Synthetic Landscapes

Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė are an artist duo living and working in Basel. Their multimedia practice – which includes performances, videos, sculptural and installation works, as well as perfumes – draws from extensive historical and theoretical research processes, a high sensitivity to materials, and intellectual openness.

Synthetic Landscapes

Synthetic Landscapes looks into the history of Western landscape painting and specifically the formation of the concept of nature as that which has been defined as alien, outside of the subject, in an effort to better understand the current ecological crisis. The project poses a challenge to the illusory promise of subjectivity as a whole and as separate from the environment, seeking to break normative behavior patterns and negotiate new ways of relating to the world.

Collaborations: EPFL Center for Imaging, GAN and AI, environmental research at the EPFL.

Mouthless Part III (Panorama)

Dates of the exhibition:
3.-26.02.2023
EPFL Pavilions – Pavilion A

Unfolding through a two-channel video installation, Mouthless Part III (Panorama) brings the spell of Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė’s visual universe into the space. It is part of their research project Synthetic Landscapes and the third chapter of their Mouthless video series.

Gawęda and Kulbokaitė collaborated with engineers at the EPFL Imaging Center and Image Analysis Hub and scientists to explore GAN aesthetics and environmental research. Technical and scientific inputs have been absorbed and integrated into the folkloric tropes of an opulent narrative and aesthetic that develops across two channels as a conversation between two characters: an archetypal Eastern European peasant and a landscape demon. Mouthless Part III (Panorama) is a delightful disruption of technoscience, where storytelling, science, advanced digital technologies, the character study, fashion, and a nuanced soundscape all converge, queering genres, haunting the context, and illuminating transtemporal links through a calibrated visual narrative.

Exhibition/project credits

Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė, Mouthless Part III (Panorama), 2023

Commissioned and produced in the framework of EPFL – CDH Artist in Residence Program 2022, Enter the Hyper-Scientific.

Curator & Head of Pogram: Giulia Bini

Graphic design and Identity: Jakob Kirch (Lamm & Kirch)

In collaboration with:
EPFL Center for Imaging, GAN and AI, environmental research at the EPFL.

Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė

Dorota Gawęda (1986, Lublin, Poland) and Eglė Kulbokaitė (1987, Kaunas, Lithuania) are an artist duo in Basel, Switzerland. Both are graduates of the Royal College of Art, London (2012) and founders of the Young Girl Reading Group (2013–21). They work in multiples across performance, painting, sculpture, fragrance, and video installation—where language breaks down and one genre morphs into many. Transfusing different bodies of knowledge across space and time, Gawęda and Kulbokaitė nurture a research-based practice that weaves together fields as seemingly disparate as ecology and technology, science and magic, and nonhuman intelligence and shared speculation. An interest in folklore runs through their work and their storytelling weirds the relationship between body and landscape, opening up alternative states and temporalities through queerness and magic.

The duo has exhibited internationally, including at ar/ge Kunst, Bolzano (2022); Shedhalle, Zürich (2022); Kunstraum Niederoesterreich, Vienna (2022); Centre Culturel Suisse, Paris (2022); Kunstverein Hamburg (2021); Istituto Svizzero, Palermo and Milan (2021); Kunstverein Leipzig (2021); Swiss Institute, New York (2020); Julia Stoschek Collection, Düsseldorf (2020); Fri Art – Kunsthalle Fribourg (2020); Futura, Prague (2019); Lafayette Anticipations, Paris (2019); Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2018).
Upcoming projects will be presented at such institutions as Kunsthalle Mainz (2023) and Centre Pompidou, Paris (2023).

Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė website