Lina Lapelytė & Antanas Gerlikas, Dance

2021

Short video


Antanas Gerlikas and Lina Lapelytė have been making and thinking about shoes. Antanas used some local wood from Neringa to make a par of heavy high heels. Lina made shoes for the slope (formed on the sand by the water of the sea) to straighten the beach walks. In the video, the two artists meet to perform a dance in their semi-functional shoes. Dance, a representation of lightness and grace, will turn into a deadpan situation where the authors become the extensions of their own wearable sculptures. During the dance, lightness is exchanged for heavyweight form and grace is exchanged for the angled sole which, when used on a straight surface, requires angled stance. It has been proposed that before the invention of written languages, dance played an important role in the oral and performance methods of passing stories from one generation to the next. In many cultures, dance is used as a medium to discuss difficult topics. Dance by Lapelytė and Gerlikas refers to the current impossibility of togetherness and dance as social interaction, therefore the constructed and staged form manifests as a reflection of the present day.

Dance by

Antanas Gerlikas & Lina Lapelytė

Camera and post production: Alanas Gurinas

Commissioned by Contemporary Art Centre (CAC), Vilnius Kim? Contemporary Art Centre Tallinn Art Hall Foundation

For the project History of Joy, Part 4

Co-financed by the Baltic Culture Fund

With special thanks to Virginija Januškevičiūtė, Tomas Buzas, Viktoras Petraitis, Mantas Petraitis, Raimundas Malašauskas, Forest Architecture (Jurga Daubaraite and Jonas Žukauskas), Agnė Kuprytė

Antanas Gerlikas & Lina Lapelytė © 2021

BIO

Lina Lapelytė's (b.1984, works in Vilnius and London) performance-based practice is rooted in music and flirts with pop culture, gender stereotypes and nostalgia. Her works engage trained and untrained performers often in an act of singing through a wide range of genres such as mainstream music and opera. The singing takes the form of a collective and affective event that questions vulnerability and silencing.

Her durational performance work Sun and Sea (Marina) made with Rugilė Barzdžiukaitė and Vaiva Grainytė represented Lithuania at the Venice Biennale of Art in 2019 and received the Golden Lion award for the best national participation.

Lapelytė's upcoming shows include Glasgow International, UK; Kunstenfestivaldesarts, Brussels; Kaunas Biennale, Lithuania; Pompeii Commitment and Castello di Rivoli, Italy.

Antanas Gerlikas (b. 1978, Lithuania) is an artist based in Vilnius. He holds BA and MA in sculpture from Vilnius Academy of Fine Arts. Gerlikas’s intention is to never make anything that resembles anything around him, therefore one of his main sources of inspiration is dreams, which offer him otherwise unthought-of forms, spaces, and actions. One of the recent purpose of his practice is to have an immediate experience of skill, to recognise movements at the point of a change-defining shift, which happens when aesthetics become equal with an action; to further embrace the fondness to this decisive moment without having to practice within the spheres and disciplines commonly associated with the phenomenon of skill. He has presented his art in exhibitions at P////AKT (with Laura Kaminskaitė, Amsterdam, 2018), CAC (Vilnius, 2016), Objectif Exhibitions (Antwerp, 2013), Art in General (New York, 2013), Lithuanian Pavilion, 55th Venice Biennale (2013).