KARINA DVOŽECKYTĖ
But There Are No Boundaries Within
2024 09 14 - 2024 10 14
As the bicycle bell rings restlessly in Karina Dvožeckytė's video work, the artist tells me about the ashes she has saved from the fireplace of her childhood home. With this exhibition, Dvožeckytė talks about the search for home, a journey that reaches its destination only after finding home in the boundless self that we carry with us, just as Dvožeckytė carries the ashes from her childhood with her as she moves in and out of dwellings. "But There Are No Boundaries Within", presented at Gallery T.2, Titnago st. 7, Vilnius, tells the story of individuality and eternity at the same time.
The exhibition starts with Karina Dvožeckytė's works depicting parts of a traditional Lithuanian house. Stepping inside from the industrial area of Paneriai, the contrast is created by the organic nature of the paintings. Ancient Lithuanians believed that the construction of a house was equivalent to the activity of the gods. Building a home is a cosmogonic act, creating a structure that will protect a person for life. Dvožeckytė builds her house with ash and soot, which became the birch wood she burnt when she moved into her stove-heated house.
Karina Dvožeckytė grew up reading Lithuanian fables. She began to really delve into Lithuanian culture when she started studying art. This shaped her identity as a creator. Part of her roots lie in the distant lands of the Yakuts. The artist's attraction to travel and her longing for nature remind her of the Sakha, traditionally a semi-nomadic people.
Travel is one of the fundamental parts of Dvožeckytė's work, and it becomes the second axis of the exhibition. In the video work, we follow the story of one of the non-stop wanderings and discoveries, while delving into the details of nature after a long ride out of the city, following the train tracks as it passes through Paneriai. In her wanderings, Karina captures a sense of nature through drawings made in the landscape that is depicted. Here we find a reference to Rosi Braidotti's notion of nomadism: the environment influences subjectivity, changing the individual by inspiring them to adapt, and as they adapt, their identity changes.
Karina leaves the shackles of the city and travels towards nature, where she finds the threads that connect her to both sides of her roots, preserving her rich traditions. With the world strongly focused on decolonisation, but at the same time with wars in which nations and minorities are subject to immence violence, such a tracing of roots becomes particularly relevant.
"The preservation of historical cultural memory creates a sense of 'homeland', a longing for one's homeland, and a desire to honour the ethno-cultural landscape." (Ulyana A. Vinokurova and Liliia P. Dambaeva, Sacred Sites of the Sakha People, 2009).
The painting "But There Are No Boundaries Within", after which the exhibition is named, shows the artist's gaze "illegally" flying from the seaside of Nida to the territory of Kaliningrad. The seaside, so familiar here, becomes an inaccessible space of the "other" just a few hundred meters away. Is the home a structure made of building materials, or is it nature, according to whose laws cultures are formed? Or is home inside, where there are no boundaries?
Curator Rūta Matulevičiūtė
Sponsored by Vilnius City Municipality
Exhibition will be open until October 14th.