Public guided tour

Oh, make your fingernails into spades, Your palms into shovels

Sa, 14 05 2022, 1:00 pm

We start our exhibition program with the opening of Oh, make your fingernails into spades, Your palms into shovels, the first institutional solo exhibition of the Polish-Lithuanian duo Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė in Austria.

During the tour one of our art mediators will provide an introduction to the show. At Kunstraum, you can expect a selection of the duo's recent works, which set a melancholic, elegiac tone. The title of the exhibition is a quote from a lament the duo wrote as the basis of their video installation Mouthless Part II (2021), which is also part of the exhibition. How can we relate to a present that, with Timothy Morton, shows similarities to noir fiction? A present in which we are both criminal and investigator in the same case? On the list of charges: the sixth mass extinction, the Anthropocene, and the emergence of new viruses.

However gloomy this may sound, Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė do not design didactic educational pieces in their multimedia practice, nor will you leave the exhibition in deep melancholy: Their practice combines theoretical and literary references with references to Eastern European folklore in a fascinating way - with a pronounced sensitivity to sensory and material details.

We continue to ask for registration at anmeldung[at]kunstraum.net with the subject line "guided tour Oh make your fingernails … - 14.05.".

Curator: Katharina Brandl
Artists: Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė