Kliudžiau

I got it. The spinning camera zooming out in circles above an avatar lying on the cold virtual ground. Reload. I got it. Empty streets of another doomsday city seen from a window of an Internet café. And glitching dripping icicles from gutters, turning into fuzzy stray dogs as they fall down. I got it. Growing up as much in computer games as in your house, your room, your bed. I got it. A glistening arrow held in suspense versus a corrupt 3D-printing file for a neopuukko that freezes every printer mid-job. I got it. So young yet so shrivelled! Kliudžiau is the first solo project by Gedvilė Tamošiūnaitė in Improper Walls project space, Vienna. The exhibition features new productions by the artist as well as works created in collaboration with photographer Pavle Nikolic, illustrator Rūta Vėbraitė and fashion designer and artist Karolina Janulevičiūtė. The exhibition title Kliudžiau, originally a title of a story by 19-century Lithuanian writer Jonas Biliūnas, functions as a phonetic trope, an onomatopoeia, its pronunciation reminiscent of cutting, hitting, a physical material encounter. Kliudžiau presents new photographic series by Tamošiūnaitė that continue her research into the present overlaps of physical and digital realms. The exhibition explores different areas and states of these transitions, and the forms they take in individual's social and emotional being. Among them is the topic of adolescence as a period of physical and emotional change where the notion of playfulness and naive games may turn into acts of aggression or unsolicited violence. This aspect is elaborated through visual and conceptual clues to gaming and play, and the relations between violence and the sense of guilt, amplified by the presence of digital simulation and stimuli that have become coming-of-age issues during the past decades. The reoccurring leitmotif of these photographs, set in ice-like blocks of transparent epoxy resin, is a knife designed in a sci-fi style that the artist acquired during her research in preparation for the exhibition. The knife's iridescent blade gives a seducing aesthetic quality to the object of aggression and cruelty. Through slightly distorting 'lenses' of epoxy resin, the shots of the object deceitfully appear not as photographs but rather as digitally rendered images, bringing back the physical knife to its places of origins, mainly to computer games like "Mortal Combat" or other fantasy-cum-fighting video games. Other agents in the photography series – a boy, an Irish wolfhound, a webbed cluster of moth larvae – allude to various states of morphing, either as temporary states of change, or set conditions of hybridity. Text by: Ignas Petronis