Anonymous Encounters at eastcontemporary / Milan

Anonymous Encounters

Lucia Leuci, Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė

21/09
– 0
5/11 2022

eastcontemporary
Via Giuseppe Pecchio, 3 Milano


Corso
Buenos Aires is a key avenue in Milan: it connects Loreto, and the
central train station, with the elegant district of Porta Venezia
and it is a major commercial artery. According to Wikipedia, with its
350 shops and approximately hundred thousand passerbys every day,
this corso features the most numerous concentration of clothing
stores in Europe and it has one the the highest daily turnover in the
world, making it a quintessential example of capitalist modernity,
consumerism and metropolitan life. The frenzy buzzing during the day
and the holy void at night are just two of the many facets that this
place is able to showcase, maintaining a sense of vague familiarity
while presenting perpetual shapeshifting versions of sameness.
Ungraspable, maybe even supernatural, Corso Buenos Aires is an
example of what Marc Augè defines as “Non-Place”: an
anthropological space of impermanence which does not reveal much of
its own history and identity while being immediate, and where human
beings become mere crowd, anonymous and indeterminate. Such is the
location, context and starting point for Lucia Leuci and Dorota
Gawęda & Eglė Kulbokaitė duo-show at eastcontemporary.

There
is a mixed fragrance in the exhibition, developed by Dorota Gawęda &
Eglė Kulbokaitė together with perfumer Caroline Dumur. Metallic,
musky and warm, it is both the smell of Augè’s idea of “Non-Place”
mentioned above, and of an individual crossing such space,
hypothetically imagined as Tiqqun’s anthropo-morphosis of Capital:
the
Young-Girl’.
Its notes come from common undefined raw materials combined with
organic compounds that play important roles in the technological and
biological spheres, known as aldehydes. A times woody, a times
petrochemical or just non-smellable, when you think you have
identified its character this invariably changes again. The ephemeral
artwork markedly embodies the non-ness of its sources and its
molecular essence diabolically penetrates the body, moving beyond
boundaries and splipping consent. It is at the same time a version of
consumer society’s total product and a model for invisible
management, as well as an interface that renders physical things
perceived as virtual, like an idea or a concept. Light plays an
important role too, and it is partially provided by Lucia Leuci’s
sculpture
Germinali
Post-Liberty
,
two lanterns whose light-bulbs are a pair of iridescent hands wearing
a delicate organza blouse with adorned cuffs. Mannequins and Madonnas
at the same time, these holy remains are preserved in a case coloured
with alabaster dust and metallic eye shadows ranging from blue to
purple, as the hands themselves. The fossils, shells, pearls and
other precious stones that crown the elegant wrists, also appear in
the resin and iron series
Bouquet
Eterno
:
Art Nouveau shop-fronts and cathedrals windows concurrently, with
layered geometric patterns that depict girls’ body parts such as
legs, ponytails and backsides. These could belong both to Siegfried
Kracauer’s
Tiller
Girls

– 1890s non-bodies for capitalist production and abstractness –
and to the more contemporary M¥SS KETA’s
Ragazze
di Porta Venezia
,
proud of their marginal place and aware of their surroundings which
in the show seem to be captured at twilight, when the day goes to
sleep and everything that is left becomes rather creepy.

