Vartai Gallery, 9 Nov 2023 - 13 Jan 2024.

The mysterious Sphinx, half-woman, half-lion, arouses desire. Fetish is where the secret joins the strange, and their encounter becomes ambivalent – the sphinx we nourish secretly at our core. Karl Marx had a theory of fetish as a socioeconomic hieroglyphic; Michel Leiris diagnosed the West with an ethnopsychiatric condition of Eurocentric fetishism; and Jean Baudrillard thought of it as a simulacrum, which is never the one that conceals the truth — “it is the truth which conceals that there is none.“

A fetish needs a body, a screen of representation, an object of desire, a foreign culture, or a female figure; to put it simply – the other. In the twelfth-century Latin-speaking Europe, laws regulating heresy were introduced, forbidding practices of witchcraft or the so-called maleficia – “evil deeds”. Among these were fertility rites, abortion methods and other remedies used by women, named facticiosa. A related term fechura stood for the manufacture of magical objects. At the end of the century, when Portugal emerged as a kingdom and Portuguese as a distinct language, the translation feitiço was born. In the fifteenth century, when the Portuguese first reached the Senegal River and encountered African societies, the religious objects of local inhabitants were labelled feitiço, to depreciate and distinguish such spiritual practices from the Christian ones.

In this exhibition, we play with the historical meaning of fetish as the unknown originating in the demonization of women’s practices, which itself later grew into the fetishization of objects and, finally, of entire cultures. We begin our narrative from the history of the Venetian Renaissance courtesan culture, where a woman could only feel liberated if she existed at the margins of society and engaged in clandestine activities. Although living in precarity and danger, courtesans were some of the most educated, liberated and influential women in all of Europe, making them someone we can look up to even today. Veronica Franco (1546-1591), a courtesan and a poetess famous for both professions in her time, has become an inspiration and a guide in our research in Venice. Digging through ancient books and archives of textiles, we were looking for liaisons between the female body, courtesan culture, publishing, and material heritage as early manifestations of feminist engagement. The study of female sexuality – historically veiled, feared, controlled, and fetishized by the patriarchal gaze – became an invitation for us to negotiate space. The space of the gallery Vartai, a commercial art venue in a high-ceiling romantic interior, reminded us of the Italian ridotto, or salon, where semi-public encounters between artists, poets, intellectuals and their customers – high-class male investors and politicians – would take place. It is in those salons that Veronica was performing readings of her passionate, daring, erotic and critical poems, an absolute exception within the literature of the time.

The anatomy can be of a woman, of an object, or of a culture. A sensory, even erotic perception of an object unfolds in the encounter between the gaze and what is hidden beneath. Silky frills reveal a pearl-encrusted wooden structure. Layers of time and touch, the worn and the unfinished overlay like drapes of fabric – veiled yet see-though, pleasing and teasing the onlooker. The inwards of a chair peak through its surface while its detached legs support the human organs made of glass, the latter reminding us of the four humours or bodily fluids that determine our health and existence in the world. A baldaquin falls from the ceiling, kept together only by the courtesans’ embroidered poems. An illusion of a terracotta landscape arises, with rivers of Venetian ochre clay and mountains of glass, the transcendent material developed in Egypt.

Ancient Egypt, the cradle of us all, has been intriguing and fascinating us, Westerners, for millennia. The ultimate cultural fetish, Egyptomania, reminds us of the unbridgeable gap between the inaccessible past and its representation. Archaeology might be compared with psychoanalysis. Unravelling the psyche layer after layer, one also uncovers layers of the buried humanity, disclosing collective fears, desires, memories and, above all, fetishes. The psyche, constructed by the history of conquers, misogyny, and phantasms.

Anatomy of the Fetish fluctuates between the somatic and the epistemic, communication and collaboration being its primary methodology: with texts and people, with objects, bodies and materials. Conversing with the dead, working with the hands, moving through the space of superstitions, dreams, prophecies – the vertigo of the fantasy takes over. Splendour intertwines with nudity, desire with ridicule. Because a true fetishist simultaneously recognises the phantasy and is driven by it; in no way does awareness reduce the power of the fetish.

Goda Palekaitė and Marija Puipaitė

The Invisibles. Historic Furniture from a Contemporary Design Perspective

Museum of Applied Arts and Design, Vilnius, Lithuania.

24 Mar 2022 - 27 Feb 2023.

Curated together with Monika Lipšic and Vytautas Gečas.

Historical research: dr. Eglė Bagušinskaitė.

Exhibition design: IMPLMNT architects.

Graphic design: Jonė Miškinytė.

Photo: Darius Petrulaitis.

This exhibition is an invitation to take a fresh look at the furniture stored in the collections of the biggest Lithuanian museums: objects and interior details belonging to different periods, presented in a polyphonic conversation with the works of contemporary designers and artists. The exhibition title pays tribute to the “invisibles” - the furniture that lives in museum repositories, often only accessible to curators, historians, and conservators. The repository itself and its material history became this exhibition's main source of inspiration. In addition to representative historical furniture, the museum vaults contain “forgotten” objects that would never be displayed or restored due to being too deteriorated or not considered valuable enough. The curators suggest seeing the value of the objects as a reflection of Lithuania’s history. There was often little information about the objects in museum vaults, so the curators, the historian Dr. Eglė Bagušinskaitė, and the conservators searched for various historical facts and contexts. This information, interconnected in the perspective of time, materials, and changing technologies, allowed them to look at the furniture subjectively. The research will complement the stories held in the museum repositories. The exhibition aims to reveal the potential of these “silent” objects as participants of everyday life coming from different periods and to introduce the audience to old furniture technologies, restoration features, and the culture of Lithuania’s and the region’s historic interiors.

