Dorota Gawęda & Eglė Kulbokaitė

Południca, 01.03.2022

Dorota Gawęda & Eglė Kulbokaitė, Południca, 2021.

In the form of an animated video series by the artist duo Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė, the Slavic demoness Południca wreaks havoc on HEK's social media account around noon.

According to a Slavic folklore, Południca, the so-called noon girl, appears to field workers in the countryside at the hottest time of the day and torments them with difficult questions. Those who are unable to answer the questions correctly suffer various punishments and torments ranging from curses to decapitation. During the month of March, Gawęda and Kulbokaitė will regularly post on HEK's Instagram account a series
of audiovisual edits of animations and video footage based on their newest performance work -lalia. Playing with the ambiguity of the mythological figure, and transposing it into a more modern context, the artists create a metaphor for contemporary anxieties in the face of ecological and social unease.

HEK Net Works presented Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė's work Południca from 01.03.2022 to 31.03.2022.

Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė have been working together as an artist duo based in Basel since 2013. Their interdisciplinary work rooted in feminism and fiction navigates between performance, installation, scent, sculpture, painting and video. The two artists from Poland and Lithuania are graduates of the Royal College of Art in London, UK. They have exhibited internationally including Centre d’Art de Genèva (2021), Kunstverein Leipzig (2021), Swiss Institute, New York (2020), Den Frie, Copenhagen (2020), MWW, Wroclaw (2020), Kunstverein Düsseldorf (2020), Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2018), 6th Athens Biennale (2018), MMOMA, Moscow (2018), ICA, London (2017), MOMA, Warsaw (2016), Berlin Biennale 9 (2016) and MaM, Paris (2015) among others. They have also participated in numerous international residencies at the Alserkal Arts Foundation, Dubai (UAE), La Becque, La Tour-de-Peilz (CH) and Onassis AiR, Athens (GR). Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė are the winners of the Swiss Performance Art Award 2021 and the CERN Collide Residency 2022. They are also founding members of the Young Girl Reading Group (2013-
2021).