Entangled Tales
Rupert
4 July - 3 August 2018
Vilnius, Lithuania
Curated by Justė Jonutytė and Yates Norton
Artists: Rebecca Ackroyd, Stefania Batoeva, Julie Béna, Ragna Bley, Than Hussein Clark, Olivia Erlanger, Merike Estna, Daiga Grantina, Celia Hempton, Tamara Henderson, Ieva Kraule, Jenine Marsh, Daria Melnikova, Rūtenė Merkliopaitė, Mikołaj Moskal, Rosalind Nashashibi, Athena Papadopoulos, Zoë Paul, Daniel Rossi, Viktorija Rybakova, Anastasija Sosunova, Indrė Šerpytytė, Jala Wahid
Entangled Tales brings together local and international artists to look at the ways in which we think, communicate and live with matter. The exhibition’s theme takes the lead from the artists’ practices and recent feminist approaches to materiality and ‘new materialism’. It considers how our correspondences with the matter with which we are entangled offer ways to explore memory, the body, forms of participation and modes of knowing. Looking at how artists work and think with their materials, Entangled Tales considers how matter is not inert, passively awaiting our formation and control. Rather, matter responds to touch and we in turn respond to and are touched by it. Life emerges in such co-responses with a world of matter, beings, processes. How this world is configured through practices and responses enables (and can prevent) other responses to emerge in turn. As such, there is an ethics of care and responsibility in this acknowledgement of matter as something with and through which we think and act, as many feminist scholars and practitioners in various fields have observed. Karen Barad, from whose writings the exhibition takes its title, argues that responsibility to other lives and the world with which we are entangled involves being able to respond to such lives, to be ‘response-able’ to them. And to be able to respond itself requires an attentiveness to the lifeworlds with which we live.
Installation photography by Andrej Vasilenko