The exhibition also features newly commissioned works by Lithuanian and foreign artists, who interpret the exhibits in Lithuanian museum repositories by creating contemporary design works. They are complemented by existing design objects by Lithuanian and foreign designers and brands. These works continue to complement, extend, speak to, and comment on the furniture from Lithuanian museum repositories selected by the curators. In this way, design as the object creation process extends as a way of thinking. It becomes a means of appreciating historical objects, drawing attention to our current relationship with furniture and the environment. The architecture of the exhibition, developed in collaboration with the team of IMPLMNT architects, becomes yet another - the largest - piece of furniture on display, interpreting and deconstructing the idea of a storage shelf. After all, the shelves that house most of the furniture in museum repositories are usually invisible to the public. As the hall's space opens up, the racking structure offers different trajectories of movement through the space in historically non-linear perspectives, where old furniture from museum collections is seen from the perspective of contemporary design-thinking.

Participants:

Aistė Ambrazevičiūtė (LT)

Audrey Large (FR)

Autotelic Objects (LT)

Benjamin Motoc (FR)

Carolina Sardal Jerhov (SE)

Darius Petrulaitis (LT)

Dirk van der Kooij (NL)

dr. Gora Parasit (LT)

Delphine Lejeune Delphine Lejeune x Clara Schweers x Kurina Sohn (FR/ DE/ KR)

Eglė Pilkauskaitė (LT)

Emko (LT)

jot.jot (LT)

Išora x Lozuraitytė Studio (LT)

Kotryna Butautytė (LT)

Marija Puipaitė x Vytautas Gečas (LT)

Leo Maher (UK)

Lucas Muñoz Muñoz x Ines Sistiaga (ES)

Mantas Lesauskas (LT)

Moustache (FR)

Natyvai (LT)

Rokas Dovydėnas (LT)

Rūta Palionytė x Aistė Baranauskaitė (LT)

Studio Luuk van Laarhoven (NL)

Tadeáš Podracký (CZ)

Tuomas Markunpoika (FI)

Vladas Suncovas (LT)

Exhibition space Titanikas, Vilnius Academy of Arts, May 2021.

Curated and designed together with Vytautas Gečas, 2021.

Graphic design: Taktika Studio.

Photo: Norbert Tukaj.

"Post Sakralus" is an object exhibition of contemporary Lithuanian design, which exhibits the latest works of actively creating graduates and lecturers of the Vilnius Art Academy Design department. The aim is to reveal the scope of Lithuanian design today and the individual practices of designers: to show in what real and fictional worlds design works were born, ask what designers believe in today, and show how they create their faith/ creative field/ playground.

The exhibition's architecture aims to provide an opportunity to focus on one "faith” and its "sacral" object at a time and intuitively, in front of the object, from hints, understand the position of each author and context.

The exhibition "Post Sakralus" was a part of the 60th-anniversary events of the Department of Design of the Vilnius Academy of Arts.

Participants:

Lukas Avėnas, Nedas Vilkas/ Rmatura

Barbora Adamonytė-Keidūnė

Dominykas Budinas, AKO TRIKE team

Juozas Brundza/ LTD studio

etc.etc. studio for jot.jot

Evelina Kudabaitė

Austėja Platūkytė

Rapolas Gražys/ Lava Drops

Mantas Lesauskas

Less Table

Gintarė Černiauskaitė

Vartai Gallery, 17 June - 5 August 2021.

Curated and designed together with Vytautas Gečas.

Photo: Norbert Tukaj.

Close-up photo: Jonas Balsevičius.

Personal Scale features design projects by twenty individual and collaborative authors. A wide range of design perspectives and practices demonstrates the possibility of discussing sustainability differently, without objective truths or rules. The exhibition blurs the line between whether an object is handmade or industrially produced, regardless of whether it is made of new or recycled material, whether it is natural or synthetic, unique or intentionally mass-produced. Sustainability unfolds here not only in the material or in the way it is made but also in the possession of a personal relationship that allows us to get to know the objects around us better and to question the established relationship with them.

Participants:

Agnė Kučerenkaitė (LT)

Charlotte Jonckheer (BE)

Corradino Garofalo (IT)

Destroyers and Builders (BE)

Joan Vellvé Rafecas (SP)

Kiki & Joost (NL)

Kotryna Butautytė (LT)

Kodai Iwamoto (JP)

Lennart Lauren (NL)

Martynas Kazimierėnas (LT)

Messgewand (NL/FR)

Olivier van Herpt & Sander Wassink (NL)

Oskar Zięta (PL)

Pepe Heykoop (NL)

Pierre Castignola (FR)

Plasticiet (NL)

Sarmite Polakova (LV)

Sho Ota (JP)

Vartai Gallery, 13 Dec 2019 - 24 Jan 2020.

Curated together with Vytautas Gečas.

Photo: Laurynas Skeisgiela.

Alert Objects features design projects by nine authors. Many participants are alumni of the Design Academy Eindhoven, and their practice shares an approach to making objects to address and influence the broader cultural and social field. The exhibition title refers to the logical contradiction evident in our daily life: the things surrounding us are not just inanimate and passive signs of their time and culture but rather have subjective qualities, impose their order, and shape our self-perception.

Participants:

Bram Vanderbeke (BE)

Wendy Andreu (FR)

Lucas Muñoz Muñoz (ESP)

Paulius Vitkauskas (LT)

Martynas Kazimierėnas (LT)

Marija Puipaitė (LT)

Vytautas Gečas (LT)

Satomi Minoshima (JP)

Hansol Kim (KR)

Etienne Marc (FR)