Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė

Dorota Gawęda (Lublin, PL) and Eglė Kulbokaitė (Kaunas, LT) are an artist duo living and working in Basel, Switzerland. Both graduated from the Royal College of Art in London in 2012. Their work spans performance, sculpture, painting, fragrance and video. They are the founders of the YOUNG GIRL READING GROUP (2013–2021). Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė exhibited internationally including: Kunstraum Niederoesterreich, Vienna (2022); Centre Culturel Suisse, Paris (2022); Kunstverein Hamburg (2021); Istituto Svizzero, Palermo and Milan (2021); Kunstverein Leipzig (2021); Swiss Institute, New York (2020); Julia Stoschek Collection, Düsseldorf (2020); Fri Art – Kunsthalle Fribourg (2020); Futura, Prague (2019); Lafayette Anticipations, Paris (2019); Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2018); Cell Project Space, London (2018); 6th Athens Biennale (2018); Kunsthalle Basel (2017); ICA, London (2017); MOMA, Warsaw (2016); Berlin Biennale 9 (2016); MaM, Paris (2015) among others. They are the recipients of CERN Collide 2022 and laureates of the Swiss Performance Art Award 2021. Upcoming exhibitions of the duo include presentations at the Shedhalle, Zurich (2022); ar/ge kunst, Bolzano (2022) and EPFL Pavilions, Lausanne (2023).

Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė are participants of the (Inter)national Residency Program of Οnassis AiR 2019-20 and of the Tailor-made Fellowships program 2022-23.

In their work, Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė address feminist-inspired theory and (science)fiction, technology-driven emancipation and the discursiveness of space. They work within a variety of media, spanning performance, installation, fragrance, sculpture and video. With YOUNG GIRL READING GROUP (YGRG), an ongoing serial project (2013–), they examine the relationships between reading, affect, distraction, togetherness and disunity, bodily and virtual presence, live action and documentation, interested in how the collective experience of being together can be inscribed in space and how language can become material and embodied. For YGRG, the body of flesh, the location of the reading and the technology used, personify language, perform text and present that very contradiction —of processing material to immaterial, immaterial to material complexities of perceived bodies and environments. The body is re-textualized through technology and the reading is made public and embodied, positing the interdependence of the text, the body, the environment and the technology. The porosity of the queer reading produces a horizontal, useless, amoral and sensual space that lives only in and for experience. In their performances, the ongoing concern is to reconsider the way in which reading has developed as a solitary, internalized practice within the modern society, thus having a formative influence on desire and the sexual experiences of individuals. Their current research focuses on the commodification of the ‘scopic’, the over-privileged position of vision over other senses, especially smell but also touch and sound.

During their residency at Onassis ΑiR, Gawęda and Kulbokaitė aim to further expand YGRG’s activity through research into emerging technologies of motion tracking, the conceptual and actual possibilities of tactile internet, and the implications those hold for live performance. They further hope to run a number of reading group sessions.

They will be doing research into their ambitious and extended serial project they commenced in October 2019. It stems from their ongoing YOUNG GIRL READING GROUP (YGRG) research taking from it a serial and fragmented form and collective reading as narrative trigger. Following D. Haraway, embodiment is not about fixed location in a reified body, but about nodes in fields, inflections in orientations, and responsibility for difference in material-semiotic fields of meaning. Mouthless will be looking deeply into embodiment, place, sexuality, temporality, integrity and breakdown —the topics that they continuously explore with YGRG.

"We want the project to depict and contextualize the instability of boundaries that renders the reading body and its surroundings as the site of an active and ongoing set of relations, positing the interdependence of the text, the body, the environment and the technology. Fragmented in its form, 'Mouthless' is a hybrid project resisting an integrity expected of an artwork, striving for a fragmentariness rather than holism. Aesthetically, we are interested in the low budget b-horror and experimental film from Eastern Europe and plan to explore the format of a teleplay horror-mocumentary superimposed onto the gallery space. Conceptually we would like to explore the horror that is attributed to being outside (norm, society, etc.), which is inherently part of queer experience."

YOUNG GIRL READING GROUP (YGRG) is an ongoing serial project (2013–) that addresses feminist inspired theory and fiction as well as technology-driven emancipation, examining the relationships between reading, affect, distraction, togetherness and disunity, bodily and virtual presence, live action and documentation —interested in how the collective experience can be inscribed in space and how language becomes material and embodied. YGRG investigates the act of reading as an intimate experience while creating the potential for public performances through the "outlouding" of words. It is a community that looks for a different way of approaching text and reading and sharing knowledge. It uses the reading circle principle as a critical practice and investigates the embodiment of language as artistic practice.