RYXPER1126AE

The exhibition RYXPER1126AE can 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) >>> VIA THE FOLLOWING LINK <<<.

The exhibition of Dorota Gawęda and Egle Kulbokaite 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.

The show – that slipped to online platforms – is complemented by accompanying events, performance documentation and two online collective reading sessions 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.

Dorota Gawęda and Egle Kulbokaite: 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.’

Dorota Gawęda (b. 1986, PL) and Egle Kulbokaite (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 Kulbokaite 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 Kulbokaite 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 Kulbokaite 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.

Online accompanying events

2020/03/24 – 04/04

Dorota Gawęda and Egle Kulbokaite: 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.

2020/04/04 (SAT) 11:30

Hangover Reading Club #7 – Liquid bodies

The reading session will be led by independent curator Gyula Muskovics.

In the course of the virtual reading circle the participants will make an attempt to erode the boundaries between us and the other, between normal and abnormal, living and inanimate. The bits of texts we focus on this time will be in English, while the discussions held online will be in Hungarian. To receive the texts and the technical information needed for you to join, send a message to .

2020/04/05 – 04/18

Dorota Gawęda and Egle Kulbokaite: 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

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

YOUNG GIRL READING GROUP 165 – Purity and Danger

The reading session will be led by artists Dorota Gawęda and Egle Kulbokaite.

In the course of the virtual reading circle we will focus on Mary Douglas’ text Purity and Danger. 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, send a message to .

2020/04/19 – 04/26

Dorota Gawęda and Egle Kulbokaite: 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.