Many
yellow and red laser-eyes emerge from the walls, on a series of
canvases which Dorota Gawęda & Eglė Kulbokaitė breeded with
the aid of Generative Adversarial Networks. Their hybrid nature is
hard to grasp. Between image and painting and abstraction and
figuration, blurry backdrops reveal layered gestures that complicate
everyday objects and images. In the total absence of clear references
and fixed forms, teddy bears twist and melt, while piles of clothes
become demonic and daisies take on a supernatural look, like a forest
at night. The title of these works,
Kratt,
is a clue: it refers both to malevolent household creatures from
Baltic tradition and algorithmic-liability, channelling a digital
folklore that escapes authoriality as we know it. Under the scrutiny
of these naughty figures, a crowd of blossoming trolley-sculptures by
Lucia Leuci comes to life animating the space. Each of them carries a
story which is revealed by their symbiotic companions. There are
Argentina e Peru, two innocent ceramic babies – embrions of
consumerism – kept in a hospitable cave-womb. There is a couple of
cheeky copper tropical parrots whose materiality renders them even
more alive and adaptable, reacting to external environmental
conditions and ready to conquer the streets of Milan; and a group of
succulent Capital-leeches made of bronze, more human than one would
think. Also in a distributed group, are the five gracious creatures
that recall Donna Haraway’s butterfly-girls and evoke the
prosthetic-accessories crowding future shops. Finally, there is the
tiniest dog with its best friend: a homeless man who lingers daily in
Corso Buenos Aires destined, for the eyes of many, to stay anonymous
and ghostly until the next twilight. At a better inspection one might
notice that the group of trolleys-sculptures not only germinates in
the gallery space; these are in transit too, their roots exposed and
eradicated curl in a dynamic dance. They unveil a sense of protection
and non-human companionship, as well as a colder detachment,
non-belonging and alterity.

The
works in the show present a highly layered symbolic lexicon, and an
abundance of gestures, images and materials of various nature –
make-up, trash, rare organic finds, industrial scraps – that
generate a rather variegated kitschy environment where the human is
absent and the demons of contemporaneity come alive. As their
potentials, dangers and contradictions get shuffled and amalgamated,
Corso Buenos Aires becomes a haunted and haunting landscape of
commodity fetish and other relics of excess, a point of departure for
both strategies of production and narratives that describe a changing
sense of collectivity, while re-defining the familiar. Corso Buenos
Aires has its relevance in Lucia Leuci’s practice; the intimate
relationship the artist has with this place has been the subject of
past shows, and has emerged throughout her career in various forms.
Dorota Gawęda & Eglė Kulbokaitė on the other hand – being
literally far away – embody a more distant position to the subject.
The encounter of their peripheral gaze and Leuci’s deep involvement
creates an uncanny resemblance with the transient essence of the
place. The recurrent theme of negation, of non-ness, is not to be
looked at as sole absence, but rather as a condition for otherness.
Anonymous Encounters is a nightmare, a psychedelic trip, a holy
vision in a lonely field.

Caterina
Avataneo


Lucia
Leuci (b. 1977, Bisceglie, Italy) lives and works in Milan.

Lucia
Leuci is a visual artist based in Milan. Her artistic practice
focuses on the use of drawing, painting, sculpture and installation
as primary needs and means of expression. She explores reflexive
actions that transcend individual choice – primitive performative
acts that perpetually scale between intimate manual skill and
collective action. Lucia Leuci has exhibited among others at the
Fondazione Adolfo Pini and Tile project space in Milan, Like a Little
Disaster in Polignano a Mare, Polansky gallery and Berlinskej Model
in Prague, Oulu Museum of Art and Titanik gallery in Finland, Museum
of Angra do Eroísmo in Portugal, Alta Art Space in Malmö and THE
POOL in Istanbul.

Gawęda&Kulbokaitė
Dorota
Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė
(b.
1986 & 1987, Poland and Lithuania) live and work in Basel.

Dorota
Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė are an artist duo established in 2013
and based in Basel. Both are 2012 graduates of the Royal College of
Art in London. Their work spans performance, sculpture, painting,
photography, fragrance and video. Creating sensory environments that
directly involve the audience, using both screen technology and
organic elements, they generate fragmented narratives that echo our
contemporary anxieties. Gawęda and Kulbokaitė are the recipients of
the Swiss Performance Art Award 2021 and the Collide Residency Award.
In 2022 they are on residency at CERN in Geneva/Hangar in Barcelona
and EPFL, Lausanne. They are also the founders of YOUNG GIRL READING
GROUP (2013– 2021).