Belly-up Dream (Dog or Fish?) | Ieva Rižė
On 26 September at 18.30, the fourth exhibition of the programme "Dream Belly-up (Dog or Fish?)" opens, featuring an installation by artist Ieva Rižė. During the opening, the artist will also present a performance alongside the exhibition.
"Nothing is as real as true happiness, or everything that is Real is dangerous", a stranger once said. Can we imagine a world without abstract fixations, without the limits of true knowledge?
As the cultural theorist Denise Ferreira da Silva argues, it is only thinking freed from certainties and relying on imagination that creates a new sociality, a new image of the world, without violence against the "Other". Relying on Denise's theory, the artist Ieva Rižė will present an intense spectrum of uncertainty, ignorance, fragmentation and ruptures in the fourth exhibition "Dream Belly-up (Dog or Fish?)". Here, commonality spills out like water, it spreads across the boundaries drawn by knowledge, status, religion, skin colour, gender, species.
Embodied knowledge, while often undermined and marginalised within the contemporary colonial episteme, confirms the West's establishment of one way of knowing. Meanwhile, sensuous knowledges, manifested through poetics, aesthetics and other bodily encounters, open up alternative ways of knowing ourselves and the world around us. It is this exploration of the relationship with the world and the environment that can be felt and experienced in Ieva Rižė's constructed bed (exhibition) for sleeping, where there is a frame, a mattress, a sheet, a pillow, a body, a blanket. Everything unfolds in layers: the artist's never-ending journey as a body unable to escape the effects of time and connections as markings of bodies. The sensuous, embodied, affective and imaginative relationship with the world opens the way for a different ethics and politics.
To open oneself to a different ethics and aesthetics and to leave behind, to abandon the image of the one true world, is a task that is always building up, but still remains only in the dream, only in the moment, only in the washed-out imaginative archives.
Ieva Rižė is an interdisciplinary artist living and working in Vilnius. Rižė holds a Bachelor's degree in Monumental Painting and Stage Design and a Master's degree in Contemporary Sculpture from the Vilnius Academy of Arts. Her practice includes three-dimensional painting, sculptural installations, video recordings and performative practices, often incorporating texts, sounds or drawings. Ieva focuses on the human psyche, temporality, relationships within closed groups, themes of identity and power.
\_\_Curator of the exhibition: Agnė Bagdžiūnaitė
\_\_The architects of the exhibition: Matas Šatūnas and Laura Kaminskaitė
\_\_Exhibition technician: Laura Skučaitė
\_\_Curator of the discursive and performative program: Edvinas Grinkevičius
\_\_Visual graphics: Kornelija ZizaitėThe event is part of the project "Belly-up Dream (Dog or Fish?)". The project is financed by the Lithuanian Council for Culture.
