Laura Garbštienė is born in 1973 in the small town of Vilkija (Lithuania) and presently lives in Vilnius. She completed the Master's program in Textile Arts at Vilnius Academy of Fine Arts in 2000 and collaborated with the artist and composer Artūras Bumšteinas (artist‘s duo „G-Lab") in 2002 - 2005 creating video and sound installations. Since 2002 she is working in the fields of video art, installation, photography, action and performance art. Characteristic feature of Laura's work is that she becomes an object of her own works. She immerses herself into various situations, becomes an integral part of them and thus provokes the viewer with her performance. The significant aspect of the artist's practice is the experimentation with language, fluctuation of meanings of the words, chance, provocative naiveté, the tune of subjective emotional experience and generality within the multicultural contexts. In some of her recent works by Laura Garbštienė one can notice allusions to the discourse of institutional critique.
Laura Garbštienė - CV
Artworks
Film About Unknown Artist
Film installation, 8 mm blow up to 16 mm, 11 min, 2009
"Unknown artist visits memorial plate dedicated for unrecognized forgotten unknown artist (artwork by Konstantinas Bogdanas), located in the backyard of Vilnius Art Academy. Artist feels guilty of being unknown artist and decides to travel to holy places in Lithuania to do penance. Artist goes to small village to attend Church festival on Sunday Mass. She joins a procession of young women wearing wedding dresses and pouring flower blossoms there. Then she travels to spring of holy water and draws some water famous for it's miraculous power. Later she finds small wooden church and goes it on her knees, then lies down in front of church crosswise. Then artist visits the lake where Saint Maryhad appeared in the past, there she wades in the water and stands next to statue of Saint Mary, embraces it and sings a song "You're My Heart You're My Soul" by Modern Talking. Then she jumps into the water while still wearing dress and swims to the other bank of the lake. She gets out from the water and suddenly finds herself standing by the bank of the River Seine in Paris. She is wearing the same dress. She walks streets of Paris and goes to metro. There she meets Gypsy playing accordion and asking for money. They decide to work together: he plays accordion and she dances pole dance on poles inside metro trains. She earns enough money for making her film. Film is About Unknown Artist".
Laura Garbštienė
Eagle
Videofilm, 15 min, 2009
Artist dances and sings popular love songs from 80's and 90's in front of a huge monument in Worpswede village, Germany, called "The Stone of Lower Saxony" (in German: Niedersachsenstein). In 1915, when the statue had been started to plan, its function was originally devoted to celebrate a victory of Germany in the World War I, but in 1922 it was inaugurated as a monument for the fallen soldiers. Due to unpleasant historical connotations, it now stands lonely and forgotten.
Bremen Town Musicians
Videofilm, 5 min, 2008
"While working at artist‘s residency at Künstlerhäuser Worpswede, Germany, I invited local professional musicians to write a love song for my video work. I made the lyrics of the song out of populist speeches by German politicians of the present and the past".
Laura Garbštienė
Love is
Book
Object - book shelf
Installation - a book on the table
2008
Laura Garbštienė: „This is the text from the first page of the book. The texts of other pages contain direct translations from and to English made using the automated translation programs. The process of translation is repeated back and forth numerous times. In result, I've got 75 texts in "English" the meanings of which gradually change; while the new words appear and the previous ones disappear, the texts turn into absurd word scramble. This transformation of the text reminds me of the creativity of mentally ill or of people who communicate with other worlds. The text here becomes a medium, an associative means of achieving the goal.
I use the automated translation programs that have a very limited ability to translate correctly as a tool for extending the unruly love story. I rewrote 75 texts by hand into a neat calligraphy which I never learned at school. Therefore I had to practice quite a bit to be able to do that now. The text written by hand is the ultimate truth and I sincerely believe in that, which I have learned to write naively and beautifully.
Home version / circles with melody to let a squirrel wander
Video performance, 3 min. 11 sek., 2007
Laura Garbštienė is riding a bike inside the studio at the artists' residency in Finland. The room, which is too small for a regular bike ride, shapes the circular counterclockwise trajectory of the ride. „Melody to let a squirrel wander" is used for the soundtrack of this video work. Unexpected and surreal act creates an absurd atmosphere of anticipation, loneliness and conventionality of a celebration.
Untitled
Untitled, hand-made photo album, 2007
This work was created for the project „Čiurlionis 2420" at CAC, Vilnius. Čiurlionis (1846-1914) is the most prominent and representative figure in Lithuanian art history, that has generated much of the political, art historical and critical thought around its legacy. The head of a dear and the abbreviation CAC (in Lith. ŠMC) are embroidered on the white linen cover of the photo album. The abbreviation evokes the initials of the famous artist - Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis (MKČ). Laura Garbštienė draws a parallel between MKČ and ŠMC - the two objects of cultural politics. The black pages of the album feature three photographs: one depicts Adolf Hitler feeding a hind (this photo was found online), another one - Arnold Schwarzenegger also feeding a hind (a scene from the film „Commando", 1985 ) and the third one captures the artist herself posing next to a mounted hind at Kaunas Museum of Zoology. Laura Garbštienė integrates different political, artistic and pop culture contexts and rethinks CAC (ŠMC) and MKČ within the context of institutional critique.
What should I do so that the unicorn would come and lay it's head on my lap? Installation (3 photographs, objects), 2006
In this installation the artist refers to the medieval myth of the unicorn, which is often depicted in the ancient tapestries. According to the myth, only the virgins can attract the unicorns. The only other way to meet the unicorn is the way of trickery. Garbštienė enacts a ritual - dressed in a white dress she attempts to entice the mystic creature. The artist invited a professional photographer to photograph her in the forests of the Alps as a supermodel and at the same time - an innocent creature. The photographs are complemented by two objects: a wax figurine of the unicorn and a piece of white chalk on the shelf. The artist employs the symbolism of virginity and tabula rasa for embodying the contemporary interpretation of the unicorn myth.
Three of Us
Video, 7 min., 2006
Video work „Three of Us" is shot in the St. John's protestant church in Düsseldorf and is made to appear like a music video. In this work the artist, dressed in a pink dress, sings a psalm in Arabian language in front of the altar. The southerner at the other end of the nave is backing her singing with the drums. The German shepherd is lying passively in the middle. The artist, the drummer and the dog are never shown in the same shot. The camera captures only one or two of them at once. This video is one of the Garbštienė‘s works where she draws on an incomprehensible foreign language and uses it as an intuitive-semantic and poetic component of her work. The artist mixes the Arabian, Western European and the cultures of the South and is daringly breaking the rules at the same time questioning the stability of convictions and dogmas.
Blind Messages
Video, 12 min., video and sound installation, 2005
Video
Slides
"I am trying to think I am like you all. Or even try to keep the conversation. But the distance is deep in my mind".
The artist created this installation at the artists‘residency in Norway. It speaks of the careless human relationship in times of disposable modernity. In this work the artist has filmed herself standing in the fogy mountains of Norway. From time to time the artist utters the phrases - random sentences in Norwegian. The slides show the people met by the artist. It is often impossible to recognize the person in the photograph, because the artist was primarily focused on expressing the impression of a meeting and self exploration. The images are connected with the fragments of a personal text - the stories from the artist‘s diaries.
For the sound installation the artist used her own recordings of Norwegian language that she made in the streets, from the radio programs and audio books. Laura Garbštienė deconstructs the language in an attempt to perceive its specificity. The artist uses the fragments of the records, eliminates the meaning and leaves only phonetic sound thus creating short audio pieces. The soundtrack, which also contains the moments of silence, is played through different CD players that randomly select the pieces and are located around the room.
