Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė: RYXPER1126AE

The exhibition RYXPER1126AE could be visited online between 24th of March and 26th of April, 2020 during our regular opening hours (all days, except Monday, from 4pm to 10pm).

The exhibition of Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė invites and isolates the visitors at the same time, leading them into zones of the in-between. In-between the space of the real and that of the online realm, in-between matter and information, nature and its rendered representation, narration and theory, individual and collective experiences. Central to the exhibition is a fragrance, which is a synthetic molecular replica, a volatile memory of the smell collected during one of the previous performances of the artists. The scent together with other elements in the exhibition – such as organic installation, a video generated with artificial intelligence, a sound installation and diverse objects – renders the abandoned gallery space an aberrant, organic but also austere speculative environment.

(Borbála Szalai)

The show - that slipped to online platforms - is complemented by accompanying events, performance documentation, an online collective reading session in relation to the Young Girl Reading Group project of the artists ongoing since 2013 and to Trafó Gallery’s Hangover Reading Club series offering timely theoretical texts for discussion as well as a reader assembled by the artists. The reader includes theoretical texts by Karen Barad (Nature’s Queer Performativity), Donna J. Haraway (Tentacular Thinking (Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene)), Margarida Mendes (Molecular Colonialism), Timothy Morton (Queer Ecology), and Paul B. Preciado (Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era). If you would like to receive the reader, please write a mail to gallery@trafo.hu. 

Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė: RYXPER1126AE

‘This enclosed container houses something we cannot perceive, a memory to the past or an illusion. It is enclosed here in its image and its form, flattened akin to a 19th century diorama. A camera establishes the way of seeing without permission to full understanding without permission to be inhaled.’

Ella Plevin's fictional story RYXPER1126AE inspired by the scent bearing the same name 

fullscreen view | exhibition map

Dorota Gawęda (b. 1986, PL) and Eglė Kulbokaitė (b. 1987, LT) are an artist duo based in Basel (CH). They work within a variety of media spanning performance, photography, installation, fragrance, sculpture and video. Gawęda and Kulbokaitė are MA graduates of the Royal College of Art, London (2012), and have been working together since 2013. In their work, the duo explore artistic production through collaboration and search for aberrant media that lend themselves to creating speculative environments. Formally, Gawęda and Kulbokaitė explore incompleteness and linguistic ingraspability, apparent both in their approach to performance as in the sculptural objects and environments that they propose, offering ways to renegotiate our complex relationship to Nature - ecological system that we have historically defined as separate to ourselves, as outside.

Gawęda and Kulbokaitė are also the founders of YOUNG GIRL READING GROUP (2013-), an extended serial project under which they organized more than 150 reading groups and performances at a sustained pace and at various locations. Currently the duo are developing the YOUNG GIRL READING GROUP digital archive, which will launch in April 2020, in collaboration with ARIEL- Feminisms in the Aesthetics, Copenhagen.

Their past solo exhibitions include: Amanda Wilkinson Gallery, London (2020 and 2018); Fri Art – Centre d’Art de Fribourg / Kunsthalle Fribourg and Wallriss (2020); Futura, Prague (2019); Schimmel Projects - Art Centre Dresden (2019); Lucas Hirsch Gallery, Düsseldorf (2019); Cell Project Space, London (2018); Knipsu Gallery, Bergen, Norway (2018); Mikro, Zurich, Switzerland (2017); Sodų 4 and Editorial, Vilnius (2017); Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf (2017); 1.1, Basel (2017).

Selected group exhibitions include: Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf (2019); Lafayette Anticipations, Paris (2019); Spazio Maiocchi, Milan (2018); 6th Athens Biennale (2018); Kim?, Riga (2018); Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin (2018); Baltic Triennial 13, CCA / Tallinna Kunstikoone, Tallinn (2018), SMC/Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius (2017); Musée d’Orsay, Paris (2018); 6th Moscow Biennale For Young Art, MMOMA, Moscow (2018); Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2018); Galerie Barbara Weiss, Berlin (2018); Kunstverein Freiburg (2017); Kunsthalle Basel (2017); Institute of Contemporary Art, London (2017); SMK - National Gallery of Denmark, Copenhagen (2017); de Appel, Amsterdam (2017); Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw (2016); SALTS, Basel, (2016); Berlin Biennale 9 (2016); Hessel Museum, Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, NY (2016); Kunsthalle Zürich, (2015); Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (2015), among others

Online accompanying events

2020/03/24 - 04/04

Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė: SULK

The video SULK is composed of documentation material from the performance of YGRG159:SULK (2018), which took place at ANTI - Athens Biennale 6 and gave rise to RYXPER1126AE fragrance now on view at Trafo Gallery. YGRG159:SULK is a performance in six acts, contractual, ritual-like gestures carried out as part of the choreography, each of which contributed to the olfactory composition of RYXPER1126AE. Thinking through Foucauldian biopolitics as well as pharmacopornographic regime (Paul B. Preciado), we can no longer understand bodies as “finite unities” but instead fluid, porous cartographies or else distributed networks of corporate agency (Margarida Mendes).

Performers: Hara Kiri, Belle Santos, Petros Touloudis

The script of the performance includes appropriated excerpts of texts by Ursula K. Le Guin, Margarida Mendes, Elvia Wilk, Donna Haraway, Sara Ahmed, Rosi Braidotti, George Eliot, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Sarah Sharma, Octavia Butler, Olga Tokarczuk, Leslie Jamison, Richard Sennett, Timothy Morton, Hito Steyerl, Martti Kalliala and others.

Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė: SULK, 2018. Video still.

2020/04/05 - 04/18

Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė: Fledgling

The video entitled Fledgling (2019) is based on the documentation of the performance SULK III presented in the frameworks of Kaleidoscope Manifesto Festival of Lafayette Anticipations, Paris. Performers: Elena Marija, Albane Gayet, Luki von der Gracht

Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė: Fledgling, 2019.

2020/04/18 (SAT) 11:30am

YOUNG GIRL READING GROUP 165

The reading session will be led by artists Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė.

YOUNG GIRL READING GROUP is a project by artist duo Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė, which came into existence as an actual, weekly reading group in their Berlin flat in 2013. Since then, under this extended serial performative project the artists organized more than 160 reading groups and performances at a sustained pace and at various locations. Young Girl Reading Group started from a collective reading of texts which explore broadly the intersections between gender and technology. In the course of YGRG165 we will focus on selected texts from the reader that Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė edited to complement the exhibition RYXPER1126AE. The texts we will read will be in English as well as the discussion held online. To receive the texts and the technical information needed for you to join in, please send a message to gallery@trafo.hu.

Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė, SULK III, 2019. Lafayette Anticipations, Paris. Photo: Vadim Kovriga and Cristelle Owona Nisin.

2020/04/19 - 04/26

Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė: Conjuring

The video entitled Conjuring (2019) is based on the documentation of the performance SULK III presented in the frameworks of Kaleidoscope Manifesto Festival of Lafayette Anticipations, Paris.

Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė: Conjuring, 2019. Videostill.

Supported by: Pro Helvetia, National Cultural Fund of Hungary, Káli Kövek, Embassy of the Republic of Lithuania to Hungary