The artist collective Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė (Young Girl Reading Group) uses the reading circle principle as a critical practice and investigates the embodiment of language as artistic practice. In the guided rounds of joint reading of scientific and fictional texts, they turn the practice, which often takes place so individually and silently, into a collaborative experience of the text. Together with the artists, the participants examine how thoughts and sensations, prior knowledge and intertextual references accompany the reading, have a physical effect and in turn influence the way we read and what we perceive and experience. Through the use of technical devices, e.g. when reading texts on a smartphone, both body and text are removed from the physical presence and recontoured or contextualised as human-machine relationships. The artist's long-term project offers a self-confident aesthetic space for intimate speculative experiences of the many-sided alternating effects between text, body, environment and technology.
As part of the exhibition project "DEAR HUMANS, ....", Schimmel Projects - Art Centre Dresden presents a spatial installation by the artist duo. In 'YGRG14X: reading with a single hand VIII', the reading of the text is shifted to a performative situation that can be experienced physically and sensually, and the focus from the study of the text per se is on the investigation of productive interrelations between physical and virtual presence, self and world, but also collective reading as an experience of overcoming complicated contemporary relationships. For Schimmel Projects Art Centre Dresden and DEAR HUMANS, Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė are creating an experimental spatial installation that turns text reading into a critical experience of empowerment and care that can be experienced physically and sensually.
Dorota Gawęda (b. 1986, Lublin, PL) and Eglė Kulbokaitė (b. 1987, Kaunas, LT) are an artist duo founded in 2013. Both are graduates of the Royal College of Art, London (2012) and are the founders of YOUNG GIRL READING GROUP (2013- ). Gawęda and Kulbokaitė have exhibited internationally including: Lafayette Anticipations, Paris; HKW, Berlin; 6th Athens Biennale; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; MOMA, Warsaw; ICA, London; MMOMA, Moscow; Berlin Biennale 9 among others.
Photos by Paul Barsch.
