Gallery Antje Wachs is pleased to present “Banga < Wave >” by Lithuanian artist Kristina Inciuraite, on view from August 26th to September 23rd 2006.

The exhibition “Banga” (The Wave) has been titled after the fashion magazine of the Vilnius Fashion House (VFH) popular in the second half of the 20th century. The exhibition focuses on fashion tendencies of the 1970s, and of polka dot and bubble ornaments that have been reappearing in recent fashion. The VFH which has been in business for decades might be called the veteran of Lithuanian fashion. Upon the artist’s request, the art director of the VFH Jolanta Talaikyte created new sketches of casual and evening dresses and suits according to the descriptions of former models from the VFH magazine (without being shown the actual models). In the exhibition, both the photos of the former models and the sketches of the new models are hung in juxtaposition on the wall. Two dressmakers of different ages working privately in Vilnius, Natalya and Olya, made silk dresses and suits for the artist according to the old and new models. The garments have been tailored for the artist’s figure. According to the artist, not all the garments match her well or appeal to her taste because of their excessively “womanly” silhouette, but several dresses fascinate her with their subtle retro style.
Inciuraite is questioning what makes the dress models of various eras different, and what makes them similar? What is the relation between the understanding and assessment of aesthetics in the past and the present, between what has been forgotten and what is being made today? The new is the recontextualized old. In the words of the philosopher Wolfgang Welsch, modernity has not disappeared anywhere – postmodernity is its new variant: “Postmodernity is not a nameless time following modernity – it is, or at least it aims to be, developing modernity following limited modernity, and its established concept tries to reveal and encourage it like a vector. Such pluralistic postmodernity draws all kinds of omitted views and potencies back into the game.”*
This vision of a wind-beaten polka dot dress that infers a young-girl blossoming into maturity comes, not only from fashion history, but from Lithuanian cinema. An excerpt from the Lithuanian feature film “The Last Day of Holidays” (director A. Zebriunas, 1964) that is a Lithuanian classic, with a girl in a polka-dotted dress dancing at the seaside, has been used in the project. Her improvised dance is a manifestation of careless childhood combined with physical attractiveness symbolic of entrance into the adult world. Schoolchildren from the Vilnius Balys Dvarionas Musical School were invited to create a soundtrack for this subtle dance sketch. In the video the excerpt of the girl dancing is repeated five times to different music, each newly composed soundtrack reveals a wide range of emotions. The interactivity of the budding composers in creating musical compositions for an old film opens the horizon for these “omitted views and potencies” and encourages a new interpretation of the aesthetic and cultural codes, which have remained static for 50 years.
The interpretation of certain phenomena or situations produces dualistic aesthetic tensions. The enlarging of the bubbles ornament (found among the dress patterns) on the wall, tests whether the circle or the rhombus falling between the circles is the dominant pattern. They both are active graphical elements in the ornament that compete optically. This tests the priorities of seeing, or even imagination. We might ask whether this is reflective of how they change over the course of time, and whether they change in principle.
Similarly, the series of photographs “Blondes” tests imagination and stereotypes of beauty. Inciuraite uses models that may be blonde but might not be statistically beautiful, or may be older than the canon of beauty allows. How do we consider a black and white photograph that does not give away the actual color of the photographed woman’s hair? Perhaps these are grey-haired women? Or maybe the hair color does not matter at all? On the whole, are all the women photographed from behind and not showing their face older women? And are there any men among them?
Like the ambivalence of the graphical ornament, the mutability of feminine identity in the photographs destabilizes our comprehension: forcing us to establish priorities and decide – what is more intriguing the visible or the invisible?**

* Wolfgang Welsch “Our Postmodern Modernity”, 2002, translation from German, “Alma littera” publishers, 2004 ** In her earlier work Kristina Inčiūraitė most often refused to demonstrate women’s figures and showed an empty stage filled with women’s voices. In her short videos the woman was represented through her voice, which would make the spectator imagine what the speaking woman was. Today the artist enacts the game “visible-invisible” related with the woman and her environment by using different means – a graphic ornament, clothes, photographic art etc.