collection in Düsseldorf, the Body Archive project space in Zurich, the Trafó House of Contemporary Arts in Budapest, the Fri Art Kunsthalle / WallRiss in Freiburg, the Amanda Wilkinson Gallery in London, the Centre for Contemporary Art FUTURA in Prague. Their work has been exhibited at such institutions as the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, Lafayette Anticipations in Paris, Spazio Maiocchi in Milan, the Contemporary Art Center in Vilnius, the Institute of Contemporary Art in London, Kunsthalle Basel in Basel, SMK – National Gallery of Denmark in Copenhagen, Kunstverein for the Rhineland and Westphalia in Düsseldorf. The artists participated at the 6th Athens Biennale ANTI (2018), the 6th Moscow International Biennalle for Young Art (2018), the 13th Baltic Triennial (2018), and the 9th Berlin Biennial (2016).